聖パウロの難破のある風景

Rubens ran the busiest painting workshop in northern Europe, with assistants, contracts and delivery dates. Landscapes were the exception. He made around 40 of them for no client at all, kept most of them in his own house, and gave a few away to friends. This is one of those. A rock rises out of the sea in the middle of it with a lighthouse burning on top, and the picture divides at that point. On the left a ship is breaking up in a storm and people cling to the wreckage. On the right the sun is out, there is a rainbow, a small castle on a slope, and survivors warming themselves at a fire. The scene has long been read as the apostle Paul shipwrecked on Malta, shaking the snake off his hand into the flames, though the details that would settle it have worn away and a 17th-century engraving of the composition does not quite match.