PIETRO PAOLO RUBENS (seguace di)

(Siegen, 1577 - Antwerp, 1640) Faun with fruit basket and bacchante Oil on canvas, 113.4X93 cm The canvas under consideration is taken from the one made by Peter Paul Rubens in 1615 and belonging to the Schonborn-Buchheim collection. The basket of fruit placed in the center of the composition symbolizes 'abundance' and, in Rubens' invention, is even allusive to the seduction and complicity of relationship between the bacchante and the satyr. The gesture of picking grapes from the bunch, in fact, represents pleasure or amorous availability, especially if it is Bacchus, Cupid or a married woman, as seen in works by Goltzius, Joos van Cleve or Conrad Faber, a gesture often depicted by seventeenth-century Dutch artists and which in the following decades and century became a mere attribute of the personifications of autumn, losing the moral significance that had been attributed to it.