Un triunfo romano

Rubens made this for no patron at all. It grew out of pictures he had studied 30 years earlier as court painter in Mantua, where the Gonzaga family owned Mantegna's Triumphs of Caesar, nine great canvases of a Roman victory parade. Rubens took two of those scenes and rebuilt them in his own way, loosening Mantegna's carved stillness into a moving crowd of trumpeters, garlanded oxen and men carrying trophies and treasure. He seems to have kept at it on and off for years, changing his mind as he went, purely for his own interest. It was still in his house, unsold, when he died in 1640.