Wisdom triumphant over war and discord under the government of James I of England

By 1632, Charles I had governed England for three years without calling Parliament, and the ceiling he ordered for the Banqueting House in Whitehall, his palace hall in London, was meant to glorify the Stuart crown. Its hero is his father, James I, who had united the crowns of England and Scotland and liked to present himself as a king of peace. Rubens worked the ceiling out in oil sketches like this one, painted on a wooden panel, before the full-size canvases were made. Here James sits enthroned at the upper left, his arm stretched out, while Minerva, goddess of wisdom, in her plumed helmet, drives back an armed warrior. The museum's title names him as armed Rebellion, pushed away from the king's throne. The finished canvases went up in the hall in 1636. In 1649, 13 years later, Charles I was beheaded on a scaffold built outside that same building. The Brussels museum bought this sketch from a Paris dealer in 1894.