The Feast of Herod (recto) Tomyris with the Head of Cyrus (verso)

This remarkable double-sided drawing by Peter Paul Rubens, dating from around 1637–38, presents two dramatic scenes from ancient and biblical history on a single sheet. The recto shows 'The Feast of Herod'—the grisly banquet at which Salome presents the head of John the Baptist to her stepfather Herod Antipas. The verso depicts 'Tomyris with the Head of Cyrus'—the Scythian queen who, after defeating the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great, allegedly immersed his head in a vessel of blood, fulfilling her vow of vengeance. Rubens executed the drawing in pen and brown ink, with black and red chalk, touched with white gouache—a multi-media approach that gave him extraordinary flexibility. The recto is the more finished side: the banquet table recedes diagonally into space, with Herod recoiling at the gruesome offering while Salome, elegant and impassive, presents the platter. The combination of pen (for crisp contours) and colored chalks (for tonal modeling) creates a richness that approaches a painted sketch. The verso, by contrast, is more quickly drawn, capturing Tomyris's triumphant fury with vigorous, spiraling pen lines. These two subjects—both involving a ruler confronted with a severed head—demonstrate Rubens's interest in parallel histories and moral exempla from different cultures. The pairing may have been intended for a series of engravings or for a tapestry cycle. Rubens's workshop produced hundreds of such drawings, which were translated into prints by professional engravers and disseminated throughout Europe. In 1637–38, Rubens was in his late sixties, still working despite increasingly debilitating gout. He had largely withdrawn from court life and was painting for his own pleasure and for a circle of discerning collectors. This drawing, with its double narrative of feminine power and vengeance, belongs to the intensely visual, morally serious yet dramatically charged world of his late work.

This drawing exemplifies Rubens's synthesis of Northern and Southern European artistic traditions—the pen-and-ink technique rooted in Dürer and the German Renaissance, the dramatic chiaroscuro and figural dynamism drawn from Italian Baroque. The recto-verso format preserves the artist's working process, showing how he developed two compositions on a single sheet. Rubens was one of the last great artists to operate a large-scale workshop producing drawings for reproductive engraving, and this sheet represents that collaborative system at its peak.

A spectacular double-sided drawing from Rubens's mature years, pairing two scenes of dramatic vengeance with virtuoso technique in pen, chalk, and gouache—a masterclass in Baroque storytelling.