Christ Giving the Keys to St. Peter (Rubens)

Christ Giving to St. Peter the keys of heaven is a baroque oil painting by Peter Paul Rubens, the latter has probably completed in 1614. It is now in the Berlin Gemäldegalerie.

Picture Theme

The image illustrates a scene from the Gospel of Matthew (16, 18 and 19), the Galilean fisherman Simon with two parable words, the management authority transfers in Jesus Christ in the early Church: But I tell you that you are Peter, and I will on this rock I build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom; whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Key collection is a symbolic act, which is also understood in the Catholic Church as the institution of the papacy. In the representations of art image Jesus' word is regularly accompanied by a visible keys.

Visual History

Probably 1612-1614 Rubens was commissioned to paint a Epitaphbild for the tomb of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. , In the church of Notre Dame de la Chapelle in Brussels. As usual, the epitaph should be the patron saint of the interred, for Pieter Bruegel So the Apostle Peter. Contracting for this work was most likely David Teniers the Younger, the d with a daughter of Jan Brueghel the Elder. was married. It is not impossible that Jan himself was involved with in the procurement process.

In 1765 the board was sold by the church council for 5,000 florins to the collector Gerrit Braancamp, after he had promised to have it replaced the original with a copy. In the following decades, the picture changed hands several times and was allegedly successively in the collections of van Lankeren in Antwerp, Nieuwwenhuys, Lord Northwick in Cheltenham, WL Grant in London, Potemkin in Brussels, RW Bacon in New York, Marcel von Nemes in Paris and 1931 on the auction Cassirer Helbing in Munich before the board in 1936 transferred from the pledged property of Dresdner Bank to the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. After 1945, the panel was the only Rubens paintings which has remained on the Museum Island and was issued until 1997 in the Bode Museum. In 1998, the image was transferred to the new building of the Art Gallery at the Cultural Forum and there re-integrated into the Berlin Rubens collection.

It is unclear whether it is the "key handover " in the various mentioned collections indeed always to the board, which is now in Berlin. One indication, however, could be the information in Adolf Rosenberg's Rubens monograph. Then the image 's housed in the RW Bacon collection, painted on canvas and of slightly smaller size is (height: 179 cm, width 155.5 cm). In addition, the screen is the back bearing the following inscription: " Peter Paul Rubens pinxit. David Teniers it haeredibus removavit anno 1676. " Since the Berliner Tafel is however painted on oak and bears no trace of an inscription, it's likely that there are at least two versions of the image which have been confused in the past frequently with each other.

The high quality of Berliner Tafel and the fact that they, like other Epitaphbilder of the master, also painted on wood, led the modern research to see in it the original.