The Fall of the Giants

From 1636, more than 60 paintings were shipped out of Antwerp to a hunting lodge in the hills north of Madrid. Philip IV wanted its rooms hung with stories out of Ovid, and his brother Ferdinand, who governed Flanders for him, settled the commission with Rubens. Rubens drew the designs on small panels and left the full-size canvases to other painters. Jordaens took at least five of them. Ovid spends four lines on the giants who piled mountains up to climb into the sky, and Jordaens paints the instant the stones come back down on them, with Jupiter's thunderbolt only suggested at the top of the picture. The art historian Svetlana Alpers, who wrote the one full study of the commission, has suggested he had in mind the hall Giulio Romano painted in Mantua a century earlier, where the walls appear to collapse on whoever is standing in the room. Rubens's sketch for this canvas is in Brussels, and the clearest difference from it is the figure in the lower right corner, which Jordaens worked up far beyond the design.