The Miracle of Saint Justus

In 1629 relics of Saint Justus were brought to the convent church of the Annonciade nuns in Antwerp, and the Moretus family, the city's leading printers, commissioned Rubens to paint an altarpiece for them. Justus was a child martyr of Roman Gaul, venerated at Beauvais. According to his legend he was nine years old when soldiers beheaded him for refusing to say where his father and uncle were hiding. Rubens painted the miracle that followed. The boy stands holding his own head in his hands, and the two men, just out of hiding, draw back from him. Riders are still visible on the right. The picture was finished around 1633, and by the 1780s it had left Antwerp for a private collection in Brussels. In 1853 Napoleon III bought it in Paris for 16,000 francs and gave it to Bordeaux, to thank the city for a painting by the Venetian artist Rosalba Carriera it had presented to him on his visit the year before.