Le Grand Jugement dernier

Rubens painted this vast altarpiece around 1617 for the Jesuit church at Neuburg, a small town on the Danube, on a commission from its Catholic duke, Wolfgang Wilhelm. It was meant to hang above the high altar as the first thing worshippers saw. The problem was the bodies. Rubens filled the whole surface with a tumbling mass of naked figures, the saved hauled upward and the damned dragged down, and the townspeople found it far too much bare flesh for a place of prayer. Before long it was covered over, and then taken down altogether. It passed through the family's collections in Düsseldorf and finally to Munich, where at nearly six metres tall it is still the largest painting in the Alte Pinakothek.