Saint Peter

Peter holds his keys and looks up, out of the picture. The Prado describes those eyes as glassy and reads them as the Tears of Saint Peter, the weeping that came after he denied knowing Christ three times, before the cock crowed. Catholic Europe returned to that subject constantly in the decades after the Council of Trent closed in 1563, when penitence was preached above almost everything else. Over his tunic Rubens put the pontifical pallium with its three crosses, so the man in tears is also the first pope. The panel is oak, a little over a metre high, the figure set in three-quarter view against a flat dark ground. Rubens painted twelve apostles this way for the Duke of Lerma, and in 1618 he told an English collector that the apostles hanging in his own house in Antwerp were his pupils' copies of them.