AFTER SIR PETER PAUL RUBENS, MID-19TH CENTURY

According to mythology, Romulus and Remus, twin sons of the priestess Rhea Silvia who went on to found Rome, were rescued by the river god Tiberinus and set down on the Palatine Hill. There, on the banks of the river Tiber, they were nursed by a she-wolf underneath a fig-tree and fed by a woodpecker, two animals sacred to Mars, their father. They were discovered by the shepherd Faustulus, who with his wife, Acca Larentius, raised the boys as their own.

The present depiction of the myth is after the 1617-18 painting by Sir Peter Paul Rubens (d. 1640), now in the Capitoline Museum, Rome. Rubens' canvas, with collaboration from Frans Snyders (d. 1657) for the animals and Jan Wildens (d. 1653) for the landscape, also includes figures of Mars, Rhea Silvia and Faustulus, omitted here. The scene was a popular choice of mosaicists and appears both as an individual composition, as here (for another example, see J. Hanisee Gabriel, The Gilbert Collection - Micromosaics, London, 2000, p. 165, no. 97), and in table-tops as the central roundel surrounded by views of Rome (for examples see Christie's, London, 1 November 2001, lot 263 and E. M. Efimova, West European Mosaics of the 13th-19th Centuries in the Collection of the Hermitage, Leningrad, 1968, nos. 63 and 74).