The Deposition

When Rubens painted this, he was a young northerner testing himself against Italy. He had come south to Rome around 1601, in his early twenties, to study the antique statues and the painters everyone in Antwerp talked about. The picture shows the dead Christ slumped across a stone sarcophagus, propped against his mother, and you can feel the young artist pulling two worlds together. The heavy, sculptural body and the deep Roman shadows are things he was learning on the spot, while the plain stone coffin is a Northern idea of where the burial happens. For a long time nobody believed a beginner had done it, and an old inscription credited the work to Anthony van Dyck, who was a small child when it was made. Only in the 20th century was it given back to Rubens.