When King Philip IV of Spain decided to transform his royal hunting lodge, the Torre de la Parada, into a palace of myth and marvels in 1636, he turned to Peter Paul Rubens, the leading light of the Baroque. Rubens was tasked with designing more than sixty mythological scenes to fill the walls, a commission of staggering ambition and scale. Among these, Jason and the Golden Fleece (sketch for the Torre de la Parada) stands out as a testament to both royal taste and Rubens’s storytelling prowess.

The painting is not a finished canvas, but a vibrant oil sketch—a working proposal that would guide his workshop in executing the final large-scale version. At the heart of the scene is Jason, hero of Greek legend, caught at the very moment he seizes the fabled Golden Fleece. Rubens chooses the climax: Jason, muscles taut, pulls the shimmering fleece from the tree as the dragon guardian writhes in defeat, its coils echoing the hero’s own tension. The light falls dramatically on Jason’s torso and the golden pelt, drawing the viewer’s eye to the prize and the peril.

Medea, the sorceress whose magic made Jason’s victory possible, stands nearby, her gesture both protective and complicit. Unlike earlier, more static Renaissance treatments—such as those by Tintoretto—Rubens infuses the myth with movement and raw energy, emphasizing the drama of the moment. As a sketch, this work was never meant for public display, but to serve as a blueprint for Rubens’s assistants, who would produce the finished canvases for the king’s hunting retreat. Many of these sketches, including Jason and the Golden Fleece, survived and are now prized as artworks in their own right, admired for their immediacy and the insight they offer into Rubens’s creative process.

The fate of the final painting for the Torre de la Parada is less certain—many works from the palace were dispersed or lost after the building was damaged in the War of Spanish Succession. Today, the sketch is preserved in the Museo del Prado, a vivid reminder of Rubens’s pivotal role in shaping the mythological imagination of the Spanish court.