Job c. 1620

Jacob Jordaens painted this unflinching image of Job, the Biblical figure of suffering and patience, in oil on canvas sometime in the 17th century. Jordaens was from Antwerp, a cosmopolitan port city in the Spanish Netherlands, where the horrors of the Thirty Years' War were well known. The image is shocking: Job is presented not as a noble sage but as a broken, aging man, his skin erupting in sores, looking heavenward in anguish, and with the suggestion of violence in the dark form behind him. What does it mean to depict a saint in this way? In a society still reeling from the violence of religious conflict, traditional pieties were now open to question, and artists like Jordaens were challenging the institutions of the Church by reminding viewers of the physical reality of human suffering. As art historians, we can look to sources in the history of religion, and in the social history of the Netherlands to better understand the image's meaning. Ultimately, this is a painting about what it means to push against existing social norms.