The Holy Family with Saints Elizabeth and John the Baptist

Several versions of this composition exist, suggesting that it was a popular image for private devotion. Peter Paul Rubens presented a distinctly human take on the figures of Jesus, his mother Mary, and his father Joseph. The Holy Family lack the halos that often identify them, and the adult characters wear contemporary Flemish attire. Mary’s exposed breast brings to mind Jesus’s need for physical nourishment as the human son of God. Her central placement underscores the growing veneration of this saint in the Catholic community of the Spanish Netherlands. The bold, diagonal movement of the two infants—John the Baptist eagerly leans toward Jesus, who twists away from him—counterbalances the Virgin Mary’s solid, anchored form. The pyramidal arrangement of the central figures shows Rubens’s attention to the principles of Renaissance art.

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, it was customary for young Flemish painters to complete their education in Italy. Rubens spent eight years there—much longer than many of his peers. He thoroughly absorbed the art of Renaissance painters in Rome and Venice as well as recent advances in early Baroque painting, which allowed him to dominate the artistic scene back in his native Antwerp. The paintings Rubens completed after his return, with their dramatic light and bold movement, show the influence of Caravaggio’s revolutionary work, but Rubens’s style soon became more classical, incorporating the kinds of balanced compositions, clearly defined forms, and crisply rendered surfaces seen here.