The Rape of Europe

In 1628 Rubens spent several months in Madrid on a diplomatic errand, and a good part of that time went on copying the Titians in the royal collection, among them a Rape of Europa. Seven years later Philip IV asked him to design more than 60 mythological pictures for a hunting lodge in the Pardo hills outside the city, and the story came round to him again. This time he stood the composition upright and kept two figures in it, the girl and the bull, already out over the water. The beach and her companions are gone. The details are Ovid's, closely followed: her head twisted back towards the coast she is losing, one hand gripping a horn. The panel is under 19 centimetres tall. The full-size canvas made from it was painted by Erasmus Quellinus, one of the Antwerp men who worked up Rubens's designs, and it hangs in the same museum.