Diana and Actaeon (detail)
by JORDAENS, Jacob, Oil on oak panel
The dynamic landscape, with its bizarre broken tree trunk jabbing at the sky above the terrified nymph and its low-set horizon, is in the tradition of the Flemish forestscape, but does not match up to the works of Jordaens’s fellow Antwerp artist Rubens. Jordaens, in whose oeuvre the landscape played but a marginal role, was nevertheless skilled in employing its elements to give weight to the content of figurative scenes and heighten drama.