La Vergine e san Francesco salvano il mondo dall'ira di Cristo

In Counter-Reformation Antwerp, freshly Catholic again after decades of religious war, this was exactly the kind of image the Church wanted painted. Christ leans out of a black storm sky with a fistful of thunderbolts, ready to strike a sinful world. What stops him is his mother. The Virgin reaches up to plead, and Saint Francis kneels below, holding up the globe with a serpent, meaning sin, coiled around it. The whole picture turns on the Catholic idea of intercession, the belief that the saints stand between an angry heaven and ordinary people. Rubens designed it around 1614 and his busy workshop helped carry it out. He painted the same argument again for a church in Lyon, swapping Francis's companion for Saint Dominic.