Le Christ remettant les clés à saint Pierre

There is a quiet thread of art history buried in this commission. Rubens painted it, probably between 1612 and 1614, for a church in Brussels where Pieter Bruegel the Elder was buried, to hang over the older painter's tomb. The subject is Saint Peter, Bruegel's name saint, the moment in the Gospel of Matthew when the risen Christ hands him a set of keys and tells him he is the rock the church will be built on. Those keys became the emblem of the papacy itself. Rubens gives Peter the heavy, weathered hands and bare feet of the Galilee fisherman he had been, receiving something far larger than himself. The go-between on the commission may have been David Teniers the Younger, married into the Brueghel family.