イノシシ狩り

Rubens painted this around 1615, at the height of his fame, when Europe's princes wanted big, violent hunting scenes for their palaces. The hunt was the sport of rulers, a stand-in for war in peacetime. He built the tangle of men, dogs and cornered boar out of something he had studied closely in Italy: Leonardo's lost Battle of Anghiari, a wall of straining muscle and fury that survived only in copies. Here that energy is turned loose in a dark forest. Two hunters wrestle the boar at the centre while the hounds pile in, and the whole mass seems about to burst out of the frame. Rubens made a whole run of these hunts in these years for patrons like the Duke of Bavaria, each with different quarry, from boar to lions, tigers, even a hippopotamus.