The Decoration of the Torre de la Parada

Shortly before November 1636, Rubens received the commission from Philip IV of Spain to supply more than sixty paintings with mythological subjects for his new hunting lodge, the Torre de la Parada. In about one and a half years, the enormous task was completed. The pictures had been painted partly by Rubens himself, partly from his designs by a number of collaborators, among them Cornelis de Vos, Jacob Jordaens, Theodoor van Thulden and Erasmus Quellinus. Today, forty of these paintings, more than fifty of Rubens´s brilliant sketches and a few preparatory drawings survive. Together with three never previously published eighteenth-century inventories of the Torre de La Parada, they have provided the material for the new analysis of the series.