The wedding of Thetis and Peleus

The Wedding of Thetis and Peleus, dated 1633 and now in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, depicts the divine marriage feast from which Discord's golden apple — 'for the most beautiful' — was thrown among the gods, setting in motion the sequence of events leading to the Trojan War. The subject, rich with narrative implication, allowed Jordaens to deploy his full skill with crowded, festive compositions while embedding within the celebration the seed of catastrophe. The Prado, holding one of the world's finest collections of Flemish painting assembled through the Spanish Habsburg connection with the Low Countries, acquired this canvas as part of a broad engagement with Flemish Baroque. By 1633, Jordaens was producing his most ambitious mythological canvases and competing for the largest commissions. The wedding feast format — combining the pleasures of the banquet scene with the gravity of divine narrative — suited his distinctive blend of exuberance and seriousness.

The large canvas orchestrates a complex divine assembly across multiple spatial planes. Jordaens distinguishes the Olympian guests from their mortal counterparts through idealisation of physiognomy and the scale of their divine presence rather than through conventional wings or halos. The food, wine, and decorations of the feast are rendered with genre painting precision. Discord's apple, the tiny catalyst of catastrophe, receives pointed visual emphasis despite its small size.