Gregor mit Maurus und Papias

Rubens delivered his altarpiece for the Chiesa Nuova in Rome in 1607 and it failed for a reason that had nothing to do with the painting. Light from the windows struck the varnished canvas over the high altar and came straight back, so from the floor the picture could not be read. The Oratorian fathers let him do it again. In 1608 he redid the commission on slate, which throws back almost nothing, and broke it into three panels, moving the saints out to either side of the venerated image of the Virgin in the middle. This is the left panel, with Gregory the Great and the martyrs Maurus and Papias, whose relics the church kept. The rejected first version he shipped home to Antwerp. He had left Rome that October on word that his mother was dying, arrived too late, and it was hung over her grave.