I quattro evangelisti

Jordaens painted these four in 1625 in Antwerp, a Catholic city rebuilding its churches after decades of religious war with the Protestant north. The four are the evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the gospel writers, but he gives them no haloes and no grandeur. They are sunburnt, wrinkled working men crowded around a book, arguing over a passage the way labourers might. Matthew, at the right, lifts his pen as if about to write. It is the down-to-earth, full-blooded manner of Antwerp painting in the great age of Rubens. The canvas later belonged to Louis XVI and was among the works on show when the Louvre first opened as a public museum in 1793.