Il ratto di Elena

In 1627 Philip IV of Spain ordered a grand canvas of the abduction of Helen of Troy from Guido Reni, then the most admired painter in Bologna. The commission carried real weight in the middle of the Thirty Years' War, and the papal court in Rome followed it closely. Then it fell apart. Reni and the Spanish agents quarrelled over his fee, the picture went unsold, and it was offered instead to Marie de' Medici, the exiled mother of the French king, just as she herself lost the last of her power. Reni shows the Trojan prince Paris leading Helen away by the hand, calm and richly dressed, with none of the violence the story's old title suggests.