The Ceiling Paintings for the Jesuit Church in Antwerp

The thirty-nine ceiling paintings which Rubens painted in 1620-1621 for the newly-built Jesuit Church in Antwerp constituted the most extensive commission he had received up to that thime. They perished by fire in 1718, however, many of Rubens's spirited grisaille sketches and final oil sketches for the canvas paintings have survived, and they, together with documents and with contemporary copies by other artists, allow us to reconstruct not only the iconography and compositions of the painti…