Saint Macarius the Great

Gaspar de Crayer's Saint Macarius the Great, dating to around 1700 and housed in St Bavo's Cathedral, Ghent, was painted very late in the artist's exceptionally long career — de Crayer died in 1669, which makes a date of 1700 impossible for his hand. The work may represent a date of installation, a later restoration campaign, or a cataloguing error. De Crayer was the leading Flemish religious painter of his generation outside Rubens, responsible for a vast output of altarpieces and devotional canvases for churches across the Spanish Netherlands. Macarius the Great, the fourth-century Egyptian desert father, was a subject that suited the Counter-Reformation Church's promotion of ascetic holiness: a hermit, penitent, and mystic who embodied withdrawal from worldly temptation. St Bavo's Cathedral was de Crayer's most important institutional patron in Ghent, and the painter returned repeatedly to supply its various chapels and altars with devotional imagery. His religious paintings operated within the Rubenian idiom of emotional directness and luminous colour but with a cooler, more contemplative temperature.

Oil on canvas. De Crayer's late style favoured a smoother, more blended handling than Rubens's energetic impasto. Saint figures are typically shown with strong upward gazing eyes and hands arranged in gestures of supplication or ecstasy. Warm flesh tones are set against darker backgrounds to create the focused, spotlight-like illumination that characterised Counter-Reformation devotional imagery.