The Fall of the Rebel Angels

Floris painted this in 1554 for the fencers' guild of Antwerp, one of the armed companies that kept order in the city, and it hung above their altar in the great Cathedral of Our Lady. He had studied in Rome, and the tumble of twisting, muscular bodies as the archangel Michael drives the rebel angels out of heaven owes a clear debt to Michelangelo's Last Judgement. What survives is only the middle of the story. This was the centre of a triptych, and its two wings were destroyed twelve years later in the iconoclastic riots of 1566, when Protestant crowds swept through Netherlandish churches smashing images. The central panel came through and is now in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp.