Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), The conversion of Saint Bavo, 1624, Oil on canvas, 475 x 280 cm, St. Bavo’s Cathedral, Ghent
The painting that hangs in the ambulatory of St. Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent took over a decade to arrive. Its story begins not with Bishop Antoon Triest (1576–1657), who is usually credited as its patron, but with his predecessor, Bishop Charles Maes (1559–1612), who commissioned Rubens around 1611 to paint a new high altarpiece for the cathedral. Three modelli were prepared, still in the National Gallery in London. Maes died in May 1612 before the project could advance. The sketches stayed in Rubens’s studio. By 1614, two years after the bishop’s death, Rubens had written to Archduke Albert of Austria (1559–1621) asking for his help in securing the commission, stalled now by Maes’s death and, presumably, by whoever was managing the cathedral chapter. Albert apparently could not, or did not, resolve the matter. The project sat for nearly another decade, the modelli gathering whatever it is that unused oil sketches gather. It was only when Triest arrived as Bishop of Ghent in 1622 that the commission came back to life. The painting was finished by 1624 and installed at the high altar, where it remained until a new baroque altar displaced it around 1702.
That gap — over ten years between the modelli and the finished canvas — deserves more attention than it usually receives. It is not simply a story of administrative delay. It is the story of Rubens carrying a composition through one of the most transformative periods of his career, and then choosing to abandon the format he had originally designed. The three National Gallery modelli follow the traditional Flemish triptych: a central panel and two lateral wings, the native altarpiece format from van Eyck through the sixteenth century. The final canvas throws this out entirely. What Rubens delivered to Triest was a single, towering vertical composition nearly five metres high, organised around continuous upward movement and theatrical light, structured not by the symmetrical logic of the triptych but by the diagonal surge of the Italian tradition. The modelli remained in his studio, which could mean they were never fully finished to the point of delivery; it could equally mean he held onto them deliberately, knowing he might one day return to the subject on his own terms.
The Italian model he turned to was Paolo Veronese (1528–1588), whose large-scale devotional canvases — designed for viewing from below and at a distance, working through cascading diagonals and architecture that recedes into light — provided exactly the compositional structure Rubens needed for a cathedral nave. He had studied Veronese closely during his Italian years (1600–1608), and the Ghent painting shows what he retained: the sense of figures caught mid-movement between registers, the architecture that does not merely frame the action but participates in it, and the crowd in the foreground that grounds the spiritual event in something rowdy and human. Whether the congregation at St. Bavo’s in 1624 would have recognised the Venetian debt is another matter. They would have seen a work unlike anything in Flemish altarpiece tradition, and probably understood it as such.
The iconographic programme follows the 1583 biography of the saint written by the Louvain theologian Joannes Molanus (1533–1585), one of the most influential Counter-Reformation theorists of sacred imagery in the Low Countries, and author of De Picturis et Imaginibus Sacris [Treatise on Sacred Images] (1570). In Molanus’s account, Bavo bore before his conversion the name Count Allowin of Haspengouw, and his entry into the Church was framed as an act of defiance against an edict of the Byzantine Emperor Mauritius (539–602) forbidding soldiers from becoming monks. This last detail produces the right-hand group of the painting: King Clothar and his son King Dagobert, each on horseback, blocking a herald who thrusts the imperial scroll at them, the two Frankish rulers standing between Bavo and the emperor’s prohibition. For a post-Tridentine audience, the point was unmistakable — Church vocation cannot be legislated out of existence by secular authority — and Triest, as a bishop deeply invested in the institutional consolidation of Catholicism in the southern Netherlands, would not have missed it. The painting is, among other things, a piece of ecclesiological argument dressed as narrative.
The composition divides across the staircase that is both the painting’s structural axis and its central metaphor. In the lower half, Bavo’s possessions are distributed: his wealth handed to beggars, his sword surrendered, a cleric holding the black Benedictine habit that will replace his armour. In the upper register, the conversion proper unfolds, Bavo ascending toward Saints Amand (c. 584–675) and Floribert (seventh century). The staircase between them is doing a great deal of work — perhaps too much, if one is inclined to read it as heavy-handed. Rubens understood the risk: the modelli show him revising the lower-register group carefully, adjusting the positions of children around a seated mother, reconsidering an additional beggar figure, reworking the face of the deacon behind Saint Amand. The foreground needed to read as human and specific without eclipsing the saint above, and the balance took some finding. That the final painting carries it off is partly a function of the sheer scale, which distributes attention across the canvas rather than forcing the eye to choose.
Two courtiers stand at the bottom of the steps with a dog at their feet, their posture the image of cool indifference to what is happening above them. The dog, an incidental touch, earns a second glance: in Flemish devotional painting, dogs carry the register of earthly loyalty and the life that is being left behind, and here it sits very precisely at the foot of everything Bavo is renouncing. Whether Rubens intended the animal as a knowing symbol or simply as a naturalistic detail that happened to fall into the right place is not clear.
To the left, Saints Gertrude (626–659) and Begga (615–693), Bavo’s sisters, appear crowned, both having followed their brother’s example into religious life. Saint Gertrude holds a gold necklace, clutched and presumably about to be released. Beside them stands a veiled figure, possibly Bavo’s daughter Saint Agletrude, her identity uncertain enough that even the modello hesitates over her placement. The left panel of the triptych design concentrated on these three women as a compositional unit; in the final single canvas, they are folded into the left edge of a more expansive scene, which costs them some of their individuality. This is the trade-off the format change imposed: the triptych gave each group a panel of its own; the single canvas absorbs them into a crowd.
The building that received the painting in 1624 was not a neutral space. St. Bavo’s still contained the van Eyck brothers’ Ghent Altarpiece (completed 1432), and commissioning a monumental Rubens for the high altar was, in part, a statement about the continuity of artistic ambition in the city and the recovered confidence of the Flemish Church after decades of Iconoclasm. Triest understood exactly what he was asking Rubens to enter. He was himself a significant collector and patron, commissioner of Antoon Van Dyck (1599–1641) and Theodoor Rombouts (1597–1637) as well as Rubens, and he shaped the interiors of both Bruges and Ghent cathedrals as part of a consistent programme of ecclesiastical refurnishing. His tomb, in the cathedral interior, was carved by Hiëronymus Duquesnoy the Younger (1611–1654) in white and black marble — patron and commission together in the same building, which feels appropriate.
References
Vlieghe, H. (1972) Saints. Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, 8, nr. 72. Brussels: Arcade
Glen, T.L. (1977) Rubens and the Counter Reformation: Studies in His Religious Paintings between 1609 and 1620. New York and London: Garland Publishing
Lawrence, C. (1999) ‘Before the Raising of the Cross: The Origins of Rubens’s Earliest Antwerp Altarpieces’, The Art Bulletin, 81(2), pp. 267–296. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3050692 (Accessed: 2 March 2025).
Martin, J.R. (1993) ‘Painting and the Counter Reformation in the Age of Rubens’. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/7735933 (Accessed: 2 March 2025).
National Gallery, London (n.d.) Peter Paul Rubens, Saint Bavo is received by Saints Amand and Floribert (NG57.1); Three Female Witnesses (NG57.2); Kings Clothar and Dagobert dispute with a Herald (NG57.3). London: National Gallery. Available at: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/peter-paul-rubens-three-female-witnesses?(Accessed: 2 March 2025).
RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Peter Paul Rubens, Oil Sketch for High Altarpiece, St Bavo, Ghent, c. 1611. RKDimages, image no. 194497. The Hague: RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History. Available at: https://rkd.nl/explore/images/194497 (Accessed: 2 March 2025).