Measuring just over seven feet high and almost eleven feet wide, the painting represents a dramatic episode from the Old Testament, in which Daniel is sentenced to death for praying to God and is thrown into a den of lions by order of King Darius. Here, Rubens captures the moment of Daniel’s deliverance from this harrowing test of endurance and faith. Nearly nude and more than life-sized, he looks heavenward with clasped hands and dewy, pleading eyes as a pride of ten lions encircles him.
Scholars have identified the inspiration for Daniel’s beseeching visage in a series of antique and Renaissance sources, including the famous Hellenistic bust of Dying Alexander and Girolamo Muziano’s altarpiece The Penitent Saint Jerome in Bologna, both of which Rubens would have encountered in Italy. The lions, meanwhile, which Rubens described as “taken from life,” were likely also a combination of intensive studies, some done from life at the royal menagerie in Brussels and/or the zoo in Ghent and others from Paduan bronzes.