Thetis Receiving the Weapons of Achilles from Hephaestus

The story is from the Iliad. Achilles' mother, the sea-goddess Thetis, knows her son is fated to die young at Troy, and here she comes to the smith-god Hephaestus to collect the new armour he has forged for him, including the famous shield. Van Dyck painted it around 1630, in the years between his long stay in Italy and his move to the English court of Charles I. He fills the scene with mischievous winged cupids, one of them tugging at the great helmet, which softens what is really a mother arming a doomed child. The picture was later bought by the Austrian archduke Leopold Wilhelm, whose vast collection formed the core of what is now the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.