The Holy Family in a garland of flowers

This panel was made around 1620 in Catholic Flanders, where the Church was busy restating the special place of the Virgin, which the Protestants rejected. In the small scene at the centre, painted by Frans Francken, Mary sits with the Christ Child, and together they press down a serpent at their feet, the old image of evil crushed. Between them they hold a clear globe, the sign of Christ's rule over the world, and Joseph leans in behind in a pose borrowed from a Holy Family by Raphael that the Louvre also owns. The museum suggests the flower garland came from the Brueghel workshop, and the four Evangelists in the corners are painted in monochrome. The panel hung in the Carthusian church in Liège until French armies took the city in 1794. It was not returned after 1815, and well into the 20th century it went under the name of the flower painter Van Kessel.