The Feast of the Gods. The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis

The Feast of the Gods: The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis, painted in 1610 on copper and now in the Statens Museum for Kunst, depicts the mythological banquet at which all the Olympian gods assembled to celebrate the marriage of the sea-nymph Thetis to the mortal hero Peleus — the event at which Eris, goddess of discord, threw the golden apple inscribed 'for the fairest', initiating the sequence of events that would culminate in the Trojan War. The subject was extremely popular in Flemish Baroque painting because it required the representation of the entire Olympian pantheon at a feast — an encyclopaedic challenge ideally suited to Brueghel's ability to create richly detailed figure-filled landscapes. The wedding's joyous foreground conceals the fateful discord that will follow, giving the image a characteristic Baroque complexity of surface and implication. The Copenhagen painting is closely related to other versions Brueghel painted of the same subject.

Oil on copper, the small format concentrates Brueghel's extraordinary detail work. Olympian gods are differentiated by their attributes — Jupiter's eagle, Minerva's owl, Neptune's trident — rendered with miniaturist precision. The banquet table's spread of food and vessels is treated with the same still-life exactness Brueghel brings to his dedicated still-life works.