Christ Triumphant over Sin and Death

Around 1618 Rubens was the busiest painter in Europe, running a large Antwerp workshop that turned out altarpieces for a Catholic church eager to answer the Reformation with images full of movement and flesh and feeling. This is one of those images. Christ steps forward over the signs of what he has beaten, a skull for death and a snake for sin, his body turned and lit like a figure from the ancient sculpture Rubens had studied in Rome. It was likely made for the altar of a private chapel. Long after, in 1890, the German museum director Wilhelm von Bode bought it at auction in London, and it entered the collection in Strasbourg, where it hangs today.