Coronation and Assumption of the Virgin

Rubens had just come home to Antwerp after eight years in Italy, and in these busy years he worked out his ideas in quick oil sketches like this one. This was a proposal for a chapel altarpiece in Antwerp's cathedral, painted around 1610. The clergy turned it down in 1611, and Rubens reshaped the idea into a different picture, an Assumption, for the same spot, so the finished altar was never quite this. He has folded two moments together, Mary rising to heaven and being crowned once she arrives, in one upward rush of figures. The little panel later travelled to Russia and was bought for the Hermitage in 1722, where it still hangs.