La Rencontre d'Abraham et Melchisédech

Rubens painted this around 1616, running the busiest workshop in Antwerp and turning out altar-scale canvases for churches across Catholic Europe. The subject comes from Genesis. The priest-king Melchizedek comes out to meet Abraham after a battle and offers him bread and wine, a moment the Counter-Reformation church loved because it read as a foreshadowing of the Mass. How it reached a museum in Normandy is its own story. In 1811 Napoleon's administration handed the picture to the newly founded museum in Caen, part of a scheme that scattered confiscated and state-held paintings out to provincial galleries. It has hung in Caen ever since, far from the Antwerp churches Rubens had in mind.