From 2023 to 2025, the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten (KMSKA) in Antwerp examined and restored its monumental altarpiece Enthroned Madonna Adored by Saints by Peter Paul Rubens. Rubens created numerous preparatory drawings and oil sketches for this important commission, including the Berlin modello. The aim of the research project is both to conduct a comprehensive art-technological analysis of this oil sketch and to determine where it stands within the overall development and creative process of the Antwerp altarpiece.

Between 1625 and 1628, Rubens created a series of initial sketches on paper for this important commission and further developed his vision for the final painting in a series of several surviving oil sketches. The Berlin modello, in which the overall composition of the final altarpiece is already visible, represents the final step in the preparation process and therefore plays a special role in this series.

The in-depth art-technological analyses of the oil sketch were supplemented by an X-ray fluorescence (XRF) scan, which was conducted in cooperation with the KMSKA and the Universiteit Antwerpen. The results provide new insights into the working methods of the artist, who continuously refined his composition during the painting process, returning time and again to previous drafts and correcting his own work. The process in question concerns both individual figures and groups of figures in the oil sketch, as well as fundamental compositional changes made on the way to the final, large-format version of the painting. It is therefore possible not only to trace Rubens’s complex creative process by comparing all the surviving sketches, but now also to fully analyse it for the first time by looking at the painting process involved in creating the Berlin modello itself.