Rubens's Miracles of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, completed in 1618 and now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, is one of the most important paintings of the Counter-Reformation and a defining statement of the Jesuit artistic program. Created as the high altarpiece for the newly completed Jesuit church (Church of St. Charles Borromeo) in Antwerp, flanked by a companion altarpiece showing the Miracles of Saint Francis Xavier, the two paintings constituted the visual centerpiece of the Society of Jesus's propaganda campaign in the Habsburg Netherlands - a claim that the miraculous power of the New Testament continued in the post-Reformation Catholic Church.
The Biblical Source
The healing and exorcism miracles that Rubens depicts in the Ignatius altarpiece are modeled directly on the gospel healing narratives, particularly Mark 1:34 ('He healed many who had various diseases. He also drove out many demons') and Luke 13:12 ('Woman, you are set free from your infirmity'). The theological argument is that the Apostolic Commission of Matthew 28:18-20 - 'make disciples of all nations... I am with you always' - and the promise of Acts 3:6 ('In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk') are being fulfilled in the present by the Jesuit missionaries and their founder. Ignatius stands at the composition's center in his black Jesuit habit, his eyes lifted to heaven, his gesture that of command: the possessed fall back, the sick are healed, through him as through the apostles.
Rubens and the Jesuit Commission
The commission was one of the most important of Rubens's career. He was not merely a Catholic painter; he was a committed Counter-Reformation Catholic whose second library included the complete works of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Erasmus, and who regularly attended Mass. The Antwerp Jesuit church commission involved designing the entire decorative programme of the building - ceiling paintings, altarpieces, and architectural ornament - in collaboration with the Jesuits' father-general, a project of unprecedented scope in northern Baroque art. The Ignatius and Xavier altarpieces were designed so that they could be exchanged by means of a mechanical device: the Ignatius shown on feast days of Ignatius, the Xavier on Xavier's feast day.
Compositional Analysis
The painting is organized on the diagonal principle central to Baroque altarpiece design: the eye moves from the writhing possessed figures in the lower left, up through the crowd of witnesses, to the commanding figure of Ignatius, and upward still to the heavenly vision of the Trinity toward which his gaze is directed. The density of figures - perhaps sixty or more - creates an overwhelming sense of communal witness. The expressions of the healed and the witnesses range from prostrate terror to radiant joy, cataloguing the range of human responses to divine power. The fallen possessed figures in the foreground are among the most violent passages in Rubens's enormous output of religious painting.
Theological Significance
The painting makes a claim that was directly polemical in a context of Protestant-Catholic conflict: that the miracles of the New Testament were not unique to the apostolic age but continued in the Church, validating the Catholic tradition's claim to apostolic succession. Luther and Calvinist theology generally held that the gift of miracles had ceased with the apostles; Catholic theology maintained continuity. The Ignatius altarpiece is a visual argument for the continuity thesis, using the formal conventions of apostolic miracle scenes from medieval and Renaissance altarpieces to assert that Ignatius's healings belong to the same chain as Peter's and Paul's.
The Cessationist Controversy
Rubens's altarpiece was produced at a moment when the question of miraculous gifts was among the most theologically contested in Europe. Protestant Reformers, following Calvin's cessationist argument, held that the gifts of healing, prophecy, and tongues had ceased with the apostolic generation once the canon of Scripture was complete - miracles had served their authenticating purpose and were no longer needed. Catholic theology, by contrast, maintained that the Spirit's gifts continued in the life of the church, as the canonizations of Ignatius (1622) and Francis Xavier (1622) demonstrated: both were canonized in part on the basis of miracles attributed to their intercession. Rubens's altarpiece, displayed in the year of these canonizations, was thus not merely pious decoration but a visual argument in a live theological debate, asserting through the evidence of Ignatius's healing ministry that the New Testament's promise of 'signs and wonders' (Acts 2:43) was being fulfilled in the Catholic Church's present - not merely recorded in its past.
The Jesuit Spiritual Tradition
Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) founded the Society of Jesus as a new kind of religious order - not primarily contemplative and monastic but active and apostolic, the 'shock troops' of the Counter-Reformation. His Spiritual Exercises, a structured programme of meditative prayer over thirty days, deployed the imagination as a faculty of spiritual encounter: the exercitant was instructed to place himself imaginatively within each scene of the Gospels - to see the people, hear the sounds, smell the smells - in a practice of meditative 'composition of place' that engaged the whole person in encounter with the divine. Rubens's altarpiece is the visual equivalent of this compositional practice: it places the viewer inside the Gospel miracle story, surrounded by the crowd's reactions, in the presence of healing power. The painting and the Exercises share the same theological logic: the miraculous activity of the first century continues in the church of the sixteenth, and the imagination's engagement with that activity is itself a form of participation in it.
Visiting
The altarpiece is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The original church in Antwerp (now Saint Charles Borromeo Church) still contains significant Rubens works and is worth visiting for its Baroque interior. The KHM's Flemish Baroque collection provides the best context for understanding the altarpiece within Rubens's complete career.