Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery

Rubens painted this a few years after coming home from eight years in Italy, settling in Antwerp just as a truce in 1609 paused the long war with Spain and let the city breathe. Commissions poured in and his workshop grew. The scene is from John's gospel: scribes drag a woman caught in adultery before Christ and demand she be stoned, and he answers that whoever is without sin should throw the first stone. Rubens crowds the moment with faces, the accusers pressing in from the shadows while the woman waits. He gives Christ the one calm gesture in the picture, a hand lowered toward the ground where, the story says, he wrote something no one recorded.