Andrómeda

A young woman chained to a dark rock turns her frightened eyes toward something we cannot see. Rembrandt left out both the monster and the hero, and painted only her fear.

The story behind the painting

Andromeda Chained to the Rocks is a small oil on panel painted by Rembrandt in 1630, when he was still working in Leiden. It is his first full-length mythological female nude. The story comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Queen Cassiopeia of Ethiopia boasted that she was more beautiful than Juno and the Nereids. Insulted, Neptune sent a sea monster to the coast, and he could only be appeased by the sacrifice of the king's daughter, Andromeda, who was chained to the rocks to await it.

What to look for

The panel measures just 34 by 24.5 cm. Andromeda stands alone against the rock, completely shackled and unable to move, her body lit against the darkness. Her face is full of distress, and she looks out of the picture to the right, toward the danger approaching from outside the frame. There is no Perseus in a heroic pose and no monster rising from the waves. Everything we know about the threat comes from her expression and the direction of her gaze.

Meaning and intent

Artists such as Titian showed Andromeda, Perseus and the monster together, with Andromeda as a glamorous beauty. Rembrandt broke with that convention and painted her as a frightened, naturalistic girl. Her alarmed look beyond the edge of the picture creates the narrative tension on its own. The painting is an example of his rejection of idealised beauty: he painted women as he saw them, naturally imperfect, rather than as a classical ideal.

Legacy

The work belongs to a classic theme, the damsel in distress, rescued in the myth by Perseus, who wins her hand in marriage. Rembrandt's later mythological nudes of the period, Diana Bathing and Danae, show how his way of painting the nude kept developing from this early picture. By leaving the rescue outside the frame, the young painter turned a familiar myth into a study of a single human emotion. Andromeda Chained to the Rocks is now in the Mauritshuis in The Hague.