Church in Flanders or The Mass

On the doorway at the right, the one standing open onto trees, the frieze carries the name P. Neefs, and the cartouche above it the year 1618. He signed himself into the masonry of a church that was never built. Antwerp's cathedral lies behind the design, freely rearranged, and the side altars are his own invention. In the Catholic Southern Netherlands the guilds and the patrician families paid for altars like those and kept them up, and a nave of these years was crowded with them. The worshippers are dressed for display, and at the edge of the crowd coins are going to the poor. A greyhound crosses the chequered floor. In the lower right corner sits a small painted fleur-de-lis, the collection mark of Isabel de Farnesio, queen of Spain, who kept the panel in her dressing room at the palace of La Granja. An inventory recorded it there in 1746, and it came to the Prado in 1848.