Altarpiece of the Guild of the Joiners

Antwerp's joiners, the woodworkers who had just split from the coopers' guild, ordered this altarpiece, and the contract for it still survives. Quinten Metsys delivered it in 1511. Its central panel is the Lamentation over the dead Christ, flanked by the martyrdoms of the two Saints John. What happened afterward is the remarkable part. The painting outlived a great fire in its church about 19 years later, then the storm of image-breaking that swept Antwerp in 1566, when crowds destroyed religious art across the Low Countries. Later both Philip II of Spain and Elizabeth I of England tried to buy it. The town council refused and purchased it themselves to keep it in the city. It hangs in Antwerp still, a short walk from where the guildsmen who paid for it once worked.