Vulcan forging the Thunderbolts of Jupiter
1636 - 1638.Room 079
Peter Paul Rubens executed this painting between 1636 and 1637 on a commission from Philip IV for the Torre de la Parada. The decoration of this royal hunting pavilion, in which other artists such as Diego Velázquez participated, was the most important commission Rubens received from the Spanish monarch. Beginning in 1636, he sent more than 60 works from Antwerp to Madrid for the royal pleasure palace. The majority of his paintings depicted episodes involving the passions of the gods, taken from classical sources such as the Roman poet Ovid´s Metamorphoses. The Museo del Prado houses ten of Rubens´s preparatory sketches for the Metamorphoses series, along with the majority of the works that were installed in the Torre de la Parada. These include 14 paintings executed by Rubens or his workshop, and many others executed by other artists in Antwerp, following Rubens´s designs. Vulcan was the Roman god of fire corresponding to the Greek god Hephaestus. His forge was in the bowels of Mount Etna in Sicily, where he worked alongside the giant Cyclops. Rubens shows Vulcan labouring at his forge, as he is about to strike a thunderbolt with his hammer. With characteristic erudition and intensity, Rubens represents a scene surely inspired by Virgil´s epic poem the Aeneid, where, in Book VIII, lines 427–28, Vulcan and his cyclopean assistants are described as forging a thunderbolt for Jupiter, toto genitor quae plurima caelo / deicit in terras (like the many that the father casts throughout the heavens towards earth). The importance that the painter gives to the weapons visible in the background -cuirass, shield and axe- evokes Homer´s Iliad, in which Achilles´s mother, Thetis, asks Hephaestus to forge arms for her son to use in the war against the Trojans. This passage from the Iliad is of particular importance because it is the earliest surviving description of a work of art in European literature: the shield of Achilles (Book XVIII, lines 478–608). According to Homer, Hephaestus designs the shield depicting a series of motifs on its surface, including (from Richmond Lattimore´s translation:) ...the earth upon it, and the sky, and the sea´s water, / and the tireless sun, and the moon waxing into her fullness ... two cities ... a meadow / large and in a lovely valley ... a dancing floor, like that which once in the wide spaces of Knosos / Daidalos built for Ariadne of the lovely tresses. The creation of Achilles´s mythical armour took on enormous importance in subsequent literary tradition. Among the many writers who evoke Homer´s foundational text was Virgil himself, in whom -judging by the frequent references to Virgil in his correspondence- Rubens was particularly interested. Indeed, in the Aeneid (Book VIII, lines 447-48), we find Vulcan and the Cyclops sculpting for Aeneas: ingentem clipeum ... unum omnia contra / tela Latinorum (an enormous shield ... to stand against all the weapons of the Latins) (Vergara, A.: Portrait of Spain. Masterpieces from the Prado, Queensland Art Gallery-Art Exhibitions Australia, 2012, p. 110).
