The Holy Trinity

By 1616 Antwerp was in the middle of a long truce in its war with the Protestant Dutch, and its Catholic churches were slowly being filled with images again after decades in which reformers had stripped and smashed them. Rubens, back home and running the busiest workshop in the city, was the painter the Counter-Reformation leaned on. This small oak panel takes up one of the images Protestants had rejected most sharply: the Trinity shown as the Throne of Grace. God the Father, seated, holds up the dead body of his son, the wounds turned toward the viewer, while the dove of the Holy Spirit hovers between them. It is a compact, almost private treatment of a subject Rubens also worked out for large altars, painted on a panel only about 60 centimetres high. It entered the Basel collection in 1988.