928.

The room is interesting both for itself and also as showing how the Flemish brushes were working at the time that so many of the great Italians were engaged on similar themes.
After the cool, self-contained, scientific work of these northerners it is a change to enter the Sala di Rubens and find that luxuriant giant--their compatriot, but how different!--once more.

In the Uffizi, Rubens seems more foreign, far, than any one, so fleshly pagan is he.

In Antwerp Cathedral his "Descent from the Cross," although its bravura is, as always with him, more noticeable than its piety, might be called a religious picture, but I doubt if even that would seem so here.

At any rate his Uffizi works are all secular, while his "Holy Family" in the Pitti is merely domestic and robust.