Lamentation of Christ by Mary and John

Around 1614, Antwerp was living through a pause. The Twelve Years' Truce had halted the war between Spain and the Dutch Republic, and the city's Catholic churches, stripped bare by iconoclasts a generation earlier, were being filled again with paintings. Rubens, back from Italy for some six years, was at the centre of that work. Here he takes up an old type of devotional picture, made for private prayer, which had once isolated a single moment of Christ's suffering. Rubens packs several moments back into one image. The Kunsthistorisches Museum reads four of them in this panel: the crowning with thorns, the Crucifixion, the mourning over the body and the entombment, all set close in front of the viewer so that the believer is drawn into the grief. The oak panel, just over a metre wide, has been cut down along both sides, more on the right, and it has been in the imperial collection in Vienna since at least 1730.