Triumph of Galatea

The Triumph of Galatea — the sea nymph daughter of Nereus, celebrated in Ovid's Metamorphoses and in the pastoral poetry of Theocritus — was one of the great set pieces of Italian Renaissance and Baroque painting, immortalised in Raphael's celebrated fresco for the Villa Farnesina in Rome. The subject showed Galatea riding the waves on a shell-chariot drawn by dolphins, surrounded by tritons, nereids, and putti, in a festive marine procession. Van Thulden's 1659 treatment, held by the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, participates in the long Northern engagement with this quintessentially Italian subject. The Gemäldegalerie's collection — one of Europe's finest — places this work in distinguished company among Flemish Baroque mythologies.

The marine triumph composition requires organising a large, exuberant cast — Galatea on her shell, tritons blowing conch horns, nereids half-submerged, putti in the air — across a wide format with the sea as a dynamic stage. Van Thulden uses the wet, reflective surface of the waves to distribute light across the lower half of the composition while keeping the sky relatively open above. The figures are arranged in a processional sweep from left to right.