The Meeting of Abraham and Melchisedek

In 1620 the Jesuits in Antwerp handed Rubens one of the largest commissions of his life: 39 ceiling paintings for their brand-new church, to be turned out at speed with his workshop. This little panel is his oil sketch for one of them, the moment from Genesis when Melchizedek, the priest-king of Salem, comes out with bread and wine to greet Abraham returning from battle, an offering the Church long read as a foreshadowing of the Eucharist. Because it was meant for a ceiling, Rubens staged it to be seen from below, the figures looming up a flight of steps against the sky. He worked these sketches thinly and fast, fixing the design before assistants scaled it up. That preparatory role turned out to matter more than anyone expected. In 1718 lightning set the church alight and the whole ceiling cycle burned. Sketches like this one, now in the Louvre, are almost all that survives of what Rubens put up there.