The Infant Jupiter Fed by the Goat Amalthea

Ovid tells this story in his poem on the Roman calendar of festivals. Saturn had been warned that one of his sons would overthrow him, so he swallowed his children as soon as they were born. Their mother hid the infant Jupiter on Mount Ida in Crete, where a nymph fed him on the milk of a goat named Amalthea, so that a hungry baby's crying would not give him away. Jordaens shows the nymph milking the goat while the child holds a feeding bottle. The Louvre places the picture at the beginning of the 1630s. A little later the engraver Schelte Bolswert, who also worked in Antwerp, made a print of it with some changes, and the print shows that the canvas was later cut down at the top. That is why the satyr's gesture is so hard to read today. He is waving a branch to distract the child, and in Bolswert's version he shakes a tambourine instead. The painting passed through English collections and was bought for Louis XVIII in 1817, two years after the Allies had made the Louvre give back the works Napoleon's armies had carried to Paris.