Last Judgement

Abraham van Diepenbeeck spent his career close to the workshop of Peter Paul Rubens in Antwerp, and he made his first reputation not in oils but in glass, designing windows for the city's cathedral and churches. By the time he painted this Last Judgement, around 1645, he was giving most of his energy to designs for printed books and tapestries, the illustration trade of the Flemish Baroque. A crowded scene of final reckoning, the saved rising and the damned falling, was exactly the kind of dense, many-figured composition that grew out of Rubens and carried well into print. He worked for patrons across the Channel too, and back in the 1630s had traveled to France at Rubens's request to draw after Italian frescoes.