For Peter Paul Rubens, the ideal female body was "endowed with modesty and elegance. Her body made up of perfect proportions and curved contours"—an ideal manifested by Venus, the epitome of female beauty. Worshiped by the ancient Greeks and Romans as the goddess of love and beauty, Venus was frequently depicted in the nude, as if just emerging from the bath. One such example is the Mazarin Venus, a Roman marble sculpture in the Getty collections that Rubens himself may have studied. Rubens adapted the iconic pose of the semi-draped Venus to portray many different women in his paintings. In "The Discovery of the Infant Erichthonius," the three daughters of Cecrops (the legendary king of Athens) remove the lid of a basket, revealing Erichthonius, child of Gaia (the goddess of the Earth). Notice how the daughter on the left with the red drapery both covers and reveals herself, standing in a pose that echoes ancient marble statues of Venus, like the Mazarin Venus in the second slide. ...