The story Rubens painted is Rome's own founding legend. Amulius, having deposed his brother Numitor as king of Alba Longa, made Numitor's daughter Rhea Silvia a Vestal Virgin specifically to prevent her from bearing an heir who could threaten his rule, since Vesta's priestesses were forbidden to marry^[1]. Mars violated her regardless, and the resulting twins, Romulus and Remus, were ordered drowned in the Tiber to eliminate any rival claim to the throne^[1]. They survived by chance, washing ashore where a she-wolf nursed them until a shepherd, Faustulus, discovered and raised them^[1]. As adults the twins killed Amulius, restored their grandfather Numitor, and founded their own city on the Palatine Hill, the mythic origin point of Rome itself^[1].

The single most recognisable image of this myth is not a painting but the ancient bronze known as the Capitoline Wolf, a larger-than-life hollow-cast sculpture most art historians attribute to an Etruscan workshop, its tense, gaunt body and alert, ferocious expression capturing the animal at the moment danger approaches^[1]. The wolf itself long predates the suckling infants beneath her: those figures were added centuries later, during the Italian Renaissance, most likely by the sculptor Antonio Pollaiuolo, working between 1471 and 1473 to align the composition with the image already familiar from Roman coinage^[2]. That composite object, ancient animal plus Renaissance addition, became the emblem of the Roman Republic and remains the civic emblem of Rome today, the visual shorthand Rubens's own painting draws on and answers^[1].

Rubens spent formative years in Italy before establishing himself definitively in Antwerp, and that period reshaped his art directly. In Venice, Tintoretto affected him more strongly than Titian or Veronese; in Mantua, the painter and architect Giulio Romano became something of an idol; and in Rome he encountered Michelangelo and Caravaggio, the latter exerting the strongest influence on his work for a time, visible in paintings such as his Raising of the Cross triptych made after his return to Antwerp^[3]. Rubens's engagement with Roman subject matter, this mythic scene of the city's own founding included, sits within that broader, sustained relationship with Italian and specifically Roman visual and literary culture, built during years he spent absorbing the art of the city whose foundation myth he later painted.