Saint Paul Bitten by a Viper on the Island of Malta

Gillis Hooftman was among the richest men in Antwerp, a Calvinist merchant and shipowner whose fortune came from the sea. Around 1566 to 1568 he commissioned Maerten de Vos to paint five pictures for his dining room, all on the life of the apostle Paul, and this panel is the one with a shipwreck in it. In the Acts of the Apostles, Paul is being taken to Rome as a prisoner when his ship runs aground off Malta. The islanders light a fire for the soaked survivors, a viper fastens on Paul's hand, and when he shakes it off into the flames and comes to no harm, they decide he must be a god.

Hooftman's trade made him a keen user of maps. His clerk later recalled that the big rolled sheets were awkward in the counting house, so they were bound into a single book, put together by the Antwerp map dealer Abraham Ortelius, a few years before Ortelius published his own atlas in 1570. Another panel from the Paul series, Saint Paul at Ephesus, dated 1568, is in Brussels. This one was given to the Louvre in 1850.