painting

Enthroned Madonna Adored by Saints

Peter Paul Rubens

About this work

Object details

TitleEnthroned Madonna Adored by Saints
Datec. 1628
Mediumoil on canvas
Measurements564 × 401 cm, 350kg
Inventory numberIB1958.001

More about this work

Rubens painted this work for the high altar of the Church of St Augustine in Antwerp in 1628. That same year Van Dyck’s Ecstasy of St Augustine was installed on the left side altar in the chapel and Jordaens’s Martyrdom of St Apollonia on the one on the right (KMSKA, inv. nos. IB003 and IB1958.002). The canvas by Van Dyck was donated by Father Marinus Janssens, while the funds for the other two paintings came from various sources. It is estimated that Rubens was paid around 3,000 guilders for his piece, a large sum for a large work, while Jordaens received the more ‘normal’ 600 guilders for his smaller painting. There are two sheets with preparatory jottings in which Rubens sought for the best compositional layout (New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 2002.12a,b [recto] and Stockholm, Nationalmuseum, inv. no. NHM 1966/1863), as well as a few oil sketches in which he concentrated mainly on the colouration and the positions of several saints (Frankfurt, Städel Museum, inv. no. 464; Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, cat. no. 780, Amsterdam, Stichting De Boer; Caen, Musée des Beaux-Arts, inv. no. M 97). The choice of subject for the altarpiece was only logical, since the church was dedicated to the Virgin and All Saints. The Virgin and Child are enthroned on a high pedestal in the centre, where the Child is putting a ring on a finger of St Catherine of Alexandria. She had had a vision of a ceremony at which she married Christ. That is why the painting is also known as The mystic marriage of St Catherine. Various saints are conversing on the stairs. Joseph is standing behind the Virgin, and on the right John the Baptist is accompanied by two cherubs and a lamb. Standing on the left between the columns are Peter with the keys to heaven and Paul with his sword. At their feet is a group of four female saints: the Augustinian nun Clare of Montefalco holding scales, Mary Magdalen, Agnes with a lamb and Apollonia of Alexandria with forceps (she is invoked against toothache). At bottom left there are three warrior saints: George with the vanquished dragon, the naked Sebastian with a palm branch and a quiver of arrows, and William of Aquitaine seen from behind. At bottom right are three saints who mainly displayed their charitable natures by giving alms to the poor: Augustine, the founder of the Augustinian order, in his bishop’s robes and with a burning heart, Lawrence with the gridiron on which he was tortured, and the Augustinian monk Nicholas of Tolentino with a piece of bread. The Antwerp Augustinians were firmly Lutheran in the 16th century, and were even driven out of the city in 1527. They only returned in 1607. In the light of those events one can interpret Rubens’s altarpiece as a Counter-Reformation manifesto in which the Augustinians expressed their loyalty to the Church of Rome. In 1781, on his journey through the Netherlands, Sir Joshua Reynolds saw the compositional similarity between Rubens’s work and the Madonna di casa Pesaro by Titian in the Frari Church in Venice, ‘a subject where no story is represented’, and remarked on the anachronistic depiction of saints from different eras.