Milagres de São Francisco Xavier

Around 1617 the Jesuits of Antwerp asked Peter Paul Rubens for two towering altarpieces for their brand-new church. This one honours Francis Xavier, the Jesuit who had sailed to India, Japan and beyond to preach, and who would be made a saint in 1622. Rubens crowds the huge canvas, over five metres tall, with the miracles credited to him: the sick healed, the dead raised, a crowd of faces from Asia and Africa looking on, and in the shadows a pagan idol toppling from its pedestal. It once stood on the church's high altar. In the eighteenth century it passed to the Austrian Habsburg rulers of the Netherlands, and it has hung in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna ever since.