Le Serpent d'airain

Van Dyck was still a teenager when he painted this, working as the star assistant in Rubens's busy Antwerp studio around 1618. The story comes from the Book of Numbers: as a plague of snakes kills the Israelites in the desert, Moses lifts up a serpent of bronze, and everyone who looks at it lives. The muscular, twisting bodies and the piled-up crowd are pure Rubens, whose own version of the scene van Dyck clearly knew and reworked. But the surviving drawings show him changing it step by step toward something of his own, and the slender figures and long, loaded strokes of white are already his youthful signature. He was barely 19, and within a few years he would leave for Italy and become the most sought-after portraitist in Europe.