Saint Gregory the great adoring the madonna

Saint Gregory the Great Adoring the Madonna, attributed to Rubens with a date of 1730, raises the same attribution questions as other works in this group at the Museum Plantin-Moretus. Gregory the Great — the sixth-century pope who reformed the liturgy, sent Augustine to Christianize England, and left a vast corpus of theological writing — was a figure of special importance in Antwerp's cultural life because of the city's position as the center of Counter-Reformation Catholicism in northern Europe. The combination of the scholarly pope with the Virgin Mary in a devotional vision was an established altarpiece type, often paired with other doctors of the Church, and Rubens himself produced multiple large-scale devotional works incorporating the Church Fathers for Jesuit and Augustinian clients. By the eighteenth century, Antwerp collectors and dealers habitually attributed works in this devotional tradition to Rubens regardless of actual authorship; the Museum Plantin-Moretus group may represent workshop productions, later copies, or works by skilled Flemish followers. The Moretus family, printers and publishers, maintained close ties to Antwerp's intellectual and artistic elite throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The composition would arrange Gregory in papal robes before an apparition of the Virgin, his devotional posture contrasting with the heavenly radiance above. The Rubenesque palette of deep crimson, white, and gold would give the devotional scene a formal richness appropriate to its ecclesiastical function.