La Presencia Real en el Santísimo Sacramento

In April 1609 Spain and the Dutch Republic signed a truce that gave the southern Netherlands 12 years without fighting, and Antwerp spent them refitting its churches. Interiors stripped in the iconoclasm of 1566 still needed altarpieces, and Rubens, home after eight years in Italy, took the commissions. The Dominicans of St Paul's asked him for this one, for their Sacrament chapel, around 1609. He had painted the same subject the year before for a church in Fermo, and this version is the freer and stronger of the two. In 1680 the canvas was enlarged at the top, the bottom and both sides to fit a new marble altar carved by Pieter Verbruggen. French troops took it to Paris in 1794, it came back after Waterloo, and in 1816 it went up again on the altar it still occupies. The four men arguing over open books are the Latin Church Fathers, Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome and Gregory.