La Résurrection

Rubens painted this around 1616, back home in Antwerp after eight years in Italy and running the busiest workshop in northern Europe. These were the years of the Twelve Years' Truce, a rare pause in the long war between the Catholic south and the Protestant Dutch, when churches stripped bare by earlier waves of image-breaking were being filled again. A muscular, triumphant Christ climbing out of the tomb was exactly the image the Catholic side wanted. Rubens had already worked the subject once, for the tomb of his friend the Antwerp printer Jan Moretus. Here Christ steps up and out with a banner while the guards recoil from the light, his body built from the Michelangelo and antique marble he had spent those Italian years drawing.