The finding of Romulus and Remus

The founding myth of Rome — the she-wolf nursing the abandoned twins Romulus and Remus — was invested with particular meaning in seventeenth-century Rome, where the papacy drew on imperial Roman history to legitimate its authority and painters regularly depicted scenes from Roman legend for patrician and ecclesiastical patrons. Maratta's 1686 canvas at the Sanssouci Picture Gallery in Potsdam brings this subject to a northern European royal collection, where Frederick the Great assembled a remarkable group of Italian Baroque paintings for his pleasure palace. The scene — the she-wolf suckling the twins while a shepherd, Faustulus, approaches to find them — combines animal painting, infant figures, and landscape in a single narrative. Maratta's training in drawing human and animal anatomy together was essential for a composition requiring convincingly rendered wolf, infants, and an adult male figure in one coherent scene.

The compositional challenge of combining a wolf, two infants, and a human figure within a coherent landscape required careful spatial planning. Maratta likely used preparatory drawings for each figure before resolving the composition on canvas. The wolf's fur required a distinct handling technique — short directional strokes with dry brush drag — different from the smooth glazing used for human flesh. Natural landscape setting uses standard Baroque conventions of warm foreground and cooler atmospheric distance.