Fall of the rebel angels

In April 1621 the truce between Spain and the Dutch Republic ran out, and the war that had begun in Bohemia three years earlier was drawing in more of Europe. This canvas, more than four metres tall, was painted in those years for the parish church of St Peter in Neuburg an der Donau, the seat of the Count Palatine Wolfgang Wilhelm, a Lutheran prince who had turned Catholic a few years before and brought his lands back to the old faith. The archangel Michael plants his foot on a seven-headed dragon and raises his shield, while the rebel angels tumble beneath him in a knot of bodies and snakes. The Alte Pinakothek reads Michael here as the figure of the Counter-Reformation, guarding the Church against heretics, which in the Catholic language of the day meant Protestants. At the top, God the Father holds the globe, with a triangular halo that points to the Trinity. The painting later hung in the Düsseldorf gallery of the Electors Palatine and came to Munich in 1806.