The Martyrdom of St. Ursula

In March 1620 Rubens signed a contract with the Jesuits of Antwerp for 39 ceiling paintings in their new church, and its terms spell out how his studio worked. He would make the small designs in his own hand, and assistants, the young Anthony van Dyck among them, would paint the full-size canvases. This panel, less than half a metre tall, is that kind of design, made around the same years, for a Martyrdom of Saint Ursula. In the legend Ursula was a British princess killed by the Huns at Cologne with her companions, on the way home from a pilgrimage to Rome, and medieval tradition put those companions at 11,000. Rubens sets her in the middle, soldiers closing in, the bodies of the young women heaped below, an angel coming down from above with a palm. Another sketch of the same scene is in the Kimbell Art Museum in Texas, which describes its version as a design for an altarpiece that has never been identified.