From Ovid's Cecrops to Rubens's City of God in The Finding of Erichthonius

  ... The poet says, Dear City of Cecrops; and wilt not thou say, Dear
  City of Zeus?--Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.23 (1)

The transitory character of all things as an aspect of a preordained natural course is a common them in Peter Paul Rubens's written and painted musings on the world. In a 1629 letter to Jan Caspar Gevaerts, the Antwerp humanist and his close friend, Rubens expresses condolences at the death of his wife, recalling his own bereavement for his beloved wife, Isabella Brandt, who had died in 1626. As if to underscore the necessity of accepting one's fate, the artist invokes Marcus Aurelius, an author intensely studied by Gevaerts at this very time:

   If any consolation is to be hoped for from philosophy, then you will
   find an abundant source within yourself. I commend you to your
   Antoninus, whose divine nourishment you will distribute liberally to
   your friends. I shall add only this, as a poor kind of comfort: that
   we are living in a time when life itself is possible only if one
   frees himself of every burden, like a swimmer in a stormy sea. (2)

Rubens is not citing a specific passage, yet this shared familiarity with Aurelius allows him to convey by means of allusions the leitmotiv of this seminal Stoic thinker--the futility of remorse over the unstoppable passage of time:

   One who has seen the present world has seen all that ever has been
   from time everlasting and all that ever will be into eternity ....
   For all things, in a sense, are mutually intertwined, and by virtue
   of that all are dear to one another; for one thing follows duly upon
   another because of the tonic movement and the common breath that
   pervades throughout and the unity of all substance. (3)

Whereas similar ideas can be followed in many other letters by the artist, this engagement with the Stoic notion of the cycle of life guided by Providence is even more apparent in his paintings. From such early works as The Fall of Phaeton (ca. 1606, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) to those he created at the close of his career, such as The Rape of Proserpina (ca. 1636-38, the Prado, Madrid), the "rushing torrent" of the "world-cause" that Aurelius wrote about remained a constant within his pictorial inventions. (4) And no other source provided him with richer material for an investigation of this all-pervasive principle than Ovid's book of metamorphoses.

Whether Rubens revisited a well-known story and rendered it novel by highlighting an unexpected facet of its surface or chose a seldom recounted tale, his pictorial representations of myths invariably possess an opulence of meanings that could rival Ovid's intertwining of narratives in service to the larger theme of his poem: the mutability of forms. One such example of Rubens's affinity for this way of thinking is The Finding of Erichthonius, a painting from the decade following his return from Italy to Antwerp (Fig. 1). (5)

Created about 1616 for an unknown patron, and possibly without a specific commission, The Finding of Erichthonius is arguably among the most ambitious and mysterious of Rubens's treatments of ancient fables. It is based on a Greek creation myth, rarely commented on in writing

and even more seldom represented in painting, whose meaning centers on the procreative power of nature. At its narrative core is a monstrous infant, Erichthonius, a half-human, half-serpentine creature engendered when the seed of Hephaestus spills on the earth (Gaea) after a failed advance to Athena, his great competitor for primacy among the Athenians. (6) In Ovid's account of this story, the disreputable act leading to the birth of Erichthonius is completely omitted. Rather, the poet begins with the moment shown in Rubens's painting: the daughters of the Athenian King Cecrops (Herse, Aglauros, and Pandrosos), whom Athena had charged with the safekeeping of the basket holding Erichthonius, break their oath to the virgin goddess by uncovering the offspring of this divine indiscretion (Metamorphoses 2.552ff.).

No sooner has the reader been introduced to Erichthonius than Ovid decides to interrupt this story with an unusually long digression into a few seemingly unrelated transformations, so as to pick up the narrative at a much later moment, when one of these three royal daughters (Herse) catches the eye of Hermes. The poet continues with an elliptical conclusion to the first part: Hermes punishes Aglauros, who had attempted to thwart his desire for Herse and who had originally persuaded her sisters to open the basket with Erichthonius (Metamorphoses, 2.711ff.). This narrative lacuna is far from capricious, for it allows Ovid to avoid the problem of the different textual versions of the discovery of Erichthonius and the destiny of the princesses who had breached Athena's order. In another variant of this myth, for instance, going back to Euripides and Pausanias and popular among such Renaissance commentators of this myth as Natale Conti, all three daughters of Cecrops commit suicide as a result of a madness visited upon them by Athena. (7)