Orpheus and Eurydice is the Greek myth of a singer who walks into the underworld to bring back his dead wife and loses her on the way out, because he looks back before they reach daylight. Ovid tells it in Book X of his Metamorphoses, and Rubens' canvas in the Prado, painted in 1636 to 1638, shows the very second of the look.
The story has no battle and no monster, only a bargain and a glance, so a painter has to decide which second of it to put on the canvas. Rubens chose the glance, and others chose the snake, the climb toward daylight or the loss that follows.
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It is easy to read the look as doubt or impatience. Ovid gives a plainer reason. The condition was that Orpheus must not turn his eyes behind him until he had left the vale of Avernus, and in A. S. Kline's translation he turns because, "afraid she was no longer there, and eager to see her, the lover turned his eyes."
He had reason to be afraid. Walking ahead of her, he could not feel her touch or hear her voice. The Metropolitan Museum puts it that way in its note on Rodin's marble: Orpheus cannot feel her embrace or hear her voice, so he turns to check whether she has come.
So the look that loses her is also an act of care, which leaves painters free to stop the story at very different seconds. Each one below picks its own, and one of them picks a second before Orpheus knows anything is wrong.
What You'll Discover
What the gods do as he turns.
Who has not seen the snake.
The second Corot chose to paint.
The instant before Orpheus sees her.
How long Orpheus waits at the Styx.