Le Jugement de Salomon

Around 1617 Rubens was running the busiest workshop in northern Europe, back home in Antwerp after eight years in Italy that had taught him to paint bodies like a Venetian. Here he takes the oldest of courtroom stories: two women claim one baby, and King Solomon calls for a sword to cut the child in two, knowing the real mother will give it up rather than see it killed. Rubens catches the worst second, the soldier already gripping the infant, the true mother lunging forward in alarm, the false one unmoved. Solomon leans down from his throne in red robes. The near-life-size figures and the surge of movement come straight from what Rubens had absorbed in Rome and Genoa.