Apollo and Diana Kill Niobe's Children

Jan Boeckhorst's Apollo and Diana Kill Niobe's Children (c. 1630), at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, takes its subject from one of the most brutal episodes in Ovid's Metamorphoses: Niobe, queen of Thebes, boasted of her fourteen children as proof of superior fertility to the goddess Leto, who had only two. In punishment, Leto's children Apollo and Diana descended to earth and killed all fourteen of Niobe's sons and daughters with their arrows. The subject was popular in Baroque mythological painting because it offered painters a scene of simultaneous large-scale violence and grief — many figures in dramatic physical distress — that demonstrated compositional and figure-painting ambition. The theme of divine punishment for human hubris carried moral weight appropriate to decorative mythological cycles as well as private collections. Boeckhorst's treatment at around 1630, early in his independent career, would have competed with the Rubens workshop's canonical Flemish approach to Ovidian subjects.

The Niobid massacre demands a complex multi-figure composition balancing the orderly precision of the divine archers — Apollo and Diana positioned at a distance, arrows nocked or released — against the chaotic collapse of their victims below. Boeckhorst organises the dying and dead Niobids across the lower half of the composition in a variety of postures that demonstrate his knowledge of antique sculpture, from which the Niobid figures were traditionally derived. Strong light from above or from the direction of the divine twins illuminates victims' flesh dramatically against a dark background.