The Meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek by Rubens, Peter Paul, Sir

This is The Meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek, painted by Peter Paul Rubens around 1626. It was never meant to be seen as a panel painting, it was a modello, a small oil sketch, for a monumental tapestry series commissioned by the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, Archduchess of the Spanish Netherlands. The full set of tapestries cost a staggering sum and hung in the convent of the Descalzas Reales in Madrid, where they proclaimed Habsburg piety and power.

Look at the center of the painting. The armored Abraham receives bread and wine from Melchizedek, a priest-king who appears in Genesis for only a few verses. Rubens makes the handoff the fulcrum of the entire composition. The crimson drapery pulls your eye to the exchange, and that exchange is the whole point. Christian theology reads this moment, the offering of bread and wine to the patriarch, as a prefiguration of the Eucharist. For the archduchess and her viewers, this was a sacred promise visible in the Old Testament, rendered in the most expensive woven art money could buy.

Rubens painted this modello on panel around 1626, when he was at the height of his powers and running a vast workshop in Antwerp. The tapestry commission was one of a series called The Triumph of the Eucharist, designed to celebrate and defend the doctrine of the Real Presence against Protestant challenges. The painting itself came onto the market decades later and sold into private collections, eventually reaching the collection where it resides today.

The next time the painting exchanged hands, it was for a price far less than the tapestries cost to weave. But the idea it defends, that the bread and wine become something more, has never stopped being worth fighting over.

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