Saint James the Greater

He grips a book, and with him Rubens has put a pilgrim's staff and a pilgrim's hat. The Prado's reading is that the two Santiagos are folded into one man here, the apostle whose letters are collected in the Bible and the pilgrim whose road ends at Compostela. That double identity was about to turn into a political question. In October 1617, five years after this panel was finished, the Discalced Carmelites asked the Cortes in Madrid to give Teresa of Ávila a share in the patronage of Spain, which until then had been Santiago's alone. The king dropped the idea that year. It returned under Philip IV, Rome granted it in July 1627, and a papal brief cancelled it again in January 1630. The panel is oak, 108 centimetres high, and he looks out of it as directly as anyone in the set.