St Martin's Church of Aalst

Eris in peste patronus, you will be the patron in the plague. Those Latin words are written on a tablet in the altarpiece Peter Paul Rubens painted for this church between 1623 and 1626, in which Christ appoints Saint Roch, the pilgrim saint invoked against plague, as protector of the sick waiting below. The Brotherhood of Saint Roch, a lay confraternity of Aalst, commissioned it for their altar, and it came with a small Madonna for the top and two predella scenes beneath, all from Rubens's workshop.

Sint-Martinuskerk is a working Gothic parish church, begun around 1480, and the Rubens is its best-known treasure. Another is the tall stone sacrament tower carved in 1604 by Jérôme Duquesnoy the Elder, a Brussels sculptor. The altarpiece has seldom left the building. French revolutionary commissioners took it to Paris in 1794, and it came back after Napoleon's fall.

The church has been restored in phases since 2003, and in November 2023 the painting, just over four metres tall, went to the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage in Brussels for cleaning and study, with its return planned once the work in the church is finished.