聖母子と諸聖人

Rubens died in Antwerp on 30 May 1640, worn down by gout, and his family buried him behind the high altar of St James', the parish church a few streets from his house. The altarpiece over the tomb is his own work, painted in the 1630s and set into the chapel his widow and children spent the next five years finishing. The figures are family. Tradition identifies the armoured Saint George as Rubens himself, the old Saint Jerome as his father Jan, and the Virgin and the Magdalen as the two women he married, though none of that is documented and Rubens left no instructions about it. The chapel has just come out of a restoration by Belgium's royal heritage institute, part of seven years of work on the church, and the picture still hangs exactly where the family put it.