Jupiter Rebuked by Venus

Abraham Janssens, Peter Paul Rubens's major competitor in Antwerp in the 1610s, produced monumental paintings of mythological and secular subjects. Influenced by his five-year stay in Rome, he injected his paintings with recognizable quotations from ancient sculpture and Italian Renaissance painting. This scene of Venus reprimanding the visibly annoyed Jupiter on Mount Olympus is a direct reference to a composition by the Italian artist Raphael on the ceiling of the Villa Farnesina in Rome.

Janssens, however, enhanced the power and dynamism of the figures by emphasizing their musculature and working on a larger scale.

The physical object — Oil on canvas, 197.5 × 237.5 cm (77 3/4 × 93 1/2 in.); Framed: 231.1 × 271.8 × 7.6 cm (91 × 107 × 3 in.) — carries its own history of handling and restoration. Abraham Janssens's brushwork here moves between exacting description and looser, more suggestive passages, a balance typical of Baroque studio practice.

Look closely and the painting opens up. Objects you might pass over — a folded letter, a half-drawn curtain, the angle of a glance — were placed to be read. The scene trades in a shared visual shorthand for courtship and longing that period audiences would have decoded instantly.

Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago now holds the work, where conservators and historians continue to revisit its condition and attribution. Each generation of scholarship adds a layer to how Abraham Janssens's output from this period is understood.

“A silence so complete it becomes its own witness.”