Saint Thomas Touching Christ's Wounds

Dated 1644 and held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, this panel painting by Erasmus Quellinus II depicts the moment from the Gospel of John (20:24-29) when the doubting apostle Thomas places his fingers in the wounds of the risen Christ — one of the most psychologically charged episodes in the New Testament narrative cycle. Quellinus, son of the sculptor Erasmus Quellinus I and working in Antwerp under Rubens's direct influence, brought to this subject the full weight of Flemish Counter-Reformation devotional painting with its emphasis on tactile, physical encounter with the divine. Thomas's gesture — the finger entering the wound — makes invisible resurrection physically verifiable, and Flemish painters from Rubens onward approached it as a moment requiring maximum physical and emotional reality. Philadelphia's museum acquired this as part of its collection of European Baroque religious works.

Panel support for a mid-sized devotional work was an increasingly archaic choice by 1644, when canvas had largely superseded panel in Antwerp's workshops. Quellinus may have chosen panel for the smooth surface quality appropriate to the carefully modelled faces and hands this subject required. Christ's wounds, Thomas's probing finger, and the expressions of surrounding apostles are the composition's critical passages, requiring the finest brushwork.