Saint Simon

Simon is reading, seen in profile, his fingers slipped between the pages to hold his place. Close to that hand, almost swallowed by the shadow, lies a saw, the tool he was said to have been killed with. He pays it no attention. The panel is one of twelve apostles Rubens painted between 1610 and 1612 for the Duke of Lerma, the minister who ran Spain for Philip III, in a decade when the Council of Trent had made such sets a routine commission. The light does the work here. It comes in hard from one side, lifting the forehead and the hands off a dark ground and letting everything else sink. In 1618 Rubens sent an English diplomat a list of the pictures hanging in his own house, and among them was a second set of these apostles, painted by his pupils after his originals.