Master of Shadows

by Mark Lamster

  Judged by its contents, the most impressive gallery in Antwerp belonged to Rubens. Its walls were adorned with his own paintings, with copies he made from old-master works, and with originals by the likes of Titian, Raphael, Tintoretto, and Veronese. He also collected from among his own circle, including his pupil Van Dyck, and local painters of good but lesser reputation. Rubens, artist of the grand gesture, had a special fondness for the small genre and landscape scenes that he rarely painted himself (and that snobbish Italophiles like Iberti disparaged as the only idioms in which Flemings might be trusted). These works were complemented by the large collection of antiquities he brought back from Rome. He also built an extensive library, with volumes on subjects ranging from architecture and botany to theology and zoology. Classical history was, of course, a special point of emphasis. His taste in literature was generally more scholarly than bombastic. He once complained of the French writer Père Goulu, “His conceit and vanity are insufferable, and his hyperbole passes all measure.”

  For Rubens, this was a working collection. Intellectually, it was his conduit to an accurate reconstruction of the historical past, one of the great aims of the antiquarian project. As an artist devoted to the ideals of the Renaissance, he believed a thorough knowledge of the classical tradition was a professional necessity. “In order to achieve the highest perfection one needs a full understanding of the statues, nay a complete absorption in them,” Rubens wrote in a treatise on sculpture, though he warned that the painter should at all costs “avoid the effect of stone.” To aid in focusing his attention, Rubens designed a special gallery for his statues, a miniature museum modeled on the Roman Pantheon, which he tacked onto the back of the refurbished Flemish house. Willem van Haecht, who had painted the image of the Van der Geest home with Rubens addressing the archdukes Albert and Isabella, depicted a version of the gallery in his Studio of Apelles, painted around 1628. (The title offered a thinly veiled reference to Rubens.) The small gallery was semicircular, with a half-dome ceiling punctured by an oculus window and more than fifty niches on two levels for display. This configuration had been endorsed by a long line of influential Italian architectural theorists, including Vitruvius, Sebastiano Serlio, and most recently Vincenzo Scamozzi, who illustrated a similar space in his 1615 pattern book, L’idea della architettura universale, of which Rubens owned a copy.

  IN 1618, Rubens dramatically expanded his collection of antiquities in a deal with Dudley Carleton, the English ambassador to the Dutch government at The Hague. Carleton was in his mid-forties at the time—he was just four years older than Rubens—but he had already developed a drawn and weary aspect about him, the product of a peripatetic career in which he had often found himself held responsible for the ill-considered behavior of his superiors. As a younger man, he had been appointed as a court secretary to one of the aristocratic co-conspirators in the so-called Gunpowder Plot, the famously ill-conceived scheme to blow up the Houses of Parliament while King James I was calling it to order. Carleton was briefly detained before he was cleared of any wrongdoing.

  Carleton’s association with Rubens began before the two men had even met. In 1616, just after Carleton had arrived in the Netherlands, Rubens sold him a hunting scene in exchange for a diamond necklace valued at 50 pounds (about 600 guilders). Hunting scenes were quite fashionable with the English nobility at the time, and Carleton had in fact wanted an even larger version of the same painting. Rubens, however, demanded nearly twice as much for the bigger picture, and the ambassador was in no position to increase his offer.

  Carleton, in fact, was in some economic jeopardy, and it was this uncomfortable situation that Rubens would leverage to transform himself into one of Europe’s foremost collectors of antiquities. Carleton’s straitened circumstances were the product of yet another disastrous experience working on behalf of a highly placed English nobleman, Robert Carr, the Earl of Somerset. Like many British aristocrats of the period, Carr had been bitten by the art bug, and he had arranged for Carleton, then England’s ambassador in Venice, to acquire a collection for him in that center of artistic patronage. This was something Carleton had been doing for a while, and with political motivation. Though James I was a bawdy Scotsman with little interest in the arts beyond the occasional trip to the theater, his son Henry, the Prince of Wales, was something of an aesthete, and considered London an isolated intellectual backwater in comparison to Madrid, Paris, and Rome. If the English Stuarts were to have any credibility in those capitals, Henry thought, they would have to be taken seriously as patrons of the arts. Henry died before he could succeed his father to the throne, but his interest in the arts inspired his countrymen, in particular Carr, who happened to be the king’s closest confidant.

  With the exception of James himself, there was no more powerful figure in England than Carr. The king doted on him, besotted with his powerful build, his charm, and their shared Scottish roots. James even gifted Carr the seized home of the explorer Walter Raleigh, then resident in the Tower of London as an enemy of the state. Carleton, in Venice, was charged with filling this palatial manor with art. He spent 800 pounds—a small fortune—on a collection of antique marbles and paintings by Venetian masters and then shipped the entire haul off to London. But before Carleton could be reimbursed, Carr was swept up in a scandal that would bring a swift conclusion to his career.

  While Carleton was busy rounding up Venetian art for Carr, the earl had availed himself of an object of beauty in London: Frances Howard, wife of Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex. The extramarital affair generated considerable public outrage. Even Carr’s own deputy, Sir Thomas Overbury, was appalled. Carr was not one to tolerate such impudence, and neither was King James, who tried to ship Overbury abroad. When he refused that appointment, the irate king saw to it that he was jailed in the Tower of London. That might have been the end of the matter, but Carr continued with his revenge, having his former secretary murdered with a combination of toxic candies and a poisoned enema. When Carr’s culpability in that crime was discovered, he was carted off to the tower, notwithstanding his relationship with King James. Alas, this was no good for Carleton; the trove of paintings and antiquities he had acquired on the earl’s behalf had just arrived from Venice. Carleton found the collection in Carr’s bowling alley and just managed to liberate it before it was impounded. But he could hardly afford to keep it. “I am by mischance made a master of such curiosities,” he complained. The paintings he arranged to sell off (at a considerable loss), but the marbles were harder to bargain away. There was more bad news for him when he arrived at his new post as ambassador to The Hague. The shipment of antiquities was short seven statues. Carleton could do nothing but ruefully summon his customary British forbearance. “I finde some of my owne heads wanting,” he wrote.

  Even with those losses, the collection of marbles was estimable, and when Rubens heard that Carleton had it on the Continent, he dispatched a letter inquiring if the ambassador would be inclined to accept a reasonable offer for it. The answer, of course, was yes. Carleton had purchased the marbles for the equivalent of 6,000 florins (never mind those missing heads), and he sought only equal value in return. Rubens, for his part, was happy to oblige sight unseen, but wanted to pay in paintings, not cash. “I find that at present I have in house the very flower of my pictorial stock, particularly some pictures which I have kept for my own enjoyment; some I have even repurchased for more than I had sold them to others,” he wrote, adding, “I like brief negotiations, where each party gives and receives his share at once.” To that end, he attached a list of images from which Carleton could choose, indicating the dimensions and prices of each.

  Payment in kind was somewhat less than ideal for Carleton, but he knew that paintings would be far easier for him to move, both literally and figuratively, than his statues. Nevertheless, he was offering Rubens something exceptional, and wasn’t about to be hustled. “You, sir, may calculate on having in this collection of marbles, the most costly and most precious [of it
s kind], which no prince or private person, whoever he may be, on this side the mountains can have.” He had reviewed Rubens’s offer sheet and found it, like his heads, wanting. Too many of the paintings were studio productions, and Carleton was interested only in “originals.”

  Rubens blanched at this suggestion. The question of originality was hardly straightforward given the practices of his workshop. “They are so well retouched by my hand that they are hardly to be distinguished from originals,” he wrote. “The reason I would deal more willingly in pictures is clear… they cost me, so to speak, nothing. For everyone is more liberal with the fruits of his own garden than with those he must buy in the market. Besides, I have spent this year already some thousands of florins on my estate, and I should not like, for a whim, to exceed the limits of good economy. I am not a prince, sed qui manducat laborem manuum saurum [but one who lives by the work of his hands].” The funds in question were almost certainly those used in the construction of the gallery that would eventually house Carleton’s statues. In any case, he thought Carleton foolish for not taking a larger number of the retouched paintings, to which he assigned dramatically lower prices and which he considered largely indistinguishable from those he painted entirely himself.

  The negotiation wasn’t the brief affair Rubens envisioned, but eventually the two parties reached an agreement in which Carleton received eight Rubens originals along with 2,000 guilders’ worth of tapestries purchased in Brussels. There was but one caveat: Carleton wasn’t buying the artist’s false modesty. “I cannot subscribe to your denial of being a Prince,” he wrote, “because I esteem you the Prince of Painters and of Gentlemen, and to that end I kiss your hands.”

  RUBENS MAY HAVE had the financial resources of a prince, and Carleton may have esteemed him as one, but Rubens was not of noble blood, and he kept a safe distance from the royal court in Brussels, even as he profited from its patronage. The archdukes’ Coudenberg Palace was a cold, sober place, its severity relieved only by its opulence. Both Albert and Isabella had been reared in Spanish courts noted for their punctilious formality and zealous Catholicism, attributes they brought with them to the Netherlands. Those qualities proved to be particularly useful during the truce years, as they worked to instill a sense of national unity on a polity whose communal bonds had been fractured by years of conflict.

  The archdukes began this process of nation building by consolidating their power within the aristocracy. It was their privilege to award membership in the Order of the Golden Fleece, among other honors and titles, and to appoint provincial governors from among the nobility. Once they established a loyal political base, they had at their disposal the mighty financial engine of the Spanish Netherlands, powered by its advanced agrarian system and extensive trade network. Though Madrid constrained their policy-making abilities, the archdukes retained for their own administration moneys collected from the provinces—moneys that had previously been forwarded on to Spain. So endowed, Albert and Isabella spent lavishly on their own court. Coudenberg, along with their other palaces at Tervuren, Binche, and Mariemont, was outfitted with the finest Flemish tapestries and the fruits of their unsurpassed garden of court artists, Rubens chief among them. Albert and Isabella may have been servants of Madrid, but their aggressive program of building and patronage signaled, both to their own population and to observers abroad, that they were to be taken seriously as sovereigns in the grand Habsburg tradition.

  The archdukes spent extravagantly from the public coffers, but they still managed to cultivate a strong bond with their subjects. Albert made it a tradition to wash the feet of worshippers on Maundy Thursday, the feast day just before Easter. In 1615, Isabella won an archery contest at the festival of the Crossbow Guild. Rubens admired her immensely. “She is a princess endowed with all the virtues of her sex,” he would write. “Long experience has taught her how to govern these people and remain uninfluenced by false theories which all newcomers bring from Spain.”

  That piety was something that she and Albert extended across their dominion. Beyond the cult of their own personality, the ultimate unifying force of their monarchy was a resurgent Catholicism. During their rule, Catholics of all denominations—Augustinians, Capuchins, Carmelites, Dominicans, Franciscans, Jesuits—brought a great flood of fervor to the Spanish Netherlands. Antwerp, formerly a haven of religious tolerance and secularism, was to be a shining beacon of the Counter-Reformation. The Church became an omnipresent force in the daily life of the city. Sunday blue laws prohibiting consumption of alcohol and precluding other entertainments were strictly enforced. Witches were hunted and superstition suppressed. Books, plays, and music were censored by the clergy. A proper religious education was forced on the public, the lower classes in particular.

  The new religiosity generated an artistic efflorescence the likes of which had never been seen in northern Europe, or perhaps anywhere else. The iconoclasms of the early conflict years had denuded Flemish churches of their artistic patrimony. After years of warring and economic privation, the remnants of so many barren and inadequate buildings stood in an appalling state of decrepitude. That would have to change. Enormous sums were dedicated to ecclesiastical reconstruction and beautification. Rubens, having returned from Rome, could see just how beneficial this would be to his career, and was savvy enough to take advantage. Before the expiry of the Twelve Years’ Truce in 1621, he executed more than sixty altarpieces, a third for churches in Antwerp. The Jesuits alone spent 500,000 guilders on their Antwerp basilica, St. Charles Borromeo. Rubens designed the facade and a cycle of thirty-two paintings for its ceilings. Working from his templates, Van Dyck and other assistants were responsible for most of the labor on this enormous project, tragically destroyed when the church burned in 1715.

  Rubens’s two most celebrated ecclesiastical works from the truce years survive, and since 1815 have been united at the Onze Lieve Vrouwekathedraal, where they stand flanking the pulpit. The cathedral was not the intended destination for The Raising of the Cross; it was originally commissioned as an altarpiece for the Church of St. Walburga, to which Rubens’s dear friend Cornelis van der Geest was principal benefactor. It does, however, make a fitting pendant to The Descent from the Cross, an altarpiece created specifically for the cathedral, and at the request of the Harquebusiers’ Guild, then under direction of another Rubens intimate, the burgomeester Nicolaas Rockox. The artist earned a combined 5,000 guilders from the two jobs. Both were triptychs in a traditional Flemish format, and in both central panels the focus was on a dramatically lit Christ figure that evoked a deep sense of pathos. The compositional strategies of the Venetian school and the muscularity of Michelangelo were plainly evident in the two altars. Caravaggio’s theatrical lighting and emotional force were also unmistakably present. But Rubens’s Christ was no commoner; he was a chiseled antique hero, a fusion of the classical and the Catholic realized with a sense of tragic urgency. From so many disparate inspirations, Rubens had synthesized something majestically his own.

  Those two great altarpieces remain in Antwerp, but that was not to be the fate of the monumental Adoration of the Magi that Rubens painted to celebrate the signature of the Twelve Years’ Truce. Great hopes were pinned on that agreement, but for all its temporary benefits it proved, by any reasonable estimation, to be a disappointment. The truce didn’t so much end fighting as initiate a new phase of conflict, a cold war with combat displaced to the territorial margins of empire, and the Scheldt still under blockade. During the truce years, Dutch and Spanish forces engaged in a heated battle for colonial territory, facing off against each other in the Americas, along the West African coast, on the Indian subcontinent, and in the Far East. Matters were equally combustible in the disputed boundary regions that abutted the Low Countries along their German borders. The gradual escalation of hostilities was an impossible drain on the already fragile stability of Lerma’s government. With neither financial nor military resources to fight on interminably on so many fronts, Spain was in dire need
of a lasting resolution to the war with the Dutch.

  In this goal Lerma had a partner in Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the de facto political leader of the Dutch provinces. Oldenbarnevelt had been instrumental in concluding the Twelve Years’ Truce, believing that the costs of war, in blood and treasure, outweighed the potential economic benefits of the colonial trade. Almost as soon as the ink was dry on the truce agreement, he and Lerma initiated back-channel negotiations in an effort to consolidate its temporary, twelve-year term into a permanent peace. The Spanish price for this would be Dutch renunciation of the Indies. In exchange, the Dutch would have their freedom of religion. Spain was even prepared to give up its demand that the Dutch lift their blockade on the Scheldt—a concession that all but sacrificed Antwerp’s economic future and its status as a financial capital.

  Lerma chose to place these delicate talks in the hands of his ruthless consigliere, Rodrigo Calderón, the Count of Oliva. The count had been born in Antwerp, and it was hoped his presence in the city, on the pretext of other state business, would not arouse the suspicion of the enemies of peace. Unfortunately, the swaggering Calderón did not prove to be the nimble operative the situation required. When the true intention of his visit became public, there was outrage on all sides. Revanchists in Madrid opposed compromise from the outset. For the archdukes, Calderón’s very mission, undertaken on their soil without so much as the courtesy of a warning, was an affront, and to the extent that Spanish objectives diverged from their own—especially in regard to the Scheldt—a direct blow to their interests. In the Dutch provinces, reaction was equally strong, especially among the powerful commercial interests in Holland and Zeeland that stood to benefit most from colonial expansion and, conversely, had most to lose from the potential resurgence of Antwerp as an international center of trade. Calderón was forced to depart in failure, and when he left, he took Rubens’s commemoration of the truce along with him—an unintentionally ironic commentary on the situation. The painting, pulled from the walls of Antwerp’s town hall, was a gift from the regents of the city, who hoped to curry Calderón’s favor and thought it the most beautiful present they could bestow on a man they knew to be a great connoisseur of art.