La Transfiguration

Rubens painted this enormous canvas in 1605 while still in his twenties, years before he was famous, working in Italy as court painter to Vincenzo Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua. The duke had commissioned three huge paintings for the Jesuit church in Mantua, and this Transfiguration of Christ, over six meters wide, was one of them. For a young Fleming it was a chance to work at the scale of the Italian masters he had come south to study. The reason it now hangs in Nancy, in eastern France, and not in Mantua is Napoleon: when French forces looted the region around 1800 the altarpieces were pried out and carried over the Alps, and this one has been on loan to the Nancy museum ever since.