The miracles of St. Francis Xavier, Modello

Around 1617 the Jesuits of Antwerp were building a spectacular new church and needed altarpieces for it, so they turned to the busiest painter in the city. This is the small trial version that Rubens worked out entirely by his own hand before his workshop scaled it up to nearly four metres. It shows Francis Xavier, the missionary who had preached in India and Japan, performing miracles. A pagan idol topples from its column, the sick rise, and a drowned child is carried in at the left. There is one catch of timing. When Rubens painted this, Xavier was not yet a saint. He was only canonised in 1622, a few years after these pictures had already begun making his case in paint. In the loose, quick brushwork of the sketch you see Rubens's own hand.