The Capture of Samson

Painted about 1609–10, in the first years of Peter Paul Rubens’ return from Italy to Antwerp, The Capture of Samson shows the blinded strongman seized by the Philistines in a whirl of soldiers, torchlight and contorted bodies. The subject gave Rubens everything he loved: violent action, foreshortening learned from Michelangelo, and the contrast of lamplight against deep shadow that he had studied in the work of Caravaggio in Rome. Fresh from his appointment as court painter to the Archdukes, the young master compressed a whole drama of lunge and collapse into a small panel of astonishing energy, already displaying the bravura handling that would make him the most influential painter of the seventeenth century. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.