La caccia all'ippopotamo e al coccodrillo

Maximilian I, the Elector of Bavaria, ordered this in 1615 as one of four huge hunting scenes to hang in his palace at Schleißheim, the others showing lions, wolves and boar. Rubens and his Antwerp workshop turned them out over about two years. This is the exotic one. Hunters on rearing horses and their dogs pile onto a hippopotamus and a crocodile on the bank of the Nile, a palm tree marking the far-off setting Rubens knew only from prints and travellers' reports, never having seen the animals alive. He builds the whole thing as one diagonal knot of muscle, teeth and falling bodies. The set was looted during the Napoleonic wars, and of the four only this hippopotamus hunt came back to Munich.