The education of Jupiter

The Education of Jupiter, dated around 1700 and now in the Snijders and Rockox House in Antwerp, depicts the infant god being raised by the nymph Amalthea and fed by the goat whose horn would become the cornucopia. The late date suggests this may be a workshop production after a design by Jacob Jordaens, who died in 1678 at the age of eighty-four, leaving behind a prolific workshop tradition that continued under his pupils. Jordaens had been the dominant painter in Antwerp after Rubens's death in 1640, continuing the Flemish Baroque tradition of large-scale multi-figure compositions with robust earthy vigor. His mythological subjects, unlike Rubens's idealized treatments, tend toward warm domesticity: gods and nymphs rendered with the same fleshy realism as his genre subjects of festive Flemish households. The goat Amalthea and the infant Jupiter form a subject that allowed the workshop to display technical facility with animals, children, and landscape in a single composition. Jordaens's stylistic legacy was substantial in Antwerp painting through the end of the seventeenth century, and this late example shows how his visual language was maintained and transmitted after his death, forming a bridge between Flemish Baroque and the domestic genre painting that would characterize the Rococo period.

The mythological scene is rendered in the warm, fleshy style associated with Jordaens' school, with robust figures and lush pastoral setting characteristic of Flemish Baroque mythological painting.