Painting the Word ⑦ Rubens — The Descent from the Cross and the Christ-Bearers

Christ’s body slides down a white cloth off the cross. The men holding him form a diagonal that cuts across the canvas, and at its lower end, the shroud wrapped around his body glows as the only pale surface in a field of darkness. Open the wings of the Antwerp Cathedral altarpiece this panel belongs to, and two entirely different scenes appear — Mary visiting her cousin Elizabeth, and the infant Jesus presented in the Temple. Why were these three scenes bound into a single altarpiece? This installment of Painting the Word turns to Peter Paul Rubens.

Who Was Rubens

Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) was the leading painter of Flemish Baroque art, based for most of his career in Antwerp, in what is now Belgium. He spent eight formative years in Italy (1600-1608), absorbing Titian’s color, Caravaggio’s dramatic lighting, and the musculature of classical sculpture. After returning home, he worked simultaneously as a painter and a diplomat, moving between the courts of Europe. The Descent from the Cross, painted just after his return to Antwerp, is widely regarded as the work in which he first fully synthesized everything he had learned in Italy.

The painting was commissioned in 1611 by Antwerp’s Confraternity of the Arquebusiers (a civic guild of harquebus marksmen) as the high altarpiece for the Cathedral of Our Lady, and executed between 1612 and 1614. The guild’s patron saint was St. Christopher — a name that means, in Greek, “the one who carries Christ.” Rubens made that name the organizing key for the entire triptych: the left wing shows the pregnant Mary visiting Elizabeth (The Visitation); the center shows men lowering Christ’s body from the cross (The Deposition); the right wing shows the aged Simeon receiving the infant Christ in his arms (The Presentation in the Temple). In every panel, someone is physically bearing Christ.

The Text — John 19:38-40

After the crucifixion, two men who had kept their discipleship secret step forward.

“After this, Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciple of Jesus, but secretly because of his fear of the Jewish leaders, asked Pilate for the body of Jesus. With Pilate’s permission, he came and took the body away. He was accompanied by Nicodemus, the man who earlier had visited Jesus at night. Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds. Taking Jesus’ body, the two of them wrapped it, with the spices, in strips of linen. This was in accordance with Jewish burial customs.” (John 19:38-40)

Both men had, throughout the Gospel narrative, been too afraid to follow Jesus openly. Now, at the most dangerous possible moment, they are the ones who physically carry his body down.

Reading the Painting — A Diagonal Body, and the Shape of the Whole Triptych

Peter Paul Rubens, The Descent from the Cross (center panel of the triptych), 1612-14, oil on panel, 421 × 311 cm — Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp. Public domain (Wikimedia Commons, PD-Art/PD-old-100, artist died 1640).

The center panel is built around a single sharp diagonal running from the crossbar at upper right down to the hands at lower left. The figures supporting Christ’s body — a man on the ladder gripping a corner of the shroud in his teeth, John (in red) taking the weight of the torso, Nicodemus and Mary Magdalene at the feet — are arranged along that diagonal in a loose ellipse. The pale shroud wrapped around Christ’s body is the single bright surface on the entire canvas, glowing against the surrounding darkness and pulling the eye straight to it. The composition echoes the dramatic poses and dark grounds of Daniele da Volterra’s Italian Mannerist Deposition, filtered through Rubens’s own more classically balanced restraint.

Read alongside the wings, the logic of the whole becomes clear. In the left panel, the pregnant Mary carries Christ in her womb; in the right panel, Simeon carries the infant Christ in his arms; in the center, John and Nicodemus carry Christ’s dead body. From the beginning of a life to its end, all three scenes are bound by a single motif: someone bearing Christ. The name of the guild’s patron saint — Christopher, the Christ-bearer — turns out to be the theological program for the entire altarpiece.

Theological Reading — Tears After Trent

When this painting was made, the Catholic Church was working out new standards for sacred images under the decrees of the Council of Trent (1545-1563). The Council held that sacred images should stir devotion in the faithful and communicate doctrine with clarity, and a broader Counter-Reformation theological current called for Christ’s suffering body to be rendered heroic and dignified, and for Mary to be shown grieving yet still composed and upright in her faith. Rubens’s Mary doesn’t collapse. Her hands rest on Christ’s body, her face carries visible anguish, but her posture stays straight and her presence remains fully conscious. This is not suppressed emotion — it is grief and faith held together in one body, exactly the iconographic convention the Counter-Reformation asked of its painters.

At the same time, this painting was itself an argument for the very use of sacred images that the Reformation had condemned as idolatry. Only decades after waves of Protestant iconoclasm had swept through the Low Countries, a Catholic painter produced this overwhelming altarpiece as a direct demonstration that images could be a channel for faith rather than an obstacle to it. Joseph and Nicodemus — secret disciples who had hidden out of fear — step into the open at the most dangerous moment to carry Christ’s body publicly. Read against its own historical moment, that scene quietly mirrors the situation of Counter-Reformation Catholics themselves, who likewise had to carry their faith out into the open amid the upheavals of the age.

Coming Next

Part two of the Rubens sub-series looks at the full Antwerp Cathedral altarpiece program to examine how Counter-Reformation biblical painting was staged like theater — light, gesture, and the calculated management of the viewer’s gaze.

Works Cited

English-language

• John Rupert Martin (ed.), Rubens: The Antwerp Altarpieces — The Raising of the Cross and The Descent from the Cross (W. W. Norton, 1969) — the standard scholarly study devoted specifically to these two altarpieces
• Kristin Lohse Belkin, Rubens (Phaidon, Art & Ideas, 1998)

German-language (in translation)

• Jacob Burckhardt, Recollections of Rubens (Phaidon, 1950 English translation of the posthumously published Erinnerungen aus Rubens) — the Swiss cultural historian’s classic study, also available in Korean translation

The image above is a 1280px reduction of a public-domain (PD-Art) scan hosted on Wikimedia Commons. All works listed above are real, standard scholarly studies.

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