CHAPTER 39 On Painting the Unfathomable: Rubens and The Banquet of

Aneta Georgievska-Shine

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, Glowed on the marble, 78 Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines From which a golden Cupidon peeped out 80 (Another hid his eyes behind his wing) …….. Above the antique mantel was displayed As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale 100 Filled all the desert with inviolable voice And still she cried, and still the world pursues, “Jug Jug” to dirty ears. And other withered stumps of time Were told upon the walls; staring forms 105 Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.

As many other passages in The Waste Land, these lines from T. S. Eliot’s elegy for Western civilization conjure a world that feels both intensely present and as fleeting as a dream. We are in the boudoir of a lady seated at her toilette and utterly absorbed in self-contemplation. The images that decorate her private quarters open passages into other times and places, each one more remote than the other. One of them takes us all the way back to antiquity through a story that seems barely intelligible to the “dirty ears” of the modern world: in which the Thracian King Tereus rapes and mutilates his wife’s sister, the Athenian princess , and cuts out her tongue in order to prevent her from telling of her ordeal. Though Eliot merely alludes to this myth, most of his readers would have easily recalled its essential elements. To name a painting on the subject, how- ever, would have been exceedingly difficult, unless they were familiar with The Banquet of Tereus by Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), one of the very few

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004354128_040 Rubens and The Banquet of Tereus 529 large-scale representations of this story in the history of art. Dated to about 1636, this composition, now at the Prado, was created as part of a mythological cycle for the royal hunting lodge of the Spanish Habsburgs, Torre de la Parada (Fig. 39.1).1 Like most of the other works in this series, it addressed the battle between passions and reason—as embodied in this confrontation between the Thracian Tereus and the two Athenian sisters, Philomela and . As Ovid reminds us in book six of The (6: 412–674), Procne had been married off to Tereus in gratitude for his help against “savage” invad- ers of . When this new Queen of became homesick, her husband offered to bring her sister to their court for a visit. Instead of doing so, on the way back from Athens, he raped Philomela, mutilating her and leaving her in the wilderness. Yet the “mute” Philomela comes up with a brilliant device—to weave her story into a tapestry that she sends to her sister’s new home. Upon receiving this evidence, Procne disguises herself as a Bacchante and goes to re- trieve her from the forest. Paradoxically, their reunion leads to an even greater crime: Procne’s murder and dismemberment of her first born son, Itys, whom she serves to her husband (his father) as a meal. Rubens focuses on a particularly potent moment of this gruesome nar- rative, when Tereus recognizes that he has become his son’s “sepulcher” (Metamorphoses, 6:665). As such, it exemplifies the classical notion of “tragic discovery” or anagnorisis, which often involves cultural taboos such as pat- ricide, incest, or infanticide.2 The agent of this discovery is Philomela who

1 Aside from Rubens’s painting, we know of a few no-longer extant compositions on the sub- ject, by artists like Leonello Spada and Cristoforo Allori. Lothar Sickel, “ ‘… Il desiderio ch’io tengo di servirla …’ Leonello Spadas Tätigkeit für den Kardinal Maffeo Barberini im Licht un- bekannter Briefe,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 46, no. 2/3 (2002): 409–438. The Spada was recorded in the 1623 inventory of the collection of Maffeo Barberini, and showed the preparation of the “banquet” for Tereus: “un quadro grando di tela depintovi la favola di Procne e filomela quando fece mangiare il figliolo al proprio Padre con molte figure alto p[al]mi 6 ½ largo p[al]mi 8 in circa con Cornice,” or about 140 × 180 cm. The one by Allori was recorded in a collection in Naples in 1815. Rubens surely knew earlier prints on the subjects, such as those included in illustrated editions of Ovid. One likely example, due to its popularity, would have been the engraving by Antonio Tempesta, Ovidii Metamorphoseon, ed, W. Janson, Amsterdam, 1606, pl. 60, which also focuses on the presentation of the head of Itys to Tereus by the two sisters. 2 Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 15, 489. In the words of Northrop Frye, recognitions through such archetypes confront the audi- ence not only with its past culture, but with the cultural form of the present. As he famously observes, “the culture of the past is not only the memory of mankind, but our own buried life, and study of it leads to a recognition scene, a discovery in which we see, not our past