The Death of Eurydice

This canvas is wider than it was designed to be. Strips were added at the sides, and because the signature sits at the edge of the section that follows Rubens's design, the art historian Svetlana Alpers concluded that the widening came after the painting was finished, probably to fit the wall it was going to hang on. In its original upright proportions the figures pressed together far more tightly. Ovid tells the death of Eurydice in a few lines of book 10 of the Metamorphoses. The bride was walking across a meadow with a group of water nymphs when a snake bit her ankle. The snake is there, low in the picture, along with the lyre that marks her husband Orpheus. The text asks for neither, and both were put in so that the subject could be recognised at once. Erasmus Quellinus painted it between 1636 and 1638 for Philip IV's hunting lodge outside Madrid. Rubens's small preparatory sketch for it is now in Rotterdam.