Il ratto di Europa

In the late 1630s a king in Warsaw was buying Italian pictures by post. Wladyslaw the Fourth of Poland wanted a Guido Reni, and this is what arrived: Europa, a Phoenician princess, being carried out to sea on the back of the white bull that is Jupiter in disguise. Reni was past 60 and painting in the pale, silvery manner of his last years, the colour drained almost to pearl. Europa looks back toward a shore already too far to reach, one hand raised. The picture left Poland within a generation, passed through French and English hands, and reached London only in 2013, a gift in memory of the collector Denis Mahon.