Few paintings in the Baroque period dared to capture the shocking climax of Ovid’s tale as boldly as The banquet of Tereus (Ovid, Metamorphoses, VI, 647-674), after by Peter Paul Rubens. The moment Rubens chose to depict—when Philomela and Procne serve Tereus the flesh of his own son—was so notorious that even in the seventeenth century, it was rarely attempted on canvas. This work is not an autograph Rubens, but a studio piece created under his supervision, based on a lost original; its very existence testifies to the appetite for mythological drama among Rubens’s patrons in the 1630s. The painting freezes the story at the instant of revelation.

Tereus, king of Thrace, sits at the banquet table, unwittingly eating the remains of his son Itys, whom his wife Procne has murdered in revenge for Tereus’s rape and mutilation of her sister, Philomela. Philomela stands at the ready, holding the boy’s severed head on a platter, her gaze locked on Tereus with chilling calm. The women’s rich garments and the opulent feast contrast with the horror of the act, heightening the sense of outrage and betrayal.

The theatrical gestures—Procne’s outstretched arm, Tereus’s sudden recoil—echo the emotional intensity found in Titian’s earlier treatment of Ovidian subjects, but Rubens’s version is more direct, almost brutal, in its confrontation with the viewer. The exact journey of this studio work is unclear, but it belongs to a series of mythological paintings produced in Rubens’s Antwerp workshop in the late 1630s, likely for a learned or aristocratic patron fascinated by the darker tales of antiquity. While the original Rubens composition is lost, this version preserves the dramatic conception and visual language that defined his late mythologies. Today, the painting stands as a testament to the enduring power of Ovid’s stories and Rubens’s ability—even at one remove—to translate them into scenes that still unsettle and fascinate.