The Triumph of the Eucharist

Commissioned in 1625 by the Archduchess and Infanta Isabel, Governor of the Spanish Netherlands, for a royal convent in Madrid, The Triumph of the Eucharist constitutes Rubens€s largest surviving program of church decoration€"some twenty tapestries in all. Scribner€s book provides a fully integrated study of this remarkable cycle of tapestries, here seen in the context of the great Flemish artist€s other decorative programs: his three other tapestry cycles, the ceiling paintings for the Jesuit Church in Antwerp, and the celebrated €˜Medici Cycle€ of paintings in Paris. As the epitome of High Baroque religious art, this tapestry cycle addresses a central subject in Counter-Reformation theology: the Sacrament. It presents an epic history of the Eucharist, from its Old Testament prefigurations though its historical battles with paganism and, later, Protestantism. Scribner€s iconographic study of this visual epic reveals the extraordinary richness of Rubens€s allegorical language and vocabulary of images. In its elaborate€"and unprecedented€"use of fictive architecture within the tapestries, the cycle effectively transformed the convent chapel into a new Holy of Holies, the Christian successor to the Jewish Tabernacle of the Most High. In his grandest commission as Isabel's court painter, Rubens here offers his most comprehensive and Baroque expression of his Catholic faith.