The Persecution of the Harpies

Ovid gives this chase two lines. In book 7 of the Metamorphoses the sons of the north wind have driven the maiden-headed birds away from an old man's table, and that is all he says. Svetlana Alpers looked instead to the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, which has the harpies dropping out of the clouds like squalls the moment the old man touches his food, devouring everything, then screaming off over the sea with Zetes and Calais behind them, swords drawn, near enough to miss them by a fingertip. That is where the painting stops, with nothing caught. Rubens's oil sketch for it is in the same museum, and the differences are small, the young man's sword and the crossing of the legs. This is also the one canvas in Erasmus Quellinus's group for the lodge on which no signature has been found. Signatures were an awkward matter across the series, and a letter survives in which Philip IV's brother Ferdinand, who governed Flanders while the pictures were being made, returns to the king a memorandum naming the painters who had carried out the work from Rubens's designs.