Lamentation of Christ

Rubens rarely signed his pictures, so the letters on the rock at the far left are worth finding. They read P.P. Rubens F., followed by the year 1614, painted into the stone beside the body. The panel is small, about half a metre across, and was made for private prayer rather than for a church. The dead Christ, the mourners and the things of the Passion are painted with close, almost tactile care, meant, as the museum puts it, to lead whoever knelt before it deeper into the story. Within 25 years the panel had crossed to England, into the collection of James Hamilton, a Scottish nobleman and one of King Charles I's closest advisers. Hamilton was beheaded in March 1649, a few weeks after the king, his pictures were sold abroad, and this one was bought by the Habsburg archduke Leopold Wilhelm, then governor of the Spanish Netherlands, whose collection later came to Vienna.