Madonna and Child with Saint Elizabeth and the Young Saint John

Around 1618 Antwerp was living through a truce. The war between Spain and the Dutch Republic had been on hold since 1609, and in the Spanish-ruled city workshops were busy with religious paintings for churches and for private houses. This one was made for a home. An old source says Rubens painted it for an Antwerp family named Gobou, though that has never been confirmed. The scene of the Virgin and Child meeting their relatives, Saint Elizabeth and her son, the little John the Baptist, comes from a medieval devotional text, the Meditations on the Life of Christ, and it gave painters a way to show two naked babies inside a sacred subject. John holds a lamb, the sign of Christ's future sacrifice, and the Christ Child strokes its fleece while Elizabeth bends in from behind. Rubens borrowed the arrangement from Raphael's Holy Family known as La Perla, which he probably saw in the Gonzaga palace in Mantua during his years as a young court painter there. Copies of the composition survive in Florence, Venice and Vienna. This canvas belonged to the Lowther family in the north of England from 1763 to 1935, and since 2004 it has been on deposit in Barcelona from the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection.