by Mark Lamster
The journey across the Mediterranean was slow but uneventful, and for a while it seemed that luck had turned in favor of the young painter. At Alicante, he consigned the horse and table of the grand duke without difficulty. But he also learned that the overland trip across Spain, which was already going to be weeks longer than expected, was to be longer even still. The Spanish court was not in Madrid; since 1601, it had been removed to Valladolid, several days to the northwest over difficult terrain. That shift, which lasted five years, had come at the bidding of Lerma, whose intention was to isolate Philip III from the chattering political busybodies of Madrid, and thereby enhance his own influence.
The trek from Alicante to Valladolid was a twenty-day slog through wind and rain that matched all the difficulty of the crossing of the Italian boot. And when Rubens finally did arrive at the residence of Annibale Iberti, Vincenzo’s Spanish ambassador, he was greeted by another surprise. Philip wasn’t in town. Earlier on the same day, the king had departed on a rabbit-hunting expedition into the nearby hills. At least he’d be back soon. Satisfied with himself, Rubens composed a missive to Vincenzo. “I hope that for this first mission which Your Serene Highness has condescended to entrust me, a kind fate will grant me your satisfaction, if not complete, at least in part,” he wrote. “And if some action of mine should displease you, whether excessive expenditure or anything else, I beseech and implore you to postpone reproach until the time and place when I may be permitted to explain its unavoidable necessity.”
Alas, the note was written with something less than absolute candor. Ambassador Iberti, it seems, had not been expecting Rubens and his gift horses, and he was not pleased at their arrival—and in a bedraggled state at that. One of the grooms charged with administering the equine wine baths was nearly dead with a fever contracted on the journey, and would only last out the week. Iberti could not have been happy to welcome that contagion into his house, and was perhaps even less pleased to learn about the rather large debt Rubens had accrued along the way, for which he would now be responsible. The costs of the journey had grown to 500 ducats, 200 of which Rubens had fronted out of his own salary (in the neighborhood of 300 ducats per year), with another 300 borrowed from a merchant banker in Valladolid. “I regret that I am poor and have not the resources to correspond to my good will,” he wrote to Chieppio. “If this repayment of my loan is made promptly, I shall be grateful; I do not ask it as a gift or reward, as others may pretend I do.” Presumably, he meant Iberti. Rubens, a craftsman from a burgher family in Antwerp, could hardly be expected to finance his own mission.
Debt was the least of his problems. A week after Rubens’s own damp arrival in Valladolid, the shipment carrying the paintings and vases, delayed by the inclement weather, finally made it to Iberti’s door. Rubens opened the cases for inspection, only to be sickened by what he found: “Malicious fate is jealous of my too great satisfaction.” He had hand packed the paintings himself back in Mantua, lovingly wrapping them in oilskin before placing them in tin casings and airtight wooden chests. At Alicante, he had checked the contents to make sure everything had survived the sea journey, and found all to his satisfaction. But now the paintings were practically ruined beyond repair, “so damaged and spoiled that I almost despair of being able to restore them,” he wrote, adding, “I am in no way exaggerating.” It had been the rain, the three steady weeks of it. Dampness seeped through all of his careful packing, and the result was a mess of rotted canvas, faded color, and flaking paint.
As a remedy, Iberti pressed Rubens to do what repainting he could with the assistance of a team of Spanish artists, and to then slap together a half-dozen woodland scenes as replacements, ideas Rubens greeted with little enthusiasm. Rubens was not particularly impressed with the local Spanish talent, a fact he made clear in no uncertain terms in a letter to Chieppio. “God keep me from resembling them in any way!” A hasty job wasn’t going to fool anyone, especially a well-known connoisseur like Lerma. “I am convinced that, by its freshness alone, the work must necessarily be discovered as done here,” he wrote, “whether by the hands of such men, or by mine, or by a mixture of theirs and mine (which I will never tolerate, for I have always guarded against being confused with anyone, however great a man). And I shall be disgraced unduly by an inferior production unworthy of my reputation.”
If Rubens’s reaction to Iberti’s meddling was particularly sharp, it was because he found the ambassador’s attitude in regard to his Flemish artistic pedigree offensive. Iberti’s suggestion that Rubens toss off a few genre scenes for Lerma stank of the longstanding Italian prejudice that Flemish painters were capable only of cloying devotional pictures, fussy portraits, and the occasional landscape, but nothing more ambitious. Michelangelo summed up this general perception in a rambling disquisition published in 1548:
Flemish painting … will appeal to women, especially to the very old and the very young, and also to monks and nuns and to certain noblemen who have no sense of true harmony. They paint stuffs and masonry. The green grass of the fields, the shadow of the trees, and rivers and bridges, which they call landscapes, with many figures on this side and many figures on that. And all this, though it pleases some persons, is done without reason or art, without symmetry or proportion, without skilful choice of boldness and, finally, without substance or vigor. Nevertheless there are countries where they paint worse than in Flanders. And I do not speak ill of Flemish painting because it is all bad but because it attempts to do so many things (each one of which would suffice for greatness) that it does none well.
When it came to the backhanded compliment, Michelangelo was no less skilled than he was with a block of granite. Rubens, of course, did not share the Renaissance master’s opinion. If he had any one great aspiration for his artistic career, it was to forever obliterate such preconceived notions, and he would do so, in part, by synthesizing the strengths of the Italian tradition—its muscularity in composition and figure, its boldness in color and execution—with the meticulous pictorial description so characteristic of art from the Netherlands.
The good news was that the situation wasn’t quite so dire as Rubens and Iberti initially feared. Though Rubens claimed no exaggeration in his description of the damage done to the paintings, and may have been forthright in that immediate assessment, after giving them some time to dry out in the sun, and after a gentle cleaning and retouching, he was able to resurrect all but two of the works. These he replaced with one of his own compositions, making no secret of his authorship. This was a double portrait of the Greek philosophers Democritus and Heraclitus standing over a globe, a conventional pairing that typically contrasted the joyful Democritus, amused by the folly of man, with a more compassionate and teary-eyed Heraclitus. But Rubens’s bearded Democritus seemed somewhat more pensive than joyful, and his wizened Heraclitus more circumspect than weepy. Grand in theme, it was a clear rebuke to Iberti and an overt demonstration of Rubens’s capabilities as both a painter and a man of learning. It was also a perfect selection for a cagey statesman like Lerma, and perhaps also an allusion to the bond between Mantua and Spain (represented by the two philosophers with the world between them) that Vincenzo’s whole gift-giving enterprise was intended to reinforce in the first place.
Iberti got a measure of retribution on the upstart painter. When Philip returned from the woods, the ambassador made it a point to shunt Rubens off to the sidelines at the formal presentation of the carriage and horses, even though the duke had left explicit instructions that he be given a prominent position during these proceedings. “He could still have reserved the entire management for himself, and yet have given me a place near His Majesty, to make him a mute reverence,” Rubens carped. “I say this not to complain, like a petty person, ambitious for a little flattery, nor am I vexed at being deprived of this favor … He gave me no reason or excuse for the alteration of the order which, half an hour before, had been settled between us.” In Iberti’s defense, it was the ambassador’s traditional role to make
such presentations, and he can hardly be faulted for a certain degree of skepticism as to the abilities of the star-crossed political neophyte, operating above his social station, who had arrived at his door unannounced, in debt, carting a fatally ill groom, and with the spoiled fruits of his journey rotting in the leaky crates of his own devising.
Rubens was removed from the central action at the ceremony with Philip, but when it was time to make the presentation to Lerma, Iberti made sure he was front and center. If the duke was less than pleased with the touched-up reproductions, Rubens would be there to take the blame. But Lerma wasn’t upset at all; he was thrilled. Cloaked in a luxurious crimson robe, for a full hour he carefully inspected each of the pictures, commenting on their refinement throughout. In an exultant letter addressed directly to Vincenzo, Rubens reported Lerma’s “great satisfaction” with both the quantity and the quality of the paintings. “If the donor’s reward is the approval of his gifts, Your Most Serene Highness will have achieved his purpose.” The water damage had actually been a blessing, for it gave his fresh copies a patina of age, and with that “a certain authority and appearance of antiquity.” Indeed, Lerma thought all but two were originals, and neither Rubens nor Iberti was foolish enough to dissuade him of his mistaken impression.
Back in Mantua, Vincenzo could be pleased that he remained in good stead with the Spanish court. For Rubens and Lerma, however, the trip marked the beginning of a long and productive relationship. Rubens, politically astute, had chosen his ally wisely. In later years, he would often muse about the duke’s power over Philip III, and tell an anecdote about an Italian businessman granted an audience with the king. When Philip questioned why the Italian had not first taken his business to Lerma, the man responded, “But if I should have been able to have an audience with the duke, I should not have come to your majesty.” Rubens admired the duke’s influence, and Lerma was correspondingly impressed by the young painter—so much so that he commissioned from him a life-sized equestrian portrait and then lodged him at his country house at Ventosilla so he might complete it. The result, lost and later found in the Lerma family collection at the turn of the twentieth century, is a masterpiece, one of the painter’s first: the duke, clad in black armor and clutching a baton of command, sits formidably atop a white steed striding forward as if to march straight out of the picture frame. The obvious precedent was Titian’s 1548 mounted portrait of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at his victory over Protestant forces at Mühlberg, a painting in the Spanish royal collection and so immediately familiar to Lerma. (Rubens sketched a partial copy during a visit to Madrid at some point during his stay.) It was also a rather overt allusion to Tintoretto’s 1579–80 equestrian portrait of the present king’s father, Philip II, riding into Mantua, and so a reminder of the political alignment that prompted the gift. This allusion was reinforced by a subtle visual reference within the picture: Rubens cribbed the foreshortened steed on which Lerma sat from Andrea Mantegna’s celebrated Camera Picta frescoes at the Castello di San Giorgio, back in Mantua. Perhaps it was a reference only the artist would appreciate. But what no one could fail to see was the boldness of his composition. His face-on view of Lerma was both more dramatic and technically more difficult than the profile arrangements of Titian and Tintoretto, making it at once a repudiation of the prejudice against Flemish painters and a forthright demonstration of his own ambition.
The emphatically martial nature of Lerma’s portrait was actually somewhat ironic, for the duke spent much of the two decades after its completion working to forge peace in Rubens’s embattled homeland. The ugly situation in the Low Countries was surely a topic for discussion between Lerma and Rubens during the painter’s residence at Ventosilla. From the middle of the sixteenth century, the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands had been engaged in an on-again, off-again civil war, with the separatist and largely Protestant northern provinces seeking independence from Spain, and the predominantly Catholic southern provinces remaining, for the most part, loyal to Madrid. Rubens’s native Antwerp, a divided city, was caught in the middle.
In the future, both Lerma and Rubens would spend enormous time and energy in their efforts to bring resolution to the conflict in the Low Countries; for Rubens, the quest for that peace would become a defining grail he would chase for much of his professional life. For the moment, however, his thoughts were focused on his painting, and he wanted nothing more than to return to Rome, where he could continue his professional development. He even refused an offer to join Lerma’s court. It was nice to be wanted by so important a client, but as far as Rubens was concerned, Spain was an artistic wilderness. Italy remained the cultural heart of Europe; it was the wellspring of the Renaissance and the center of classical learning. Fueled by the great patronage engines of a resurgent Church and an urbane nobility, it was the best place for an ambitious young painter to confront the past and establish a reputation for the future. In Vincenzo, he had a patron who allowed him considerable, though not complete, autonomy.
There was also a matter of filial piety. Rubens’s elder brother Philip was living in Rome, where he was the librarian of Cardinal Ascanio Colonna. Despite the three-year gap in their ages, the brothers had always been close, and now both of their careers were ascendant. Before moving to Rome, Philip had established himself as the protégé of Justus Lipsius, perhaps the most influential scholar in Europe, who considered him almost a son. He had also served as personal secretary to Jean Richardot, president of the Flemish Council of State, a connection that must have been of great interest to Lerma.
As it was, Rubens would return to Italy as a more mature and able diplomat, and he would do so on his own terms. The travails of his embassy and the machinations of Iberti had hardened him, and his budding relationship with Lerma had boosted his already considerable confidence. His correspondence, passive and insecure during the ill-fated opening stages of his mission, became progressively more assured as he came into his own as a diplomat. The suggestion that he had been profligate or even dishonest in his accounts, presumably made by Iberti, was now met with an unequivocal defense from the painter. “I do not fear the slightest suspicion of carelessness or fraud,” he wrote. In fact, Iberti had been fairly complimentary in his reports back to Mantua about Rubens, though he planned to check his books.
Rubens was not concerned with accusations about his conduct, nor was he interested in a Parisian side trip intended solely to gratify Vincenzo’s prurient desire for painted French beauties. “I should not have to waste more time, travel, expenses, salaries (even the munificence of His Highness will not repay all this) upon works not worthy of me, and which anyone can do to the duke’s taste,” he wrote to Chieppio from Spain. The demand was bold, but Rubens was never one to beat around the bush. “Qui timide rogat, docet negare,” he was fond of saying, a maxim attributed to Seneca. “Who asks timidly, courts denial.” Rubens got his way.
Bypassing Paris and its women, Rubens returned by sea to Genoa, an elegant merchant city of churches and palazzi that enchanted him from the moment of his arrival. Rubens spent days on end dutifully recording its architectural wonders in his sketchbooks. His brother Philip was especially pleased to hear of his safe arrival on the Ligurian coast. Fearing the dangerous winter waters of the Mediterranean, he had composed a Latin prose poem dedicated to the artist, then in transit. Like his brother’s paintings, the composition evinced a fascination with classical history and a rather dramatic artistic disposition:
Aegeus was less anxious than I am now, about the fate of his dear brother Theseus, when on his native shore he sacrificed himself to the spirits of Androgenes; for my heart is torn apart by anxiety for you my brother, who is more worthy of love than daylight itself; for you, whom a small ship now bears away across the Tuscan sea, and for you, who must—alas!—put your trust in the inconstant sea; now that the terrible power of the winds is unleashed and the waves churn under the influence of malevolent stars. Ah! May the first man who built a ship and dared set sail
on the immense ocean eternally bewail his deed…. When will I be able to run to my brother, and our hands lock in a sweet embrace? It is then that the wild waves of Tages will come under my roof, and I shall welcome the opulent gifts of the oriental sea.
MANTUA MUST HAVE seemed a vision when Rubens saw it floating in a shroud of haze across the umbilical Ponte di San Giorgio. After a long and successful journey, it was a pleasure to return home, especially to so lovely a city. The birthplace of Virgil was a jumble of palaces and gardens enveloped by lakes that cast it in a fine mist. There was no questioning its beauty. Thomas Coryat, an English traveler in the early seventeenth century, declared it “the citie which of all other places in the world I would wish to make my habitation.” It hadn’t always been so. After a visit in 1459, Pope Pius II complained that the place was “marshy and unhealthy,” not to mention unpleasantly hot and overrun by frogs. Vincenzo’s Gonzaga forebears took action. The architect Leon Battista Alberti was commissioned to improve standards of construction, architecture, and urban design. In the following century, Giulio Romano, the prized student of Raphael, filled the role of court architect—one of his official titles was “superior of the streets”—and set about a monumental project of building and beautification. Romano’s work at Mantua included the Palazzo Te, a masterpiece of Mannerist style, and a lordly residence for himself, which Rubens would cast as a model for his own house in Antwerp, years later. The home of Andrea Mantegna, built during his tenure as court painter in the fifteenth century, would also serve as a model for Rubens, as would the astonishingly beautiful frescoes Mantegna created for the ducal palace.
