Prometheus By Dirck Van Baburen

The work of art I chose is Prometheus being chained by Vulcan by Dirck van Baburen in 1623 and is oil on canvas. He had very few paintings that are known today and his career was short lived but the ones that are known are of mostly religious subjects in Rome. In his final years of painting he started to merge the methods he had learned from Caravaggio and Manfredi into mythological and history paintings. In this painting Baburen adapts a upside-down figure of St. Paul for the position of the fallen
Prometheus who was consequently being punished for stealing fire from Hephaestus on Mount

Olympus to give to the humans.

In the myth of Prometheus he was spared imprisonment in Tartarus because he had aided the gods in defeating the

Athena and
Prometheus admired these creatures even though the mighty Zeus disliked them and if he could would have uncreated them. Because he couldn’t uncreate them he decided to confine them to earth and deny them immortality. For this Prometheus had a soft spot for the humans and he taught them various things in arts and skills in the world. Another task given to Prometheus was to determine how sacrifices were to be made to the gods. For this he cut up two portions of a bull one was fat and bones and the other was the skin and the finest meat from the two portions Prometheus asked Zeus to choose one and the other would go to the humans and Zeus fell for the trick and the humans were left with the finest meat and the skins to utilize for themselves. Angered by this trickery Zeus punished the humans by taking away fire for which to cook their meat and were thus forced to eat raw uncooked food. With this
Prometheus went to Mount Olympus and stole the fire from Hephaestus and gave it back to the humans. This severely angered Zeus and for Prometheus’s betrayal he orders Hephaestus to

With Pandora had come a box that contained evil, disease, poverty, war, and various other afflictions. When Pandora opens this box on earth she unleashes all of these plagues upon humankind and thus got his revenge on the humans. Prometheus on the other hands was then punished for stealing the fire and giving it to humans so Zeus orders Vulcan to chain Prometheus to a rock on a mountain peak and everyday there was to be an eagle to tear and eat Prometheus’s liver out of his body. Because he was immortal he would heal through the night only to have the eagle come the next day to eat it out of his body again for all time.
This continued on for thousands of years until other gods begged for Zeus to show mercy on
Prometheus. Finally Zeus caved in and said he would release him if he would tell Zeus a secret that only
Prometheus knew so Prometheus told of a sea nymph Thetis would bear a son that would be greater than his father. This Information was important because Zeus and Poseidon both wanted her and

arranged for her to marry a mortal so that any child she bore would not come to challenge their