The Visitation (left panel of triptych)

This is the left wing of the great triptych Rubens made for Antwerp Cathedral, where it still hangs. The guild of arquebusiers, the city's militia of gunmen, commissioned it in 1611. Their patron was Saint Christopher, whose name means Christ-bearer, and Rubens built the whole altarpiece around that idea. Every scene shows Christ being physically carried. In the central panel his dead body is lowered from the cross. Here on the left, before he is even born, the pregnant Mary climbs to visit her older cousin Elizabeth, herself expecting the child who will grow up to be John the Baptist. Rubens had not long come home from eight years in Italy, and the weighty, twisting figures show how closely he had studied the Italian masters.