Il ratto di Europa

Rembrandt painted this in Amsterdam in 1632, the year he arrived in the city as a young man and the port was booming on world trade. The story is from Ovid, the god Zeus turned into a white bull to carry off the princess Europa across the sea, and her friends on the shore throw up their hands as she is borne away. But Rembrandt gives it a Dutch harbour. In the background you can pick out a loading crane on the quay, the kind that stood in Amsterdam itself, and the man who commissioned the picture, Jacques Specx, had made his fortune in the Dutch trading empire out east. Mythology here is dressed as the merchant world Rembrandt had just stepped into. It is one of very few pure landscapes with a story that he ever painted.