The story
Walk along the north aisle of St. Paul's and you pass fifteen paintings in a row, each showing a moment from the lives of Christ and the Virgin. They are the Mysteries of the Rosary, painted around 1617 by eleven Antwerp artists whom Peter Paul Rubens drew into the project. Rubens took only one scene for himself, The Flagellation. His two most gifted young collaborators added theirs, Anthony van Dyck with Christ Carrying the Cross and Jacob Jordaens with the Crucifixion.
St. Paul's is a working Catholic church, built by Antwerp's Dominican friars and finished in 1571. After the city's Calvinist years ended in 1585 the friars came back and refitted it in the Baroque taste, which is why so much painting crowds its walls. Rubens appears again with the Disputation on the Holy Sacrament, a gathering of theologians around the host on the altar, and with an Adoration of the Shepherds.
For more than 150 years the church also owned a Caravaggio. His Madonna of the Rosary reached Antwerp in 1623, acquired by a group of local painters that included Rubens and presented to the Dominicans. In 1786 Emperor Joseph II claimed it for his own collection, and it now hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
Beside the church lies the Calvary, a walled garden of 63 life-size statues and nine reliefs, set up between 1697 and 1747.
