The Great Last Judgement

The Great Last Judgment (c. 1616-17) at the Alte Pinakothek is one of the most physically overwhelming canvases in the history of religious painting — at 608 × 464 cm, a composition of extraordinary scale and ambition that sets out to rival and surpass Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel Last Judgment. Where Michelangelo's composition is architecturally organised, Rubens's is dynamically centrifugal: the saved and damned do not occupy clearly separated zones but are caught in a spiraling vortex of ascending and falling bodies that creates a sense of maximum spiritual turbulence. The muscular figures, many in the extreme foreshortened poses that demonstrated mastery of human anatomy in motion, combine Michelangelesque body types with the Baroque physicality that Rubens brought to all his large figure compositions. Wolfgang Wilhelm, Count Palatine of Neuburg, commissioned the work for the Jesuit church in Neuburg an der Donau, where it remained until moving to the Munich collections in the nineteenth century. The Alte Pinakothek holds it as one of the supreme achievements of Flemish Baroque painting and Rubens's most sustained engagement with the subject that had defined the Western tradition's grandest ambitions.

The massive composition arranges dozens of figures in a swirling vertical movement, with the saved rising on one side and the damned tumbling on the other. Rubens' flesh painting and anatomical mastery are displayed in an extraordinary variety of figure types and poses.

This monumental canvas in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, is one of the largest paintings in Rubens's oeuvre. The enormous scale has presented ongoing conservation challenges. The canvas has been relined multiple times. Cleaning campaigns have addressed darkened varnish while retouching restored areas of paint loss.