Lot and His Daughters

According to the book of Genesis, Lot and his family fled the city of Sodom before its destruction by a wrathful God. Fearing that no other men survived to give them children, Lot’s daughters conspired to seduce him. This disturbing tale enjoyed widespread popularity in Northern European art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Rubens’s monumental interpretation is perhaps its greatest depiction. The artist structured his painting around the contrast between youthful and aging flesh, all depicted with his peerless virtuosity. Like The Met’s Venus and Adonis and its Rubens family portrait, the painting once hung at Blenheim Palace in the collection of the dukes of Marlborough.