English: In 1543, Nicholas à Spira (1510-1568) was elected abbot of the abbey of the Norbertine Order at Grimbergen in the southern Netherlands. In 1566, the abbey, like many Catholic churches and institutions in the Netherlands, was set on fire by bands of Protestant reformers bent on purging the land of idolatrous images. However, the altarpiece survived until the anticlerical campaigns of the 1790s that swept through much of western Europe with the reverberations of the French Revolution. The altarpiece was apparently dismantled then, probably in order to separate the portraits from the central panel, which was very likely destroyed.