Orfeu e Eurídice

Near the end of his life Rubens took on an enormous job for the King of Spain: dozens of scenes from Ovid to decorate Philip the Fourth's hunting lodge, the Torre de la Parada, in the hills outside Madrid. He was in his late fifties, wealthy and famous and increasingly crippled by gout, so he designed the pictures and left much of the actual painting to his workshop, keeping the invention his own. This one catches the worst second in the story of Orpheus, who has charmed the rulers of the underworld into releasing his dead wife Eurydice on one condition, that he not look back at her until both are safely out. At the right, Pluto and Proserpina lift a warning hand. Orpheus, almost at the exit, turns anyway, and Eurydice, the serpent's bite still on her leg, begins to slip back into the dark. Rubens based the seated Pluto on a figure by Michelangelo he had copied into a notebook decades earlier in Italy.