The Triumph of the Eucharist over Idolatry

In the 1620s the Eucharist was the sharpest doctrinal quarrel in Europe, and Catholic rulers made defending it a matter of state. Isabel Clara Eugenia, who governed the Spanish Netherlands from Brussels, ordered 20 tapestries on the subject for the convent of the Descalzas Reales in Madrid, and this small panel is one of the models Rubens painted for them. An angel lifts a chalice inside the Roman temple of Capitoline Jupiter, and the light coming off it scatters a pagan sacrifice. A butcher strides forward shielding his eyes, a servant wrestles the bull by its horns, an altar tips, and the spilled libation wine runs out of the scene into a marble basin. At the edges the whole thing turns out to be a cloth held up by four cherubs between twisted columns, so the design for a tapestry shows a tapestry. In the 18th century strips of wood were added around several of the six panels the Prado holds, and those additions have since been taken off.