Saint Ignatius of Loyola

When Rubens took this on, the Jesuits were campaigning to have their founder declared a saint. Ignatius of Loyola had died in 1556, was beatified in 1609, and was canonized in March 1622, and the order needed images that argued the case. Rubens gave them a canvas more than two metres tall, the saint in a heavy brocaded chasuble looking up into a break in the clouds, his left hand holding the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus open at the words “to the greater glory of God”. It was built to be seen from below, in the Gesù, the order’s mother church in Rome. In 1773 the pope suppressed the Society of Jesus, and four years later the painting, by then in the Jesuit church in Brussels, was knocked down at auction there to a buyer named Donckers.