Assumption of Mary

This huge oak panel, more than four and a half metres tall with a rounded top, was first intended for the high altar of Antwerp Cathedral. It never got there. Rubens worked on it from around 1611, and in 1621 it went instead to the Lady Chapel of the city's Jesuit church. The cathedral had to wait until 1626 for another Assumption by Rubens, the one still over its high altar today. This is his first treatment of the subject, and next to the later ones it holds remarkably still. Mary rises in a bright light, while below the men and women around her empty tomb stare into it, painted in the heavy earthy colours of the world she is leaving. It stayed with the Jesuits for more than 150 years. In 1773 the pope dissolved their order, and in 1776 the panel was acquired from the Antwerp church for the imperial collection in Vienna.