Daniel in the Lions' Den

A young man prays among ten life-size lions, and several of the beasts stare straight out at us, as if we too had stepped into the den. Rubens said the lions were done from life.

The story behind the painting

The painting tells the biblical story of Daniel, thrown into a den of lions for defying a decree of king Darius the Mede that forbade praying to anyone but the king, and saved by his faith. Rubens painted it after returning to Antwerp from eight years in Italy. It may have been begun in 1612 but is more often dated 1613 to 1615; Wikidata gives 1615. Why and for whom Rubens painted it is still unknown.

What to look for

The lions are life-size, which heightens their menace, and the canvas is huge, about 224 by 330 cm. Rubens may have based the lioness on a Renaissance bronze from Padua, but he wrote to Dudley Carleton that the lions were done from life. As court painter in Brussels he had access to the archdukes' menagerie, and one account says he tickled a lion to make it open its mouth. Daniel is shown young, though by biblical chronology he would have been over eighty, and his prayer comes from the deuterocanonical chapter 14, not chapter 6.

Meaning and intent

The National Gallery of Art describes the work as combining realism and theatricality to draw a strong emotional reaction. Daniel's face recalls the ancient Dying Alexander and a Penitent Saint Jerome by Girolamo Muziano, works Rubens saw in Italy. Modern commentators suggest a political allegory or a Counter-Reformation picture of personal faith. Rachel Aviva Pollack notes that there are ten lions, the same number as the provinces of the Southern Netherlands during the Twelve Years' Truce.

Legacy

Its first known owner was Dudley Carleton, the English ambassador at The Hague, who received it from Rubens in a 1618 exchange for antique statues. In 1628 Carleton gave it to Charles I, who hung it in the Bear Gallery at Whitehall; Charles then gave it to James Hamilton, and it stayed at Hamilton Palace in Scotland for generations. Over time it was misattributed to Paul de Vos and Jacob Jordaens, and the Cowdray family believed their picture was a copy, before its true identity was recognised and it went to the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1965.