Miracles of St. Francis of Paola (Sketch)

In 1483 Louis the Eleventh of France, old and ill, had a Calabrian hermit brought to his castle of Plessis, just outside Tours, in the hope of a cure. The hermit was Francis of Paola, founder of the order of the Minims, and he never went home. He died at Plessis in 1507 and was buried in the Minims' church there, until Huguenots dug up his remains and burned them in 1562, in the first of the French wars of religion. Around 1628 Rubens painted this small oil sketch to prepare an altarpiece for a church in Tours. It shows the saint the way the legend remembered him, lifted up again and again by miraculous forces and hanging in the sky inside a blaze of light. The altarpiece it was meant to prepare was never painted.