Coronation of the Virgin

What looks like a finished picture is really a working document. Around 1620 Rubens ran the busiest painting workshop in Europe, in Antwerp, producing altarpieces on a scale no single hand could manage. When a church or a patron came to him, he answered with a modello, a small oil sketch worked up in colour to show what the finished altar would look like. This Coronation of the Virgin is one of those sketches, painted quickly and largely by Rubens himself, the Virgin carried up among saints and angels toward the crown. From a sheet like this, assistants would scale the design onto a canvas many times its size, and Rubens would return at the end to finish the faces and hands. Sketches like this were valued and collected in their own right, and this one now hangs in the Courtauld in London.