The Resurrection of Lazarus

The big painting this sketch was made for no longer exists. Rubens painted it around 1620, a tall altarpiece of the raising of Lazarus, and it later belonged to the Berlin museums, where it was destroyed in 1945. This small panel, about 37 centimetres high, is one of the few ways left to see the design. The Louvre notes that the two hardly differed, apart from the old man peering in behind Christ, who is missing from the Berlin canvas. Rubens also reworked an old habit of the story. In medieval pictures the apostle Peter frees the dead man from his shroud. Here that task falls to his sister Martha, while Lazarus himself already leans toward Christ. The top corners of the panel are thinly filled, a sign that the finished altarpiece was framed with a rounded top.