Феодосий и святой Амвросий

The story fixed on this canvas was a favourite of the Counter-Reformation church. In the year 390 the Roman emperor Theodosius ordered a massacre in the Greek city of Thessalonica, and Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, barred him from the cathedral until he did public penance, a bishop turning an emperor away at his own church door. Rubens designed the picture around 1617 to make that lesson plain, the bishop calm and immovable, the emperor checked on the steps. Much of the actual painting was done by his brilliant young assistant Anthony van Dyck, who liked the subject enough to paint his own version soon after. It now hangs in Vienna.