by Mark Lamster
The choice of an artist, then, was not unprecedented, but the choice of this artist, Rubens, occasioned a good deal of chatter among Vincenzo’s notoriously chippy courtiers. He had good manners, yes, but he was not of aristocratic blood, and he was not a member of Vincenzo’s inner circle—for that matter, he wasn’t even Italian. His relevant experience was, indeed, practically nonexistent, though he had been prepared, at least in his early years, for a life in court service. As a child, he had been enrolled, along with his older brother Philip, in Rombout Verdonck’s school for boys, the academy of choice for Antwerp’s burgher elite. There, the Rubens brothers were drilled in the classics: Virgil, Horace, Pliny, and especially Seneca, whose stoicism was considered a philosophical model for contemporary behavior. Art was not on the program. Jan Rubens, the boys’ late father, had been a lawyer and an alderman, and it seemed the young Peter Paul was headed down a similar path. He had always been an eager student, and a gifted one. The painter’s nephew would later write that “he learned with such facility that he easily outstripped his classmates.” Economic circumstances, however, put an end to Rubens’s formal schooling at the age of thirteen. In 1590, the family education fund was diverted to provide a dowry for an older sister, Blandina. Rubens’s evident intelligence and charm, even then, made him a prime candidate for a career as a court functionary, and his devoted mother, Maria, arranged through family connections to have him set up as a page in the residence of the Countess Marguerite de Ligne-Arenberg, whose father-in-law had been a governor-general of the Netherlands during the reign of Philip II.
It was a good appointment, but Rubens was unhappy. “There always glimmered inside him a desire for the noble art of painting,” wrote Joachim von Sandrart, a German painter who traveled with Rubens in his later years. As a child, he had spent hour after hour poring over the woodblock prints of the artists Hans Holbein and Tobias Stimmer, which were popular among middle-class families like the Rubenses. Young Peter Paul was a natural with a pen, and found himself especially drawn to the robust figures in Stimmer’s book of illustrated stories from the Bible, which had a physical presence so strong—like the imposing statues of cathedral facades—that it seemed they might just stomp off the page. From even those early drawings it was plainly evident that Rubens had artistic talent, and now he wanted to make a career of it. This was not an unprecedented decision for a Rubens; an older brother, Jan Baptist, had left the family many years earlier to pursue a career in the arts, and was thought to be in France. Rubens was not prepared to forsake his kin as his sibling had, but life as a functionary was not going to satisfy him either.
Whether or not she approved, Maria understood that once her headstrong young son had fixated on some goal, refusing him would be pointless. Again using family connections, he was apprenticed to Tobias Verhaecht, an Antwerp landscape painter of minor reputation who was a distant relative by marriage. Roughly a year later he moved on to the atelier of Adam van Noort, a respected member of the painters’ guild, and some two years after that to the studio of Otto van Veen, who figured among Antwerp’s artistic elite. He learned the basics of his craft in these apprenticeships: how to make pigments and prime a canvas, the techniques required of different mediums, how to layer colors, how to model a figure, how to compose the elements of an image. Soon enough he was working on canvases that would be finished by his masters. His education was more than just practical. Van Veen especially encouraged Rubens’s academic interests. Before establishing his studio, Van Veen had traveled through Italy, where he absorbed the ideals of the Renaissance and the classical tradition. This was not uncommon at the time. Among the informal circle of like-minded humanists who dominated Antwerp culture, an extended tour of Italy was practically de rigueur. Even Jan Rubens, the painter’s father, had made such a trip, earning his law degree in Rome after seven years of study abroad. Van Veen was more of a proselytizer than most. Upon his return he went so far as to assume a Romanized name: Octavius Vaenius.
By 1598, Rubens had completed his training and become a member in good standing of the Guild of Saint Luke, the painters’ guild. He was a master, but he knew that he did not have all of the education he required, and he could see this deficiency quite plainly in his first commissions. A large panel painting of Adam and Eve showed his promise, but there was an undeniable stiffness to the picture, a frozen quality, that he intuitively understood as a weakness. Italy beckoned.
Rubens’s quest to travel abroad for personal and professional enrichment was contingent upon his receipt of documents from the Antwerp town hall. These letters were required of all travelers, and verified that their bearers had good standing in the community and clean health—“no plague or contagious disease.” Rubens received his papers on May 8, 1600. The next day he was off, accompanied by his first pupil, Deodate del Monte, who was similarly certified and would serve as a faithful assistant for many years to come. They traveled by horse, and though there is no precise record of their path, in all likelihood they traveled south and west, crossing through Alpine passes into northern Italy. Their first destination was Venice, a city that had supplanted Rome as an artistic capital for a brief moment in the previous century. If Venice had lost that momentum, it could nevertheless boast a modern school of painting that was like nothing Rubens had seen in Antwerp. In place of the studied classicism of Van Veen, the works of Bassano, Veronese, Tintoretto, and above all Titian, with their explosive colors, dynamic compositions, and expressive brushwork, suggested new directions for the young painter.
Rubens made it to Venice in time for the city’s June carnival, a raucous annual event of masquerades, feasts, exhibitions, and performances with a history dating back to the thirteenth century. Vincenzo was also in town for the festivities, as an honored guest. The duke was a man of considerable appetites and liked to be on hand when there was a good debauch to be had—he was notoriously ill-tempered when not sated. To prevent this eventuality, the duke traveled with a sizable entourage, a group that included his secretary and chief political officer, Annibale Chieppio, a chubby-cheeked Milanese with a punctilious nature. In addition to his diplomatic duties, Chieppio kept an eye peeled for fresh artistic talent for the duke’s Mantuan studio. At some point during the carnival, he met the enterprising young master from Antwerp. A review of the work Rubens had brought with him over the Alps was apparently enough to convince Chieppio to add him to the Mantuan payroll. Vincenzo already had one Flemish painter on staff, the portraitist Frans Pourbus, and that had worked out well. If nothing else, Rubens would prove useful in filling out Vincenzo’s nascent “Gallery of Beauties.” The duke enjoyed the prestige of his art collection, but he was frankly more interested in the lascivious pleasures it might provide him, and kept his court studio busy knocking out portraits of Europe’s most attractive ladies. Rubens would soon find that work beneath his dignity, but for the moment he was happy for the appointment, which came with a respectable salary and accommodations in the royal compound. That same October, when Vincenzo left Mantua for Florence to attend the proxy marriage of Marie de’ Medici to King Henry IV of France, Rubens was brought along as part of the duke’s retinue.
That wedding, which united the Medici and Capetian dynasties, gave Rubens a taste of royal splendor that made a lasting impression. The ceremony took place at the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore, under the soaring vault of Brunelleschi’s great dome. At the sumptuous banquet that followed, figures dressed as Roman gods serenaded dignitaries assembled from across Europe. (Henry, however, awaited his bride back in France, not wanting to expose himself to the predations of his prospective relatives.) In the future, Marie would become one of Rubens’s most important patrons and political allies, but at her nuptial event he was relegated to the periphery. It served, however, as a useful lesson in the formalities and grand scale of Baroque political theater.
Rubens completed his first formal diplomatic “mission” for Vincenzo in the following year, 1601, when he delivered a letter from the duke to Al
essandro Cardinal Montalto, nephew and adviser to Pope Sixtus V. The job, not a particularly difficult one, required the navigation of the halls of Roman power, but served primarily as an excuse to send Rubens to Rome, where he stayed for eight months making copies of old-master works for the duke. He also took on private commissions during his residency in the Eternal City, in the process substantially elevating his reputation as an artist.
That budding notoriety may well have been a factor when Vincenzo made the decision to send Rubens abroad in 1602. Word that Rubens was a bright new talent was already beginning to filter through Europe’s capitals, and the fact that Vincenzo could claim him as a member of his artistic stable would be seen as yet another feather in the duke’s cap. As an added bonus, Rubens could paint all the most attractive women in Madrid for Vincenzo’s cabinet. Indeed, the painter would be instructed to return from Madrid by way of Paris for no other reason than to bring images of the fairest figures in that city back for the duke’s museum of high-end soft-core pornography.
Vincenzo, then, knew just what he was doing when he had Rubens summoned to his private apartments at the Castello di San Giorgio. The artist walked briskly, as was his wont, through the halls of the palace and was ushered into the duke’s presence by an elaborately uniformed chamberlain. Chieppio was there to provide him with his instructions, or at least the basics; there’d be plenty of time to go over logistics before his departure.
It was a plum assignment, and Rubens knew it. His whole Italian experience had thus far eclipsed all of his aspirations. He had departed Antwerp in an effort to enrich himself intellectually, and almost at once he had found himself attached to one of the most distinguished courts south of the Alps. The tasks of the Mantuan studio had proven to be no great challenge for him, and he had virtually unlimited access to the duke’s collection of old masters, which he could study at his leisure. He had already traveled to Florence and to Rome on the duke’s payroll, and now he was being offered the opportunity to ingratiate himself with the new Spanish king and his many acolytes, all potential clients. The logistical and diplomatic demands of the trip would be a chore and a distraction from Rubens’s primary passion—his art—but the benefits were so great as to outweigh any thought of refusal. At the very least, he would have access to the famed royal collections in Madrid and at the Escorial, the art-filled monastery and palace complex in the nearby Guadarrama hills. And so when the delicate final moments of his meeting with Vincenzo and Chieppio arrived, Rubens was effusive. Yes, he was very pleased to be charged with this mission, and he would do all in his power to represent the duke with appropriate dignity.
IT WAS NEARLY a year before Rubens actually left Mantua with Vincenzo’s gifts for the Spanish king and his courtiers. That long delay, the product of some bureaucratic snafu, augured poorly for the journey. At least it should have given the palace stewards time enough to map out an easy route to Spain for the painter, one that would have avoided mountain passes, unfriendly tax collectors, and the prying eyes of the duke’s rivals. Unfortunately, careful attention was not devoted to the logistics of the journey, and Rubens did not have the experience to see just what trouble lay in store for him.
All this was beginning to dawn on him, however, when he found himself standing uncomfortably in an opulent Pisan receiving room before Vincenzo’s uncle Ferdinand I de’ Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany. This was in late March 1603, when he was already three weeks into his long-delayed journey. Rubens recognized Ferdinand’s shrewd countenance; he had seen him in person a few years earlier, at the proxy wedding of Henry IV and Marie de’ Medici in Florence. But that viewing was from a distance only. This audience was something altogether more intimate, and Rubens was grateful that Ferdinand opened it with a disarmingly friendly introduction. The grand duke politely inquired as to the painter’s background and his purpose in Pisa, a long distance and a difficult mountain passage from his patron’s Mantuan palace. Rubens offered the truth, though he went light on the details of his mission; he was in no position to discuss Vincenzo’s affairs with another prince, no matter their relation. The grand duke nodded. In fact, the question was a con. He knew precisely who Rubens was, where he was going, why he was going there, and what he was carrying along with him. To demonstrate this knowledge, he cut Rubens off in midstream and proceeded, in rather bemused fashion, to rattle off the entire extravagant catalog headed for Philip III—every last item, down to the final whalebone harquebus. It was an impressive performance, and it concluded with the grand duke “asking” that Rubens add two more articles to the manifest: a horse and a marble table to be deposited with one of the grand duke’s own allies at Alicante, on the Iberian coast. What could Rubens do but say yes?
Back at his room in the aftermath, Rubens sent off a dispatch to Chieppio in which he described the meeting in some detail. “I stood there like a dunce, suspecting some informer, or in truth the excellent system of reporters (not to say spies) in the very palace of our prince,” he wrote. “It could not be otherwise, for I have not specified my baggage, either at the customs or elsewhere. Perhaps it is my simplicity which causes me astonishment at things that are ordinary at court. Pardon me, and read, as a pastime, the report of a novice without experience, considering only his good intention to serve his patrons, and particularly yourself.” If things had not gone according to plan, at least he might try to ingratiate himself with his superiors.
Rubens’s plea of naive innocence was disingenuous, for at the very least he should have anticipated what was to transpire at that meeting. He had, in fact, already agreed to take on the grand duke’s horse two days earlier, when he was approached by a fellow Antwerp native in Ferdinand’s employ. Had he let slip with one too many details during their conversation? Probably not, but the assertion in his letter to Chieppio that he had not “specified” his baggage was patently false. If Rubens was surprised at all, it might have been that the grand duke was willing to trust him with his horse in the first place, given that his journey from Mantua to Pisa had been something of a fiasco from its very outset, and its tortured progress no great secret in the halls of Tuscan power. This was probably on Ferdinand’s mind as well, but the audience with Rubens had been called less as a test of the painter’s competence than as a message to his Mantuan nephew, Vincenzo. Ferdinand was not prepared to simply cede his role as Italian arbiter of cultural authority to the Spanish crown. Just two years earlier, Ferdinand had sent his own immense gift to Lerma: a marble fountain capped by a statue of Samson slaying a Philistine. This masterpiece was the work of the sculptor Giambologna, himself a Flemish transplant to Italy. Now Vincenzo’s gift would pass, but not without Ferdinand’s tacit approval.
Rubens’s journey from Mantua to Pisa had in fact been such an amateurish farce that any number of sources could have provided Ferdinand with information on its bungled early stages. At Ferrara, the convoy’s first stop, customs officials had insisted upon opening for inspection each of the seven trunks in the shipment, not counting the plainly visible horses and carriage. (Rubens, who could be obsessive about his reputation, conveniently neglected to mention this when he had asserted that his luggage had not been inspected.) The Ferrarese presented Rubens with a duty so large that it exceeded the entire projected cost of the trip to Spain. Vincenzo might have sent along a formal request that the cargo be exempted from such levies, but he considered it beneath his dignity to do so; that would have looked cheap. Instead, Rubens was provided with a packet of letters of introduction, and forced to scurry about begging the intercession of local figures of influence with ties to the duke. Acting nimbly, he managed to free the cargo, but the scene was rehearsed again at Bologna, the next stop, where authorities were satisfied by what was generously described as a “tip,” and once again in Florence, after an arduous trek over the Apennines.
The drive over the mountains was particularly expensive and time-consuming. Rubens was forced to commission oxen to pull the luggage through the muddy Apennine passes, with their narro
w switchbacks and steep inclines. The Tuscan vistas were spectacular—when they were visible through the rain and fog—but the cost for hauling the carriage alone was enormous, and that was without the protective cart built to carry it, which had to be left behind. Upon arrival at Florence, things didn’t much improve. When Rubens presented his credentials, he was met by looks of bewilderment. What was he doing in Florence? Why hadn’t he taken the direct route from Mantua to the port of Genoa? “They almost crossed themselves in their astonishment at such a mistake,” Rubens observed. Instead, incompetent Mantuan court functionaries, perhaps jealous of his mission, had sent him on a circuitous fool’s errand southeast through Tuscany, forcing a needlessly difficult mountain crossing. Worse still, he might sit idle and bleeding funds for three or four months waiting for a ship to Spain at Pisa, whereas service out of Genoa was far more dependable.
The delay with the carriage and spring flooding along the route to the coast kept Rubens in Florence for ten days. When he did reach Pisa, at least there was good news: a fleet of ships from Hamburg happened to be in port and en route to Alicante. He booked passage, but now there was an additional problem. It was Rubens’s understanding that once he arrived in Spain, the ride to Madrid would take roughly three days. Once again, even a brief glance at a map would have shown quite clearly that on this he had been badly sold by his handlers in Mantua. (No small irony, given that the astronomer and cartographer Giovanni Antonio Magini was a Mantuan court resident and had been working on an atlas of greater Italy for ten years.) The journey was actually some 280 miles—a good two weeks in travel time—and the funds with which he had been provided would not suffice. Vincenzo’s precious horses, bathed regularly in wine to maintain their lustrous coats, could not be pressed, lest they appear worn out at their presentation to the king. Frustrated, Rubens wrote to Chieppio asking for additional funds, while promising to spend his own salary until he could be reimbursed. “No one can accuse me of negligence or extravagance; my clearly balanced accounts will prove the contrary,” he wrote. “I beg you to favor me by informing His Highness freely of everything, or by having him read this letter.” A few moments later he thought better of this presumptuous request and tacked on a postscript: “It would be better for me if you were to make a verbal report; the letter in certain places may exceed the limits of modesty and reverence for His Highness.”
