The Damned being cast into Hell

This small oak panel reached Vienna with the collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the Habsburg governor of the Spanish Netherlands who bought Flemish paintings in Brussels by the hundred in the late 1640s and 1650s. Francken painted it around 1605 to 1610, in his first years as an independent master in Antwerp. The subject is the lower half of the Last Judgement, the moment the condemned are driven down into hell, a theme Antwerp painters had inherited from Bosch and Bruegel as a chance to fill a panel with falling bodies and devils. At about 47 by 32 centimetres, it is a cabinet picture, meant to be looked at from close up in a collector's room.