The Victory of Truth over Heresy

In 1625 the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia, who ruled the southern Netherlands from Brussels, ordered 20 tapestries from Rubens for the Descalzas Reales, the royal convent in Madrid. This small panel is one step in that chain. Rubens painted it, larger cartoons were made from it, and the weavers in Jan Raes's Antwerp workshop worked from those. What he invented for the set is a trick: each scene shows a cloth apparently hanging from a painted architecture, so that the finished tapestry would look like a tapestry hung inside a tapestry. Here Truth, led forward by Time, points to the words Hoc est corpus meum, this is my body, the phrase spoken at mass over the bread. Below her a dragon stands for evil, and the figures pushed down with it include Luther and Calvin. In the foreground a fox, the old emblem of heresy, is being beaten by a lion. During the 18th century strips were added around several of these panels to enlarge them; they have since been taken off.