Apollo and Coronis

One of the most refined Dutch painters of the first half of the seventeenth century, Van Poelenburgh specialized in religious and mythological subjects set in extensive Italianate landscapes; the same is true of Bartholomeus Breenbergh (1598–1657), whom he influenced. Van Poelenburgh in particular customarily worked on a small scale, often on copper, and the present painting is an unusually substantial and moreover immaculately preserved example of this practice. In 1786, three years before the storming of the Bastille, it was engraved in reverse when it formed part of the legendary collection of the duc d’Orléans, who was the brother of the ill-fated Louis XVI and met an equally violent end.
At that time, the subject was identified as the story of Cephalus and Procris from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”, but the fact that the weapon is an arrow as opposed to a javelin proves that it must actually represent another closely related myth likewise recounted in the Metamorphoses, that of Apollo and Coronis. Just as the hunter Cephalus inadvertently kills his spying wife and immediately rues it, so too the sun god’s impulsive fury at his beloved’s infidelity is instantly turned to grief by her death. His reaction is to punish the raven who had told him of her transgression, and turn its hitherto white feathers to black. Although Ovid relates that Coronis’ ‘fair white skin was drenched in crimson blood’, Van Poelenburgh deliberately kept the bloodshed to a minimum, instead allowing the eye to revel in the perfection of the lovers’ nude bodies.