Woman of the Apocalypse
Rubens completed the painting of the Woman of the Apocalypse, a subject that had been very popular in German iconography since the 15th century. The bishop had commissioned a subject "applicable to all feast days of the Blessed Virgin" ("so sich auf alle unser Lieben Frauen Fest applizieren liesse"), which made the Madonna of the Revelation, associated in Counter-Reformation iconography with both the Assumption of the Virgin and the Immaculate Conception, an apt choice. The finished painting is first mentioned in 1632, when it was evacuated from the advancing Swedish troops. It is now kept in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich.