Miracle of Saint Ignatius of Loyola (study)

Two stages of the same commission hang in this room. This oak panel, about a metre tall, is the modello Rubens painted around 1615 or 1616, and nearby is the finished altarpiece for the Jesuit church in Antwerp, more than five metres high. The small picture had two jobs. First it showed the Jesuit fathers what they were going to get, with the composition and the colours already settled. Then it went to the studio, where assistants copied it up to full size, and Rubens went over the big canvas himself at the end. So the sketch is the version that is his alone from start to finish. Both pictures stayed with the Antwerp Jesuits for about 160 years, and in 1776 both were acquired from their professed house for Vienna. A few years after this one, Rubens took up the same saint again for the Jesuit church in Genoa, where that altarpiece still hangs.