Hero and Leander

Hero and Leander (c. 1604) at the Yale University Art Gallery was painted during Rubens's Italian years, depicting the tragic myth of lovers separated by the Hellespont strait — Leander swimming nightly from Abydos to Sestos guided by Hero's lamp, until a stormy night extinguishes the light and he drowns, after which Hero throws herself from her tower in grief. The turbulent maritime setting — Leander's body tossed by waves while Hero and her companions watch in horror from the tower — gave Rubens an opportunity to combine his developing mastery of dynamic composition with a marine landscape of considerable drama. The myth had been a touchstone for Greek and later Latin poetry, treated by Ovid in the Heroides and by the late antique poet Musaeus in an epyllion that Renaissance readers knew well. Yale's Art Gallery, among the leading university art collections in North America, holds this early work as a significant example of Rubens's Italian period production and as a demonstration of his range of subject matter beyond the religious commissions that formed the economic core of his practice.

The dramatic nocturnal scene captures the turbulent sea with Leander's drowning body illuminated by lightning. Rubens' handling of the stormy water and dramatic sky demonstrates his early command of atmospheric effects.

This early work from 1604 depicts the tragic love story with characteristically dynamic energy. The canvas has been conserved with attention to the atmospheric sea effects. The painting has been relined. Some of the darker water passages have become more opaque over the centuries.