La danza dei villani

Rubens spent much of his life as a diplomat and court painter, moving between the courts of Europe on missions for the Spanish crown. In his last years he pulled back from all that. In 1630, in his early fifties, he married the 16-year-old Helene Fourment, bought a country house outside Antwerp, and started painting what he simply wanted to paint, landscapes and country dances like this one, made for no patron. Peasants whirl in a ring while a flutist plays from a tree, and the villa behind them belongs to Italy, where Rubens had spent eight formative years as a young man. He never sold it. After he died in 1640, Philip IV of Spain sent to buy it from the estate for 800 florins and hung it in his summer dining room.