Christ gives the keys of heaven to St. Peter
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| Christ gives the keys of heaven to St. Peter |
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| Peter Paul Rubens , around 1612–1614 |
| Oil on oak |
| 182.6 cm × 159 cm |
| Gemäldegalerie (Berlin) |
Christ gives the keys of heaven to St. Peter is a baroque oil painting by Peter Paul Rubens , which he probably completed in 1614. It is now in the Berlin Gemäldegalerie .
Picture theme
The picture illustrates a scene from the Gospel of Matthew (16, 18 and 19), in which Jesus Christ gives the Galilean fisherman Simon the leadership authority in the early church with two parables : But I tell you: You are Peter, and you will be on this rock I build my church and the forces of the underworld will not overwhelm it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; What you will bind on earth will also be bound in heaven, and what you will loosen on earth will also be loosened in heaven. The handing over of the keys is a symbolic act, which in the Catholic Church is also understood as the establishment of the papacy. In the representations of art, the figurative word Jesus is regularly accompanied by a visible key handover.
Pictorial history
Probably between 1612 and 1614 Rubens was commissioned to design the tomb of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Ä. to paint an epitaph picture in the Notre Dame de la Chapelle church in Brussels . As usual, the epitaph should represent the namesake of the buried, for Pieter Bruegel the apostle Peter. The client for this work was most likely David Teniers the Elder. J. , who lived with a daughter of Jan Brueghel the Elder. Ä. was married. It cannot be ruled out that Jan himself was also involved in awarding the contract.
In 1765 the board was sold by the church council for 5,000 guilders to the collector Gerrit Braancamp after he had promised to replace the original with a copy. In the following decades the picture changed hands several times and was allegedly one after the other in the collections of van Lankeren in Antwerp , Nieuwwenhuys, Lord Northwick in Cheltenham , WL Grant in London , Potemkin in Brussels, RW Bacon in New York , Marcel von Nemes in Paris and in 1931 at the Cassirer Helbing auction in Munich , before the panel was transferred from the Dresdner Bank pledge to the Berlin Gemäldegalerie in 1936 . After 1945, the panel was the only Rubens painting that remained on Museum Island and was exhibited in the Bode Museum until 1997 . In 1998 the picture was transferred to the new building of the picture gallery at the Kulturforum and there it was reintegrated into the Berlin Rubens collection.
It is unclear whether the “handing over of the keys” in the various collections mentioned is actually always the tablet that is in Berlin today. The information in Adolf Rosenberg's Rubens monograph could be an indication of this . According to this, the picture, which was then in the RW Bacon Collection, was painted on canvas and is of a slightly smaller format (height: 179 cm, width 155.5 cm). In addition, the canvas should bear the following inscription on the reverse: »Petrus Paulus Rubens pinxit. David Teniers es haeredibus removavit anno 1676 « . However, since the Berlin panel is painted on oak and bears no trace of an inscription, it is likely that there are at least two versions of the picture that have often been confused with one another in the past.
The high quality of the Berliner Tafel and the fact that, like other epitaph pictures by the master, it is also painted on wood, prompted modern research to see it as the original.
literature
- Irene Geismeier , Dutch and Flemish Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Bode Museum , Berlin 1976, p. 71
- Prestel Museum Guide, Gemäldegalerie Berlin , Munich and New York 1998, p. 69
swell
- ^ Adolf Rosenberg, Peter Paul Rubens. The master's painting in 551 illustrations , in: Klassiker der Kunst Vol. V, Stuttgart and Leipzig 1905, illustration on page 76; Explanation of pictures on page 468