Perseus Freeing Andromeda

This picture shows the myth of Perseus and Andromeda as described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Andromeda, tied to a rock cliff, is to be sacrificed to a sea monster.

The gruesome sacrifice has been demanded by Poseidon, god of the sea, to atone for the arrogance of Andromeda’s mother, Cassiopeia (wife of King Ketos), who, depending on which version of the tale one reads, claimed that she or her daughter Andromeda was more beautiful than the sea nymphs.

But the hero Perseus, returning home on his winged horse Pegasus, spots the chained princess, is overcome by her beauty, and frees her.

While in Ovid’s story, the couple meet only after Perseus has battled the sea monster, Rubens combines the story of the lovers’ first encounter with the battle for Andromeda’s freedom. The monster already lies vanquished in the water.

Wearing a victor’s red cloak, Perseus undoes Andromeda’s binds.

Two putti assist him …

… while two others in a separate group clamber up Pegasus’s back and a third takes his bridle.

“Shame on such fetters! You shouldn’t be bound by these but the ties of passionate lovers,” says Perseus to Andromeda in Ovid’s version.

“At first she was silent, constrained by maidenly shyness in front of a man; if her hands had been free of their bonds, she’d have lifted them up to her face to cover her blushes,” Ovid continues.

Rubens, who never shied away from sophisticated classical quotations, has based the forms of Andromeda and the putto loosening her binds on the ancient statue Venus Felix in Rome.

It seems that the painter has held to the ancient Roman poet Horace’s dictum, “ut picture poesis” (as is painting so is poetry). As if in competition with poetry, he creates a pictorial story which seeks to outdo Ovid’s text in both its formal and narrative clarity.