St Christopher, the ‚carrier of Christ’, was the patron saint of the Antwerp Guild of Arquebusiers. In 1611, the guild commissioned the ‘Deposition’ altarpiece for Antwerp Cathedral, for which the Munich oil sketch served as a preliminary study. The muscular figure can be traced back to an antique sculpture, namely the ‘Farnese Hercules’, which Rubens had seen in Rome.