The Martyrdom of St. Andrew

The Martyrdom of Saint Andrew is one of the last works by Peter Paul Rubens, painted in 1639, the year before the artist died. The scene shows the final episode in the life of the apostle as recounted in the Golden Legend: after converting many residents of Achaia, among them the wife of the proconsul Aegeas, he was condemned to die on a cross. To prolong his suffering he was tied to the cross rather than nailed to it, and over the two days of his ordeal he kept preaching to the crowds that gathered. When the people rose against Aegeas, the proconsul tried to free him, but the saint refused and, according to the story, died surrounded by a light from heaven after asking that his body be given to the earth.

The commission came from Jan van Vucht, a Fleming living in Madrid, who on his death in 1639 left the painting to the Hospital de San Andrés de los Flamencos, founded in 1594 by Carlos de Amberes. For the composition Rubens drew on a picture of the same subject that his teacher Otto van Veen had painted for the high altar of the church of Saint Andrew in Antwerp. A drawing in the British Museum in London copies the painting with small variations.

The canvas's later history mirrors the changes of the institution that held it. After the hospital was abolished in 1844 it was placed in the monastery of El Escorial, and in 1891 it returned to the new chapel. From 1978 to 1989 it was temporarily part of the Museo del Prado collection, and since then it has been in the Fundación Carlos de Amberes. In 2019 it travelled to Mexico, first to the International Museum of the Baroque in Puebla de Zaragoza, its first showing in Latin America, and then to the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City, in an exhibition on Rubens's influence on New Spanish artists such as José Juárez, Cristóbal de Villalpando and Baltasar de Echave y Rioja.

Painter

Peter Paul Rubens

Date

1639

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

306 × 216 cm

Museum

Fundación Carlos de Amberes

Genre

religious art

Depicts

Andrew the Apostle

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