Hercule et Omphale

Rubens was in his mid-twenties and living in Italy, soaking up ancient sculpture and Venetian colour, when he painted this around 1602. The subject is an old joke about the power of desire: Hercules, the strongest man in myth, made a slave to Omphale, queen of Lydia, and set to women's work. Rubens shows him seated with a distaff, spinning wool, a woman's wrap at his neck, while the queen stands over him in his own lion skin and leans on his club. A servant tweaks the hero's ear. It was painted for a collector in Genoa, and already you can see the heavy, muscular bodies Rubens would build his whole career on.