Theagenes Takes the Torch back from the Hands of Chariclea
by DUBOIS, Ambroise, Oil on canvas
The most important work of Dubois in France, the decoration of the Gallery of Diana at Fontainebleau, was destroyed in the nineteenth century. But many paintings survive from the other cycles executed in the same palace, illustrating the story of Clorinda from Tasso, and Heliodorus’s novel, Theagenes and Chariclea. All fifteen pictures from the latter series survive at Fontainebleau where they are mostly still housed in the ‘chambre ovale’, now called the Salon Louis XIII.