La Sacra Famiglia con santa Elisabetta e san Giovanni

Rubens had come home to Antwerp in 1608 after eight years in Italy, and by the time he painted this, around 1614, he was the busiest man in the city, running a workshop that supplied altarpieces to a Catholic Flanders busy rebuilding its churches. This is a quieter, more private kind of picture. The scene comes from a popular medieval devotional text, the Meditations on the Life of Christ. Elizabeth holds her son, the infant John the Baptist, who presses his hands together in prayer as he recognizes the Christ Child, and Christ lifts his hand to bless him in return. The warm, solid bodies and the closeness of the two mothers carry the lessons Rubens had brought back from Titian and the Venetians.