Il sacrificio di Isacco

Rubens came home to Antwerp in 1608 after eight years in Italy and walked into a building boom of a particular kind. The Twelve Years' Truce with the Dutch Republic had just begun, and the churches stripped in the iconoclasm of the previous century were being fitted out again with altarpieces as fast as painters could supply them. This panel is from about 1612, and the Italian years are all over it: Venetian colour, Michelangelo's muscle, a torso for Isaac that could have come off an antique statue. The knife is already up when the angel arrives, and what Rubens gives the scene is the half second in which Abraham turns and meets the angel's eyes. It reached Kansas City in 1966, bought from the art trade.