Teresa of Avilà's Vision of the Dove

This is a small, fluid work by Rubens, painted around 1614, and one of three versions he made of the same scene. Its subject is Teresa of Ávila, the Spanish Carmelite nun and mystic whose accounts of her visions had made her one of the most talked-about religious figures of the age. She would be declared a saint in 1622, as the Catholic church, in its long push against the Reformation, held up such ecstatic devotion as a model. Rubens shows her kneeling in her habit, gazing up at the Holy Spirit, who appears as a dove on a burst of cloud and light. The panel came to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge in 1999, accepted by the British government in place of inheritance tax.