The Education of Achilles

This looks like a finished painting, but Rubens made it as a stage in something much larger. Around 1630 he laid out the whole life of the Greek hero Achilles in eight scenes to be turned into tapestries, and this is one of them: the boy Achilles under the centaur Chiron, half man and half horse, who by legend raised him and taught him riding, hunting, music and medicine. An oil sketch like this was only the start. It would be copied up into a full-scale cartoon, ten times the size, then woven in wool and silk by a workshop of weavers, so the finished work hung on a wall as cloth rather than paint. Rubens took the riding lesson, Achilles learning to sit a horse, from an ancient Greek description of a picture by the writer Philostratus.