L'Élévation de la Croix

Van Dyck painted this altarpiece in 1631, in the busiest stretch of church commissions of his Antwerp years, for a canon named Rogier Braye at the Church of Our Lady in Kortrijk. He had not long been back from Italy, and the debt to Rubens, his old master, sits right in the subject — Rubens had made his own famous Raising of the Cross for Antwerp two decades earlier. Van Dyck goes cooler and more elegant, less about sheer muscle and force. Within a year he would leave for London to become court painter to Charles I. This colossal thing, about three and a half metres tall, stayed behind in Kortrijk, where it was stolen and quickly recovered in 1907.