Daniele nella fossa dei leoni

Rubens wanted his lions to be lions, not heraldry. As court painter to the archdukes in Brussels he could get in to see the real thing, a menagerie of exotic animals kept by the Spanish governors, and he studied a Moroccan breed there before painting a whole den of them, nearly life-size, prowling around the praying Daniel. He said as much in a letter, that they were done from life. That same letter is why we can follow the picture's early travels. Rubens traded it to Dudley Carleton, an English diplomat at The Hague, as part of a swap of his paintings for Carleton's collection of antique marble statues, which Rubens badly wanted. Daniel sits unharmed among the open jaws, waiting for morning.