Peter Paul Rubens workshop (?) Hero and Leander Oil... Lot 2022

Peter Paul Rubens workshop (?) Hero and Leander Oil on canvas (doubled). 83 x 108 cm. Provenance Rhenish private property. Exhibitions Becoming Famous. Peter Paul Rubens, Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 2021 - Rubens a Genova, Genoa, Palazzo Ducale, 2022. Literature Exhibit cat. Stuttgart 2021: Becoming Famous. Peter Paul Rubens, ed. by Nils Büttner u. Sandra-Kristin Diefenthaler, Dresden 2021, pp. 150-152, no. 33, m. ill. - Nils Büttner, in: Ausst.-Kat. Genoa 2022: Rubens a Genova, ed. by Nils Büttner u. Anna Orlando, Milan 2022, pp. 336-339, m. ill. The painting depicts the story of one of the most famous lovers of 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 center 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 back and forth 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 pointed out (cf. Ausst.-Kat. Genoa 2022, op. cit.). During his stay in Italy, Rubens had created the original version, now lost, whose conception the artist carefully prepared through numerous sketches, some of which are still preserved, and which already achieved fame in Italy. Thus Giovanni Battista Marino 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).