The Visitation

In 1773 the pope dissolved the Jesuit order, and four years later the paintings from its houses in the Austrian Netherlands were sold off in Brussels, this altarpiece among them. It had probably stood over the altar of a lay brotherhood in the Jesuit church in Brussels, and at the sale of May 1777 it was bought on behalf of Louis XVI. Lievens painted it around 1638 to 1640, in his Antwerp years, holding his own with large religious canvases in a city dominated by Rubens and his followers. It is one of his few big altarpieces, its top once arched. Mary embraces her older cousin Elizabeth, with Joseph on one side and Elizabeth's husband Zacharias on the other, although Luke's gospel does not put Zacharias at the meeting. The canvas was already on show when the Louvre first opened as a public museum in 1793.