La deposizione dalla croce

Rubens painted this around 1617 for the chapel of the Capuchin friars in Lille, who had just enlarged their church and wanted something for the high altar. He treats the moment as a plain physical event. A dead body is being lowered from the cross, and the whole picture is arranged around the strain of it, an unbroken chain of arms and hands passing the weight down, faces tense with effort rather than posed in grief. It stands over four metres tall, so the figures meet you at something like life size. When French revolutionaries dissolved the religious houses at the end of the 18th century, the painting was seized from the friars, and it became one of the founding works of the museum in Lille where it still hangs.