La presentazione al tempio

Around 1640 Simon Vouet was the busiest painter in Paris, back from years in Rome and running a large workshop that trained the next French generation. This altar picture came out of that moment. Cardinal Richelieu, then the most powerful man in France after the king, commissioned it and in 1641 gave it to the Jesuits for their new church on the rue Saint-Antoine, the building we now call Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis. It was only the lower part of an enormous altarpiece. The panel that sat above it, showing Saint Louis carried up to heaven, was separated long ago and now hangs in a museum in Rouen. Here the elderly Simeon takes the infant Christ in the temple, staged with the warm colour and clear light Vouet had brought home from Italy.