The Finding of Erichthonius

The story is from Ovid. Athena hid the infant Erichthonius, whose legs ended in serpents, inside a closed basket and gave it to the daughters of the king of Athens, telling them never to look inside. They looked. Rubens painted the moment of discovery around 1633. But what hangs in Oberlin is only a fragment of that picture. At some point the canvas was cut down and the child was painted over with a spray of flowers, so that for generations the scene made no sense. In 1939 a Rubens scholar recognised the composition from an old print, and cleaning stripped the flowers away to bring the snake-legged baby back into view.