The Brazen Serpent

This is late Rubens, probably from the second half of the 1630s, when he was in his sixties and often painting from a country house south of Antwerp. The scene comes from the Book of Numbers. God sends a plague of fiery serpents among the Israelites, and Moses, on the left, raises a bronze serpent on a pole, so that anyone who looks at it is spared while the others writhe in the coils. At the centre a woman in a black dress fixes her gaze steadily on the bronze and stays unharmed. Her features are those of Helene Fourment, whom Rubens had married in 1630, when she was 16 and he 53. Assistants blocked in parts of the canvas, and he finished it himself.