The Martyrdom of S. Catherine

Rubens painted this around 1615, back in Antwerp after eight years in Italy and running the busiest workshop in Northern Europe. This was Counter-Reformation Flanders under the Archdukes Albert and Isabella, and the Catholic Church wanted altarpieces that could move a crowd. A financial official at their court, Jean de Seur, ordered it for the high altar of the Church of Saint Catherine in Lille. Rubens caught the saint moments before her death, kneeling in a pink robe as women loosen her hair and reach to blindfold her. Above her rises a statue of a pagan sun god, a stray piece of the classical world Rubens had just spent years drawing in Rome. De Seur was buried in that same church a few years later.