La Descente de croix

This was one of the first big commissions of Rubens's life. In his early 20s he had gone south to Italy and entered the service of the Duke of Mantua, and around 1601 the duchess, Eleonora de' Medici, had him paint this Descent from the Cross for her private chapel. It shows the young painter already absorbing what he was seeing in Italy, the muscular bodies and the sharp dark-to-light of Caravaggio's Rome. Then it more or less dropped from view for centuries, its authorship forgotten, until a Rubens specialist recognised his early hand in it in 2001. It now hangs in Siegen, the German town where Rubens happened to be born in 1577 while his family was living in exile.