The CleaningThe company beyond the cut
The Warsaw copy: Pandrosos reclines at left, Herse stands in red, a nurse raises her palm, and Aglauros in gold lifts the basket lid above the serpent-limbed child. Sculpted figures frame the portico and fountain behind them.
The Warsaw copy · original reproduction

The copy and the cut canvas

Two different objects. The Warsaw copy preserves the larger composition. The Oberlin painting is the surviving fragment by Rubens. Their alignment is approximate.

The entire larger scene in the Warsaw copy
The Warsaw copy. The source passage below the imagined films enlarges this unchanged reproduction.
The Oberlin fragment by Rubens. Pandrosos’s fingers enter at the left edge beside the child; her leg survives below.
The Oberlin fragment. This detail uses the actual painting’s pixels, including the hand at its cut edge.

What the sources let us say

Marjorie E. Wieseman’s Oberlin catalogue identifies Aglauros in gold, Herse standing at left, Pandrosos reclining in the foreground, the old nurse, and the portico’s references to Vulcan and Gaea. It attributes the fingers and leg along the fragment’s edges to Pandrosos. The current museum record documents the fragment’s transformation and the witnesses to the wider composition.

Pausanias 1.27.2–3 places his description of the girls and their unknown burdens immediately after Pandrosos’s sanctuary. This is our route between painting and rite. It does not establish that Rubens intended the Arrhephoria or that the ritual reenacts this painting’s story.

The opening film uses an imagined expanded composition with added drapery. Its camera movement, gestures and absent viewpoints are generated interpretations, not recovered Rubens surfaces. The child and Athena now open the pottery passage. The subsequent source passage enlarges the unchanged Warsaw reproduction. We do not assign an individual parent to either stone figure here.

Passage notes and source distinctions