Lot 2022 D α

The painting depicts the story of two of the most famous lovers in ancient mythology, Hero and Leander. Ovid tells it in his Letters to Hero, the Epistulae Heroidum: Hero was a priestess of Aphrodite in Sestos on the western shore of the Hellespont; her lover Leander lived in Abydos on the opposite shore. Leander swam the Hellespont every night to meet Hero secretly, a beacon lit by Hero giving him guidance. One night, however, in a storm, this fire went out and Leander drowned in the floods.
The composition shows Leander's lifeless body in the centre of the picture, floating on the raging waves and guided by a group of mourning Nereids. The sea is shrouded in nocturnal darkness, the Nereids are tossed to and fro by the waves, only a few rays of the sun break their way between the dense clouds. This panel is possibly a work from the workshop of Peter Paul Rubens, created immediately after his return from Italy, between 1609 and 1618, as Nils Büttner has explained (cf. exhib. cat. Genoa 2022, op. cit.). Rubens created the now lost original version during his stay in Italy. The artist carefully prepared the composition in numerous sketches, some of which are still extant, and it had already achieved renown in Italy prior to his return. Giovanni Battista Marino, for example, included the painting in his "Galleria", the collection of pictorial descriptions ("Leandro morto tra le braccia delle Nereidi di Pietro Paolo Rubens"). The fame of the composition is also reflected in the replicas and copies that can be found today, among others, in the Yale University Art Gallery (inv. no. 1962.25) and in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden ( inv. no. Gal. no. 1002), among others.