Triumph of the Faith

This is a working sketch, painted on a panel roughly 90 by 64 centimetres, for something enormous. In the mid-1620s the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia, who governed the Spanish Netherlands from Brussels, commissioned Rubens to design a set of 20 tapestries on the Eucharist for the Descalzas Reales, the royal convent of Poor Clares in Madrid, where the hangings would be brought out at Corpus Christi.

Rubens worked the way a designer works. Small oil sketches first, then larger painted models, then full-size cartoons for the weavers, who made the tapestries in Brussels workshops between 1627 and 1632. The Triumph of Faith is one of the subjects in the set, a chariot procession in the Roman manner carrying a Catholic argument, designed in the years after the truce with the Dutch Republic collapsed and the fighting started again.

The panel is in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, in the city where the tapestries themselves were woven.