Audio Stop 205

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As if sitting in an underground cave, we look onto a scene with a nearly nude man, muscular with pale, peachy skin sitting among seven male and two female lions in this horizontal painting. The man sits to our right of center with his legs crossed, elbows close to his body with hands clasped by his chest, head tipped back looking up towards a small opening above. He has long, wavy, chestnut brown hair and has dark eyes. A white loincloth covers his groin and he sits on a scarlet red swath of fabric draped up over a rock next to him. The nine lions stalk, sit, or lie down around the man. One male lion next to the man, to our left, opens his mouth with his head thrown back, curling tongue extended beyond long fangs. A human skull and other bones are strewn on the dirt ground close to us. The rocky cave curves up around the animals and man to a narrow, round opening showing blue sky above.

Sir Peter Paul Rubens

Daniel in the Lions' Den, c. 1614/1616

Not On View

Craig Saffoe, the National Zoo’s curator of Great Cats, explores Rubens’s depiction of lions in a key moment of drama.

NARRATOR:
Gazing intently upward, hands clasped in prayer, the biblical hero Daniel beseeches God to save him. The king of Babylon, angry at Daniel’s refusal to worship the Babylonian king, has thrown him into a lions’ den, expecting the wild cats to tear him apart. The lions are skillfully portrayed by Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens.

CRAIG SAFFOE:
Everything anatomical about these lions looks pretty spot-on to me. My name is Craig Saffoe, I'm the curator of Great Cats at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo.

NARRATOR:
Rubens, who made the painting around 1616, was able to study real lions at the royal menagerie in Brussels. Take the pair of lions at the lower right.

CRAIG SAFFOE:
They’re gnarling and teeth-baring at each other - that's very normal for lions. It's not even always a sign of just outright aggression - maybe they're fighting over the scraps of bones that I see on the floor there.

I do see a full range of expressions of cats, and if that's what the artist was trying to capture, he did it beautifully. The animal yawning in the background is great. And then the animal directly below him has that kind of pensive stare as though he's looking at something he may be hunting, down to the animal at the bottom, who's fully asleep.

And certainly these cats evoke emotions, and one of the emotions is man versus the savage beast.

NARRATOR:
Here we see Daniel in a moment of survival, with his unwavering faith in God serving as protection from untimely demise in the lions’ den.

Rubens’s skill, and his fascination with the world around him, so evident in his depiction of these lions, brought him enormous success as an artist, patronized by royalty all over Europe.

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