Il martirio di San Livino

Saint Livinus was a missionary said to have preached in Flanders in the seventh century, until robbers cut out his tongue and threw it to the dogs. Rubens painted the worst instant of that story head-on. A soldier lifts the torn-out tongue in a pair of tongs toward a barking dog, and the knife is still bloody. The panel was made for a Jesuit church in Ghent around 1633, close to what was reckoned the thousandth anniversary of the saint's death. In the Catholic south of the Low Countries, then locked in a long fight with the Protestant north, a picture like this was meant to move a congregation rather than spare it. The whole enormous surface drives the eye upward, from the horror below to the angels already waiting overhead with a martyr's wreath.