Saint Matthew

The weapon is wrong for the man, and deliberately so. Matthew, the tax collector who became an apostle and an evangelist, holds a halberd, the pole weapon carried by guards in Rubens's own time, standing in for whatever killed him. Painters of apostles did this routinely; each figure needs an instrument of martyrdom so that a viewer can tell the twelve apart across a room. What is less usual is the face. Rubens gives Matthew no beard at all, and a young head of chestnut hair, and the museum thinks he worked partly from printed sheets, among them engravings by Peter Isselburg. The panel was painted between 1610 and 1612, shortly after Rubens came back from eight years in Italy, which shows in the heavy Michelangelesque build of the body and in the single hard light against a bare dark ground. The set belonged to the Duke of Lerma, and the museum states plainly that between his collection and a 1746 royal inventory nothing about these panels is known with certainty.