Retable de saint Ildefonse

Isabella Clara Eugenia had just been widowed. She and her husband Albert had ruled the Spanish Netherlands together from Brussels, and after his death in 1621 she governed alone, increasingly withdrawn into religion. Around 1630 she asked Rubens for this triptych, a gift to a Brussels brotherhood Albert had founded to bind the region's loyalty to the Habsburgs. The centre shows a medieval Spanish bishop, Ildefonso of Toledo, receiving a priestly vestment from the Virgin herself, who leans down from her throne. On the wings kneel Isabella and Albert with their name-saints behind them, the living widow and her dead husband set side by side before the miracle. Rubens was near 53 and at the height of his powers, also serving the couple as a diplomat.