圣本笃的奇迹

This canvas was never finished. It stayed in Rubens's studio and was still there when he died in 1640, counted among the works left in his estate. The years around 1630, when he began it, were the years he spent least at the easel. The Spanish crown and the Infanta Isabella in Brussels had been using him as a diplomat, and he had passed months in Madrid and then in London negotiating a peace between Spain and England, for which Charles the First knighted him in 1630. The subject is Benedict of Nursia, the sixth-century founder of Western monasticism, and the miracles told of him. The canvas is wide, 164 by 262 centimetres, and the figures across it stand at different degrees of completion. King Leopold the Second owned it in the 19th century and the Belgian state bought it in 1914.