Il Giudizio universale

Lucas van Leyden painted this great triptych around 1526, as a memorial for Claes van Swieten, a rich Leiden merchant and alderman who had died the year before. His family wanted it over their tomb in the town's main church. Then the world it was made for came apart. 40 years on, in 1566, Protestant crowds swept through the Netherlands smashing religious images in the churches. This altarpiece survived because Leiden's council pulled it out and kept it — not as an object of worship but as the work of the town's most famous artist. From the late 1500s it hung in the town hall, safe among the councillors, for nearly three centuries. It is now reckoned the most important altarpiece to come down from the old Netherlands, and it hangs a few streets from where it began, in Leiden's Lakenhal.