Resumen de Tetradius and the demoniac: radical shifts of focus in Jordaens’s Saint Martin healing a possessed man
Jacob Jordaens’s first independent altarpiece of 1630 went through a series of major revisions and reorganizations under the patronage of Abbot de Roore of the monastery of Saint Martin, Tournai. The treatment of the subject, an exorcism by Saint Martin of Tours, shifted attention away from the monastery’s patron saint to the master of the possessed man, the proconsul Tetradius. Possible reasons for this dramatic shift of focus relating to the status of Catholic exorcism in the Baroque era are explored
