The Holy Family with Saints Elizabeth and John the Baptist

When it was painted

In the autumn of 1608, word reached Rubens in Italy that his mother was gravely ill. He hurried home to Antwerp, but she had already died by the time he arrived. That ended nearly eight years in Italy, where he had studied the work of Michelangelo and Raphael.

He stayed, and his career took off fast. In 1609 Archduke Albert and Archduchess Isabella, the rulers of the Spanish Netherlands, made him their court painter. They let him keep living in Antwerp instead of moving to their court in Brussels. The same year he married Isabella Brant.

By about 1615, when he painted this picture, Rubens was in his late thirties. Two huge altarpieces for Antwerp churches, The Raising of the Cross and The Descent from the Cross, had made his name. In 1610 he had bought a large house in the city, and he ran a busy workshop with many assistants. His daughter Clara Serena had been born, and so had a son, Albert, named after the archduke.

Rubens had a head for business as well as a gift for painting. He had his assistants paint several more versions of this same composition, and he had engravings made after it. Prints could carry his name to places a single panel never would. A few years later he even obtained official privileges that stopped others from copying his prints without permission.

The painting already appears in a London catalogue of painters' works published in 1830, and the Art Institute of Chicago bought it in 1967. Now look again at the middle of the picture. Not one of these people looks out at us. The museum reads their interlocking glances as a chain that keeps leading back to Mary.