Image source: wikiart.org
Introduction
Peter Paul Rubens’s “Romulus and Remus” (1616) turns Rome’s founding myth into a warm, breathing scene of nature’s guardianship. At the center lies the famous she-wolf, her body stretched protectively along the streambank while the twin infants reach and wriggle against her flank. To the left, an aged river god reclines beside a nymph; to the right, a shepherd steps out from the thicket and bends forward in astonishment; above, birds flutter around a fruiting tree. The whole image reads like a pastoral miracle: providence, chance, and the animal world conspire to keep alive two children who will one day found a city.
The Myth and Why It Matters
According to Roman legend, the twins Romulus and Remus—sons of Mars and the Vestal Rhea Silvia—were cast into the Tiber and saved when their cradle lodged at the foot of the Palatine. A she-wolf nursed them in a cave until the shepherd Faustulus discovered them and raised them as his own. Rubens chooses the moment just before human care takes over, when nature and divinity still preside. For a Baroque audience, the subject delivered more than antiquarian charm. It offered an exemplar of destiny protected, of civic origins blessed by heaven, and a parable of leadership born out of extreme vulnerability.
The Composition as a Cradling Arc
Rubens organizes the scene around a low, embracing arc that runs from the river god’s arm through the she-wolf’s spine to the shepherd’s bent torso. This sweeping curve turns the clearing into a cradle, visually safeguarding the twins. A second arc runs overhead in the crown of the fig tree, so that earth and foliage together form a natural canopy. Between these arcs the babies splash in light, a compositional pocket warmed by flesh tones and the tawny pelt of the wolf. The diagonals that cross the picture—the shepherd’s staff, the leaning trunk, the outflung arms of the child on the right—lend vitality without disturbing the sheltering design.
The She-Wolf as Anchor and Paradox
Rubens paints the wolf with a calm gravity unusual in depictions of the legend. Her head turns left, muzzle softened, eyes half-closed in a vigilance that is protective rather than predatory. The thick fur around the neck is built with short, directional strokes; the belly, where the children rest, is modeled with gentler transitions, inviting touch. She is both wild and maternal, a paradox that gives the picture its emotional charge. In one body Rubens joins Rome’s native ferocity and its capacity for nurture.
The Twins and the Invention of Innocence
Unlike the wiry, heroic infants of antique reliefs, Rubens’s twins are plush and toddler-true—creased wrists, rounded shoulders, soft bellies. One stretches upward, reaching toward the leaves and birds; the other turns inward to drink, a curl falling across the temple. Their poses telegraph two temperaments: outward-facing ambition and inward-facing sustenance. The red cloth beneath them flashes like a prophecy of martial destiny while also recalling the civic color that will one day banner their city.
The River God and the Nymph
At the left, the gray-bearded figure with reed crown and water urn is the personified Tiber. He leans back with a paternal ease, arm curling in a gesture of benediction. Beside him a nymph—often read as Rhea Silvia or a river attendant—watches with a mother’s arrested breath. Their presence recasts chance as providence. The twins did not simply wash ashore; the river itself bore them, and nature’s spirits keep watch.
Faustulus the Shepherd
The man peering from the right is Faustulus, the rustic who will adopt the twins. Hat brim low, staff set, he hovers between hesitation and recognition, one hand extended as if to test whether the marvel is real. Rubens keeps him half in shadow so that he reads as a threshold figure: the moment he steps fully into the light, the custody of the children will pass from wilderness to household, from myth to civic history. His rough dress and fur shoulder-piece anchor the scene in the world of labor and responsibility.
Omens in the Fig Tree and Birds
The fig tree evokes the Ficus Ruminalis, sacred to the legend and linked to nourishing milk (rumen). Its branches curve protectively above the twins, while birds—often interpreted as woodpeckers associated with Mars—flit among the leaves. These small emblems braid the story’s threads: Mars’s paternity, nature’s bounty, and the omen-laden ecosystem that ancient Romans believed surrounded great events.
Landscape, Collaboration, and Baroque Naturalism
The painting’s thicket, reeds, and moist bank show a love of the tangible world: damp bark, springy grass, stones half-sunk in mud. Rubens frequently collaborated with specialized painters on such passages; the fusion here between animated figures and richly observed setting reflects that Antwerp habit of teamwork. Whether or not another hand contributed, the result is a persuasive wilderness that can plausibly host a miracle without feeling theatrical.
Light and Color as Moral Weather
A tempered daylight filters through the foliage, striking the infants’ skin and the she-wolf’s back while leaving the recesses cool. Warm earth hues dominate the left half—ochres in the river god’s flesh, browned greens in the reeds—while cooler blue-grays aerate the distant sky at right. The palette gradients guide feeling: warmth around the nurturing triad, cooler tones where human society approaches. Rubens’s color thus narrates the transfer of care from nature to culture.
Touch, Fur, and the Ethics of Contact
Rubens’s surfaces educate the viewer’s fingertips. The brushed velvet of the wolf’s flank, the pebbled river stones, the pliant infant skin, the corded bark of the fig—all ask to be felt. This tactile orchestration is not mere sensuousness; it advances the painting’s moral idea. Civilization begins in rightful touch: the animal’s forbearance, the children’s trust, the shepherd’s cautious hand. The first act of founding a city is learning how to handle life without harming it.
The Rhythm of Gazes
The painting binds its figures with sightlines. The Tiber looks to the twins; the nymph looks out, drawing viewers into complicity; the wolf’s glance slides toward the river god; Faustulus leans his look across the clearing; the twins attend to milk and sky. The eye travels these circuits and feels the community forming—divine, animal, human—around fragile life. Rubens turns a single discovery into a chorus of regard.
Myth, Politics, and Baroque Messaging
For patrons in the Spanish Netherlands, Rome’s origin story could speak in contemporary accents. It praised rulers who protect destiny in its vulnerable beginnings and suggested that great polities grow from providential care as much as from conquest. The image implicitly commends concord between nature and authority: the river yields, the wolf defers, the shepherd assumes duty. Rubens, a diplomat as well as a painter, understood how such allegories could flatter power while reminding it of its obligations.
Christian Echoes without Anachronism
Baroque audiences often perceived Christian resonances in pagan subjects. The sheltered infants by living water, the benign beast, the transfer from divine to human care—these motifs could whisper of Providence writ larger. Rubens keeps any echo tactful, never forcing typology onto the scene, but the painting’s charity of mood allows viewers to feel that Rome’s beginnings participate in a moral order that exceeds myth.
Comparison with Antique and Renaissance Models
Ancient reliefs usually present the scene in crisp profile: the twins firmly latched, the wolf rigid, Faustulus striding in. Rubens softens the geometry into breathing life. He replaces marble hardness with fur and skin, concentrates action in a sheltered glade rather than on a public frieze, and foregrounds feeling over heraldic clarity. Compared with Renaissance examples that emphasize emblematic clarity, his version cultivates story: we feel time passing, the sound of the stream, the quick wing-beats above the tree.
Painterly Brio and the Speed of Nature
Close looking reveals Rubens’s alternating tempos. The infants’ forms are carefully modeled, the wolf’s head and paws decisively drawn, while foliage and clouds loosen into swift, dancing strokes. That alternation between finish and suggestion keeps the picture lively and prevents the myth from petrifying. Nature, like paint, should move; Rubens lets both breathe.
Innocence, Ferocity, and the Founding Temper
The canvas balances opposed qualities Rome would claim for itself: tenderness and strength. The wolf’s jaws can kill, yet here they guard; the infants are powerless, yet chosen for greatness. Rubens captures the hinge where these truths meet. The future city is imagined as a polity capable of generosity without surrendering force—a flattering ideal, but one made persuasive by the picture’s palpable affection.
The Viewer’s Place at the Water’s Edge
Rubens sets the stream in the immediate foreground and leaves a little scrap of bank empty, as if inviting the viewer to kneel where Faustulus will soon stand. We are conscripted as witnesses and, by implication, as co-guardians of incipient destiny. The painting’s intimacy—close, low viewpoint; audible water; reachable fur—makes the myth less a distant tale and more a present responsibility.
Legacy and Afterlife
“Romulus and Remus” became one of the touchstone images of the legend in the north, influencing tapestries and later paintings that sought a warmer, more naturalistic encounter between twins and wolf. Its DNA runs through countless later pictures of foundlings, rescues, and providential childhoods. Rubens’s achievement was to make the prehistory of a city feel like a family memory.
Conclusion
In “Romulus and Remus,” Rubens gathers divinity, wilderness, and human care into a single clearing where light falls softly and destiny begins to breathe. The she-wolf’s flank becomes a cradle; the river itself seems to bless; a shepherd hesitates before stepping into history. Through supple composition, tactile surfaces, and a chromatic climate that warms around the children, the painter turns a bronze-hard legend into a living parable of protection and promise. The scene persuades not by grand gesture but by the felt truth of fur, water, leaf, and infant skin—nature and providence conspiring to found a city through kindness.