Descent from the Cross

A few years earlier Rubens had painted a Descent from the Cross for Antwerp Cathedral that made him the most sought-after painter in Flanders. This version, from around 1617, repeats that success on a smaller stage, the high altar of a Capuchin friars' church in the town of Lier, near Antwerp. The idea is the same, Christ's pale body lowered on a white sheet into the arms below, the whole weight of the scene pulling down along one diagonal. By this date Rubens ran a huge workshop, and scholars see a second hand in the free brushwork of the old man's body and robes, that of his brilliant young assistant Anthony van Dyck, then still in his teens. The painting later passed into the Russian imperial collection and hangs now in the Hermitage.