A última comunhão de São Francisco de Assis

An Antwerp merchant and tapestry dealer named Gaspar Charles left money for an altarpiece for the Franciscan church in the city. He died in 1618, before it was painted. His son signed Rubens's receipt on 17 May 1619, for 750 guilders, which is how the date is known.

The subject had an edge to it. Francis, dying, asks to be carried out and laid almost bare on the floor to take communion one last time. That sacrament was precisely what the Protestant north had rejected, and Antwerp in 1619 sat a day's ride from a frontier where the truce had two years left to run.

The panel is more than four metres tall. The friars were turned out of their church during the French occupation in the 1790s, and the painting ended up in the city's museum.