The Rape of Europe

Philip IV already owned a Rape of Europa. Titian's version was in the royal collection, and Rubens had copied it during his stay in Madrid at the end of the 1620s. When the subject came round again, this time for the king's hunting lodge in the hills of El Pardo, the design sent over from Antwerp shared almost nothing with it. The beach has gone, and so have the companions Ovid describes. What is left on this tall, narrow canvas is the bull already in the water and the girl on his back, one hand closed around a horn, her head turned back towards the coast. Ovid's detail of her clothes shaking in the wind survives in the drapery. Erasmus Quellinus painted it between 1636 and 1638, working from a small oil sketch by Rubens that the Prado also keeps. Svetlana Alpers, who wrote the only full study of that commission, noticed that the sketch carries further to the right than the canvas does, so a strip of the composition was either left out or later cut away.