Moses and the Brazen Serpent

Rubens got back to Antwerp from Italy at the end of 1608, after eight years away. In April 1609 Spain and the Dutch Republic signed a truce meant to last twelve years, and a city that had spent four decades at war suddenly had money and churches to refit. That autumn the Archdukes made him their court painter and he married Isabella Brant. This panel comes out of those months. The Israelites, punished with a plague of snakes, are cured by looking at the brass serpent Moses has raised on a cross, and Rubens fills the foreground with the twisting, muscular bodies he had been copying from Michelangelo in Rome. It stayed in Count Antoine Seilern's London house until 1978, when his collection came to the Courtauld.