Saint Thomas

In 1618 Rubens sent an inventory of the pictures in his Antwerp house to Sir Dudley Carleton, an English diplomat he was trading paintings with. One line reads: the twelve apostles with Christ, made by my pupils, after the originals by my hand that the Duke of Lerma has. Those originals are this set, painted between 1610 and 1612 for Philip III's all-powerful favourite. Thomas has his own peculiarity within it. He is reading, and he holds the book so far forward that we cannot see a word of it, while the lance resting on his arm is the weapon he was killed with. The light comes in from the right and picks out the face against a plain dark ground. After Lerma the trail goes cold for over a century. The twelve turn up again in a 1746 inventory at the palace of La Granja, then at Aranjuez, where in 1794 the whole apostolate was hanging in the queen's dressing room.