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Landscape with Philemon and Baucis

about 1625, Artist: Peter Paul Rubens

 

 

Landscape with Philemon and Baucis

Despite their great poverty, Philemon and Baucis offered hospitality to the gods Jupiter and Mercury, who were wandering unrecognised on the earth and had been turned away by everyone else whose help they had sought (Ovid, Metamorphoses). The corrupt world is punished and disappears beneath the floodwaters, but the couple, seen here in the right middle ground in a supplicatory posture, is saved. The main theme of the painting, however, is the natural catastrophe: nature in all its primordial power with cloudbursts from a heavy-laden sky, the flooded stream, the drowning and the already drowned.

Location: Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Saal XIII

Object data

Object Name

Painting

Culture

Flemish

Dated

about 1625

Artist

Peter Paul Rubens (1577 Siegen - 1640 Antwerpen) - GND

Material

oak wood

Dimensions

Overall: 147,1 cm × 209,6 cm × 2,5 cm
Framed: 177,5 cm × 239 cm × 7,5 cm

Image rights

Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Gemäldegalerie

Inv. No.

Gemäldegalerie, 690

Provenance

1640 inventory of the estate of P.P. Rubens; Coll. Leopold Wilhelm;

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