Le Martyre de saint André

Rubens painted this towering altarpiece in 1639, the year before he died, when age and gout had slowed his hand but not his ambition. It was commissioned by Jan van Vucht, a Fleming living in Madrid, for the chapel of a hospital that cared for Flemish immigrants in the Spanish capital. The subject is the death of the apostle Andrew, tied to an X-shaped cross on the orders of a Roman governor whose own wife had converted to Andrew's faith. Rubens sets the old saint high against the sky, his body still powerful, the crowd surging below. Van Vucht left the picture to that hospital chapel on his death the same year, and it has stayed with the Flemish foundation in Madrid ever since.