Il giudizio di Paride

When this reached Madrid, the man who had arranged the commission wrote home admiring it but uneasy about all the nudity. He was Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand, Philip IV's brother and governor of the Netherlands, and he added a detail: the Venus was a portrait of the painter's own wife. Rubens had married Hélène Fourment, nearly forty years his junior, a few years earlier, and she turns up again and again in his late work. He was around sixty here and troubled by gout, yet the three goddesses are painted with astonishing lightness. The picture went to Philip's pleasure palace, the Buen Retiro, and is now in the Prado in Madrid.