The Virgin as the apocalyptic woman on the moon

In 1623 Veit Adam von Gepeckh, prince-bishop of Freising, ordered a new picture for the high altar of his cathedral, and Rubens answered with this canvas, more than five and a half metres tall. It paints a vision from the Book of Revelation, a woman clothed with the sun, standing on the moon, threatened by a seven-headed dragon while God the Father carries her and her child to safety. The woman is Mary, and she treads on a snake, the old sign of heresy. In the Bavaria of Maximilian the First, under whom Mary was raised to patron of the land, nobody needed that explained. At the bottom right you can find Freising cathedral itself, painted into the scene. The Thirty Years' War came close to the picture. It is first recorded in 1632, when it was taken away to safety as Swedish troops advanced. It stayed with the cathedral until 1804, when church property was secularised and it came to Munich. A copy stands on the Freising high altar today.