The Fall of Phaeton

Rubens painted this as a young man far from home. He spent eight years in Italy, from 1600, soaking up antique sculpture and the Italian masters, and this dates from around the middle of that stay, probably in Rome. The story is from Ovid. Phaeton, son of the Sun god, talks his father into letting him drive the chariot of the sun for a day, loses control, and scorches the earth until Jupiter strikes him down to save the world. Rubens freezes the exact instant of disaster, horses rearing and twisting in panic, figures spilling across the sky. He borrowed some of those plunging horses from a lost battle scene by Leonardo that he had studied. He kept the picture and reworked parts of it a few years later.