The Raising of the Cross

Around 1620 Rubens came back to a subject he had already made his own. A decade earlier he had painted the Raising of the Cross as a giant altarpiece for an Antwerp church, and his sketch for that version hangs in this same room. This time the city's Jesuits wanted it for a ceiling, the tenth over the galleries on the south side of their new church, so the scene had to read from far below. A few men heave the timber up against a ladder, the cross tilts steeply across a stormy sky, and we look up at their straining legs. The Louvre sees a strong debt here to the Venetian painter Tintoretto. This coloured version came to the museum in 1869, in the bequest of the Paris doctor and collector Louis La Caze.