Abraham Janssens ( 1575-1632), Concord, Charity and Sincerity Conquering Discord, 1622, Oil on canvas, 155.5 x 115 cm, The Snijders & Rockox House, Antwerp, On loan from Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp
In the early seventeenth century, Antwerp faced severe challenges due to the Dutch blockade of the Scheldt River, which effectively cut off maritime trade and curtailed the city’s prosperity. The Twelve Years’ Truce (1609–1621) between Spain and the Dutch Republic offered a temporary reprieve, granting the city a brief period of peace and partial economic recovery, during which artistic production flourished.
Abraham Janssens’s allegorical painting Concord, Charity and Sincerity Conquering Discord (1622), produced shortly after the truce expired, embodies Antwerp’s longing for renewed peace and civic stability amidst the continuing turmoil of the Eighty Years’ War. In this ambitious composition, Janssens personifies three virtues, whose triumph over Discord resonates as both a political and moral statement.
The three virtues are presented with explicit, recognisable attributes. Concord(harmony), crowned with an olive sprig, steadies a cornucopia overflowing with fruit and grain while holding a bundle of arrows — the classical emblem of strength through unity. Charity (love and generosity), dressed in red, binds the arrows with a red ribbon, while a child at her side raises a flaming heart, a traditional symbol of caritas. Sincerity (honesty), in white with a garland of roses in her blonde hair, secures the bundle with a white ribbon, underlining her association with truth and openness. In the shadowy background appears Discord, depicted as an aged, grimacing figure, stripped of agency as the virtues join forces to bind unity together. The clarity of these emblems ensured the allegory was instantly legible to its audience.
The theme had immediate civic resonance. Antwerp, still marked by siege, blockade, and decline, needed precisely the virtues of concord, charity, and sincerity to withstand discord, faction, and ruin. Janssens translated this into a visual rhetoric that was moralising yet accessible, appealing both to classical humanist tradition and Counter-Reformation didactic clarity.
This painting continued a sequence of political allegories by Janssens, beginning with Scaldis and Antwerp (1609), celebrating the signing of the truce, and Allegory of Peace and Plenty (1614), which praised prosperity as the fruit of harmony. Concord, Charity and Sincerity Conquering Discord pushed this civic programme into the troubled 1620s, asserting a vision of Antwerp’s moral resilience.
Rubens’s influence can be felt in the dynamism of the figures and the orchestration of diagonal movement, yet Janssens kept the allegory close to the picture plane, rendered with Caravaggesque chiaroscuro and Netherlandish clarity. Where Rubens in the 1620s produced expansive dynastic allegories for international courts — most famously the Medici cycle in Paris — Janssens’s work spoke to local, communal concerns, grounding universal virtues in Antwerp’s civic identity.