Bacchus and Ariadne

Dated 1636 and at the Museo del Prado, this mythological canvas depicting Bacchus and Ariadne engages one of the great subject pairings of Western painting — most famously treated by Titian in 1523 in a work Quellinus would have known through prints or copies. In the Ovidian myth, Ariadne was abandoned by Theseus on Naxos and discovered by the god Bacchus, who made her his consort and immortalised her crown as a constellation. Quellinus paints this as a Rubensian celebration: physically robust figures, warm palette, energetic composition, and Bacchus's retinue of satyrs and maenads filling the scene with dionysiac vitality. The Prado, which holds one of the world's great collections of Flemish and Spanish Baroque painting, acquired this alongside multiple Quellinus works reflecting the sustained Habsburg taste for Antwerp mythological painting.

Mythological subjects of this complexity — multiple nude and semi-draped figures, animals, landscape — required the most ambitious compositional planning in Quellinus's practice. Following Rubensian principles, he builds the composition on overlapping figure groups rather than a single central action, creating visual density appropriate to the mythological subject's abundance of narrative energy.