The Capture of Samson

The blinded strongman is seized by the Philistines in a whirl of soldiers, torchlight and contorted bodies: The Capture of Samson gives its maker 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. Peter Paul Rubens painted it about 1609–10, in the first years of his return from Italy to Antwerp, 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.