Saint Ildefonso Receiving the Chasuble from the Virgin, in the Presence of Archduke Albert and the Infanta Isabella

Spanish royal clerks kept describing this small plate, and kept disagreeing about it. In the 1746 inventory of Isabel de Farnesio's pictures at the palace of La Granja it is an original by Rubens, on canvas, showing Our Lady giving the chasuble to Saint Ildefonsus with several figures, among them a king and a queen kneeling. Twenty years later the same number is entered correctly as a copper, and valued at 700 reales. By 1794 it hung in the king's small oratory at Aranjuez and was worth 4,000. It entered the museum in 1848. The scene is a Spanish legend: Ildefonsus, archbishop of Toledo in the 7th century, wrote in defence of the Virgin's virginity and was rewarded, the story goes, with a vestment from her own hands. The composition follows the altarpiece Rubens painted for a brotherhood in Brussels, whose side panels held the archdukes Albert and Isabella, the kneeling pair the clerks could not name. The museum catalogues the plate as the work of Rubens's workshop and dates it no more closely than the 17th century.