Múcio Cévola diante de Lars Porsena

The story here is one Roman schoolboys learned by heart. Around 507 BC the Etruscan king Lars Porsenna was besieging Rome, and a young Roman named Gaius Mucius slipped into his camp to kill him. He stabbed the wrong man, was dragged before the king, and to show that Roman nerve could not be broken by torture, he pushed his own right hand into the fire on the altar and let it burn without a sound. Porsenna, unsettled, sent him home, and Mucius earned the nickname Scaevola, the left-handed. This canvas comes out of the busy Antwerp workshop of Peter Paul Rubens in the 1620s, worked up from his design by the hands he employed. The composition survives in several versions, and the earliest sketches for it are now in Moscow and London.