Viaticum inside a church

A viaticum is the communion brought to someone who is dying, and that is what is happening here, inside a Gothic church. The panel carries the date 1636. Plague had reached the southern Netherlands the winter before and stayed through that year, and the viaticum was exactly the sacrament a priest carried out to the sick. Two painters put their names on this one. Pieter Neefs the Elder built the church, the perspective of columns and vaults being his speciality, and Frans Francken the Younger supplied the people in it, which was his side of a partnership that ran for years. The same pair signed a second church interior, an evening mass, now in Vienna. This panel went to Spain instead. In 1814 it hangs in the Royal Palace in Madrid, in the rooms of the infante don Carlos, and by 1834 it is listed in the Real Museo, in the second Flemish room.