La ghirlanda di frutta

This picture is really the work of three hands. In Antwerp around 1616 the leading painters often teamed up by specialty, and here Rubens painted the plump children while his friend Frans Snyders, the great still-life man, loaded the swag with grapes, apples and quince, and Jan Wildens laid in the landscape behind. The idea of children hauling a heavy garland of fruit came straight from ancient Roman sarcophagi, which Rubens had studied in Italy. Look at how the whole thing is seen slightly from below. That tells you where it once hung, high above a doorway as an overdoor, so that anyone entering the room passed beneath this cascade of ripe autumn fruit.