The Meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek

Two hands meet in the middle of this panel, over bread. The old man in the gold cape lined with fur is Melchizedek, priest and king of Salem, who in Genesis came out to meet Abraham after a battle and offered him bread and wine. Abraham, in heavy armour, climbs the steps and bows to take it. Theologians read that encounter as the first foreshadowing of the Eucharist anywhere in the Bible, which is why the scene belongs in the tapestry cycle the Archduchess Isabella Clara Eugenia ordered from Rubens in 1625 for the Descalzas Reales convent in Madrid. What the Prado keeps is his first thought for it. Once it was settled that the tapestry would hang in the cloister rather than the church, he designed the scene again, bringing the figures closer to the viewer and giving the wine jars, which sit still here at the very edge of the frame, to two servants heaving them up a cellar stair.