La Última Cena

Rubens finished this altarpiece around 1632 for a church in Mechelen, north of Brussels. It was paid for by a woman named Catherine Lescuyer, who ordered it in memory of her late father, to hang over the family's burial place. Rubens puts Christ at the centre lifting his eyes, but the figure that holds you is Judas, shoved to the near edge of the table and twisting around to stare straight out of the painting, the only one who meets your gaze. Beneath him a dog gnaws at a bone, an old sign of the traitor. The picture did not stay in Mechelen. French troops carried it off to Paris during the Napoleonic years, and it reached Milan afterwards through an exchange between collections.