Saint Teresa of Ávila Interceding for Souls in Purgatory by http://www.wikidata.org/.well-known/genid/bcfd96f75d44ebcbf8cf26361ea69e0f

This is Saint Teresa of Ávila Interceding for Souls in Purgatory, a workshop copy after Peter Paul Rubens, painted around 1630 to 1633. It hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a gift from J. Pierpont Morgan in 1917. The painting is not just a vision of the afterlife, it is a document of a real estate transaction with eternal consequences.

Look at the lower left. An angel grips the wrist of a man and pulls him out of the flames. That is Bernardino de Mendoza, a young Spaniard who gave Saint Teresa land on which to build a convent in Valladolid. He died before construction began, and this painting records what Teresa believed happened next: Christ appeared to her and declared that Mendoza's soul would not leave Purgatory until the first Mass was celebrated in that new house. Teresa's clasped hands at the center of the composition are her act of intercession, speeding that moment along.

The original altarpiece stood in the Church of the Discalced Carmelites in Antwerp. It was funded by Felipa Mendes, a member of Antwerp's Portuguese merchant community, a donor class whose wealth could pay for prayers, build chapels, and, the theology of the time held, shorten a soul's time in Purgatory. An engraving by Schelte à Bolswert later spread the composition across the Catholic world, explicitly naming Mendoza for viewers who would never see the original.

A small oil-on-wood panel like this one was not a sketch but a product, a reduced, salable version of a famous design, made in Rubens's workshop for a patron who wanted the same spiritual insurance the altarpiece promised. The flames at the bottom are not abstract torment. They are a contract burning out.

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