Saint Martin and the Beggar

A Roman soldier on a grey horse leans down and cuts his cloak in half for a naked beggar shivering in the cold, the legend of Saint Martin, who would later become a bishop and a saint. Van Dyck painted it around 1618, barely out of his teens and still attached to Rubens's studio. Some scholars think the commission first went to Rubens, who handed it to his brilliant young assistant. In 1621 the chancellor of Brabant gave the picture to the parish church of Zaventem, near Brussels, which is dedicated to Saint Martin, and it still hangs there as its altarpiece. That is the unusual thing about it. Almost everything else van Dyck made has drifted into museums, while this one has stayed for some 400 years in the small village church it was given to.