The Fall of Phaeton

The story comes from Ovid. Phaeton, a son of Apollo, the sun god, begged to drive his father's chariot for a single day, lost control of the horses and flew so low that the earth began to burn. Rottenhammer paints the moment the world can take no more. Under the bolting horses the rivers are drying up, the plants are scorched and people struggle in the heat. Mother Earth, in orange and green, turns to the sky and appeals to Zeus, who answers with a thunderbolt aimed at the boy.

Rottenhammer signed and dated the picture 1604 on a stone at the lower left, while he was living in Venice. Before 1676 it belonged to Diego Duarte, a jeweller and collector in Antwerp, and in 1768 it reached Prince William V in The Hague. French troops carried his collection off to Paris in 1795, and the painting came back in 1815.