The Fall of Phaeton

Screaming horses plunge headlong through a whirl of light and shadow as the young Phaeton, unable to control the sun chariot he has taken from his father Apollo, tumbles toward the earth with his burning reins trailing fire. Peter Paul Rubens painted this cosmic catastrophe around 1604-1608, in the years between his return from Italy and his Antwerp maturity, and the picture gathers everything he had absorbed from Michelangelo’s muscular figures and from Titian’s fire: Jupiter hurls his thunderbolt from the top of the canvas, the river gods and the zodiac reel below, and the sky itself is torn apart by the borrowed fire of the falling boy. The composition was later reworked and remained a touchstone for the rest of his career. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.