Saint Margaret

Saint Margaret, attributed to Rubens with a date of 1730, is one of a group of devotional paintings at the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp that carries Rubens's name despite falling well after his death in 1640. Saint Margaret of Antioch — the virgin martyr swallowed by a dragon who escaped by bursting through its belly with her cross, then beheaded in the Diocletianic persecution — was among the most popular female saints of the Catholic tradition, appearing regularly in altarpieces and devotional paintings from the medieval period through the Baroque. Rubens produced several genuine treatments of female virgin martyrs during his career, and his handling of the type — idealized beauty, luminous flesh, the contrast between feminine delicacy and the instruments of torture — was widely imitated. The Museum Plantin-Moretus, established in the house of Rubens's neighbor and printer Christophe Plantin, acquired many Flemish Baroque works through the family collections of the Moretus dynasty, and the attribution history of these works reflects the eighteenth-century practice of grouping Rubenesque altarpieces under the master's name without rigorous critical examination.

The saint is likely depicted with the dragon underfoot, the standard iconographic attribute of her victory over the beast. In the Rubenesque tradition, the figure would be rendered with warm flesh tones and rich drapery, the dragon providing a dynamic foil of dark scales and menacing form.