by Mark Lamster
On his peaceful new estate, Rubens took up landscape painting in earnest for the first time in his career. Freed from diplomatic service, he also celebrated the pleasures of family, love, and society in pictures of extraordinary grace and beauty, images that often depicted his beautiful wife, Helena Fourment. She was there in The Feast of Venus, a Roman debauch in which he placed her in the arms of a muscled Satyr, and she was there, in several guises, in The Garden of Love, a more respectable outdoor fete. If her face was not immediately recognizable, she was at least spiritually present in a series of love-themed mythological paintings—The Three Graces, The Judgment of Paris, Venus and Adonis, Diana and Callisto—that remain, to this day, among his most beloved pictures.
Those canvases were balanced by a series of less sanguine meditations on the costs of war, raw acknowledgments that, for all of his own good fortune and the ostentatious luxury enjoyed by his royal clients, the world was still a cruel place, and that man was often responsible for his own tribulations. Rubens, raised by a single mother who kept her family together through war and the degeneracy of her husband, persistently depicted the female figure as a paragon of virtue and peace felled by male bloodlust. In a sketch made in chalks and gouache some time after his return from London, he drew Mars, dagger in hand, dragging a woman off by the hair as Minerva and Hercules look on helplessly. In a monumental Massacre of the Innocents, a gruesome slaughter painted in 1636, children are speared and trampled by Roman soldiers. A swooning mother in the foreground wears a contemporary dress, a striking suggestion of the relevance of the mythological scene.
Rubens deplored violence in practice, but no painter, before or since, depicted it with such relish or sheer beauty. Whether it was a lion hunt, a crucifixion, or a battle scene, his expressive brushstrokes and dynamic compositional structures suited themselves to an aesthetic celebration of mortal brutality. Rubens’s violence could be gratuitous—skewered children and severed heads on pikes—but for the most part it was not of an easy, pandering variety. Rubens had spent a lifetime working to establish peace in Europe, and his paintings of war were meditations on its awful costs, rather than bellicose arguments for aggression. Even his warrior heroes were tragic figures. A cycle of paintings, made during the truce years, related the story of the valiant Roman consul Decius Mus, who sacrificed himself to save his own army.
Rubens’s great masterpiece on the theme of violence was his Horrors of War, painted in the winter of 1638 as a commission for the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The composition, for which he was paid 142 florins, was derived from the earlier sketch of Mars dragging off a female figure, but with significant alterations. At the center of the large canvas, Rubens painted the war god rushing forward with a bloody sword as a nude Venus, one of his most beautiful, drapes herself across his body in an effort to restrain him. An architect, protractor in hand, is thrown on the ground, symbolizing the urban destruction that is war’s inevitable consequence. Mars treads on a book and paper—the sad fate of the arts and sciences. Cowering at the side is a woman with a child in her arms. As Rubens wrote in an explanatory note about the painting, that maternal figure “indicates that fertility, procreation, and parental love are disrupted by war, which ruins and destroys everything.” Opposite her is another disconsolate female figure, reeling in terror. “That grieving woman,” the artist wrote, “clad in black with a torn veil, robbed of all her jewels and ornaments, is the unfortunate Europe, which has endured plunder, humiliation, and misery for so many years now, so deeply felt by everyone, that I need say no more on the subject.”
In fact, he had a bit more to say on the subject. It was in that same year, 1638, that his old friend Balthasar Moretus commissioned from him a title-page design for yet another edition of Frederik de Marselaer’s primer on diplomatic conduct. Rubens responded with a typically sophisticated composition: Minerva (representing wisdom) and Mercury (patron of ambassadors) reach out to each other below a bust of Politica, an allegorical personification of good government, itself crowned by the towers of a vigorous city. Angels fill the sky above. Dancing children appear in relief below. In a letter, Rubens described the design in some detail, explaining the significance of its many elements in a monologue that shifted from the exploits of the Athenian politician Themistocles to his own philosophy on the conduct of foreign affairs. “The advice gleaned from Minerva’s wisdom must be put into action through eloquence, through the words best suited to the issue, so that the ambassador fulfills his duty with composure,” he wrote. “Through the accomplishments of ambassadors (indicated by the olive branch which they bear), who judiciously conduct public affairs, the citizens are preserved.”
Two years after he wrote those words, Rubens succumbed to the gout that had plagued him for so much of his adult life. His final decline was rapid. By the spring of 1640, the artist’s dexterous hands were crippled to the extent that he could no longer hold a pen. A series of doctors treated him in his last days; Ferdinand even dispatched his personal medical team from Brussels, but to no avail. All the bloodlettings and false cures may well have done more harm than good, a possibility of which Rubens was acutely aware—he had always been suspicious of such treatments. Diet may also have contributed to his problems. Herring, a staple of the Flemish table, contains a hormone that exacerbates the effects of gout.
Rubens died on May 30, 1640, at the elegant home he designed for himself in Antwerp, with his wife by his side. Three days later he was buried at the Church of St. James. In the years following, an altar was raised in his honor, with paired columns, a statue of the Madonna by one of his prized students, and an epitaph in Latin composed by his old friend Gevaerts. Indeed, no Flemish writer of merit failed to pen an encomium to the great painter-diplomat, but few achieved the majesty that was Rubens’s signature. Antwerp’s Alexander van Fornenbergh may have come closest. “The rhyming geniuses who have celebrated Rubens in bold verses and composed learned poems in his honor all imagine they have carried off the palm, but they have taken charcoal to paint the sun,” he wrote. Only Rubens could have gotten away with that.
EPILOGUE
We are not likely to see a painter-diplomat like Rubens again. Ours is an age of specialization, and the practice of diplomacy has become a fully professionalized calling. Modern modes of travel and telecommunication mitigate against the need for the kind of proxy diplomacy conducted by Rubens. Though back-channel negotiations are still a useful tool in a statesman’s repertoire, it is hard to imagine a scenario in which a delicate matter of policy would be entrusted to an artist, especially a painter. The contemporary art world is an insular place, and its stars are practically groomed to challenge conventional authority and command public attention—hardly desirable character traits for a reliable political operative. A chef or an architect would seem a more plausible, if still unlikely, candidate for a covert diplomatic role. Those professions remain grounded in craftwork, but confer on their foremost practitioners a measure of deference among figures of international power.
Rubens, however, was born at a time when the greatest painters worked at the pleasure of kings and queens and heads of state. He honored them with his brush, and served them as a diplomat. In return, he was celebrated by his royal patrons, and sometimes more for his ability as an ambassador than for his skill as a painter, which was almost universally considered without equal. Sadly, that same political career is almost entirely forgotten by scholars of political history. For art historians, it is of ancillary interest, worthy of attention to the extent that it informs Rubens’s work as an artist, but not in its own right and only marginally for any broader access it might give to his personality or the context in which he practiced.
The vicissitudes of history are at least in part to blame for this state of neglect. Rubens’s greatest achievement as a statesman, the treaty he negotiated between Spain and England, is now a footnote in the grand sweep of seventeenth-century international relations, no matter how critical it may have appeared at the moment of its signa
ture or how much skill was required to bring it to fruition. Rubens never achieved his ultimate diplomatic objective, a reconciliation of Spain and the Dutch provinces, and with it peace in the Low Countries. That did not come until eight years after his death, with the signing of the Treaty of Münster, in 1648; with it, the Dutch formally won their independence from Madrid. That treaty was the first of a pair of accords signed in Germany in 1648 (the second was the Treaty of Osnabrück) that together constituted the Peace of Westphalia, which brought to a simultaneous close the Eighty and Thirty Years’ wars.
Münster gave the Dutch the freedom in name that they already had in practice, but it did not open Antwerp to the world. By the terms of the treaty, the Scheldt remained closed to international traffic. Antwerp’s golden age had come in the sixteenth century; the seventeenth would belong to Amsterdam. Belgium would not receive its own independence for nearly two centuries, during which time it passed through Spanish, Austrian, French, and Dutch control. Even now it is a land without a common language, a federation of relatively autonomous and culturally heterogeneous regions. Antwerp’s resurgence as an international trading center did not come until the latter half of the nineteenth century, fueled by the spoils of Belgium’s colonial empire. Large-scale industrialized growth, funded by the Marshall Plan, followed World War II. Today, Antwerp is again one of the busiest ports in the world and an international design capital.
It is also very much a city Rubens would recognize, a fashionable center of winding lanes and discreet charm. Alva’s old citadel is gone; Antwerp’s Koninklijk fine arts museum sits in the terrain vague that once separated the old fort from the city proper. Its Rubens galleries are among its prized attractions. Indeed, nearly four centuries after his death, the painter’s presence in the city is ubiquitous, emanating from the bronze statue of him that commands the Groenplaats, Antwerp’s central plaza. Adjacent to this is the Onze Lieve Vrouwe-kathedraal, where Rubens’s two great altarpieces—The Raising of the Cross and its pendant illustrating the descent therefrom—flank the pulpit. The limpid light of the cathedral hasn’t changed much since the days of the painter, and many other landmarks of that time are similarly intact: the offices of the Plantin Press, for instance, and the home of his friend Nicolaas Rockox, filled with a connoisseur’s collection of art and bric-a-brac. The Grote Markt still has its medieval character, and the Meir is still Antwerp’s main thoroughfare. Just off it, on the Wapper, is a facsimile of the home and studio Rubens built for himself after his return from Rome. Only the portico and garden pavillion remain from the days of the artist; subsequent owners dramatically reshaped the elegant complex Rubens had built for himself. One even turned it into an equestrian academy. The painstaking reconstruction one finds today was undertaken only in the early twentieth century, and completed during the Nazi occupation of Belgium. Rubens’s palpable eroticism was not considered “degenerate” by the National Socialists. They claimed him instead as an exemplar of muscular Aryan genius. One of the most important academic monographs on the painter was published in Munich in 1942—an uncomfortable reality for contemporary scholars.
This, of course, was always an issue with the opacity of Rubens’s works; meanings could be assigned to them, regardless of the painter’s intention, and never mind what he might have thought. Sometimes this was a benefit, sometimes not. As the scholar Jacob Burckhardt wrote in his landmark study of the painter, Recollections of Rubens, “The position of art is especially perilous when it has to serve a prevailing opinion, patriotic, political or religious, in great historical pictures.”
But a larger problem for Rubens has been not so much the imposition of distasteful readings on his pictures as a more profound loss of meaning altogether. Even in the seventeenth century, a lively debate could be had among critics and connoisseurs as to the utility of allegorical painting, and whether it was appropriate to combine contemporary and historical figures and events. In the years following, the British master Joshua Reynolds called that kind of mishmash a “fault,” though he gave the great Rubens a pass. By the end of the nineteenth century, Burckhardt could describe Rubens’s allegorical mode of representation as “a vogue which is now absolutely obsolete.” The mythological, historical, and biblical stories that were the subjects of his paintings are no longer familiar to modern viewers. Even scholars have trouble deciphering the intricate statecraft of seventeenth-century Europe that was the subtext (and occasionally the primary theme) of his art.
With his works shorn of so much intellectual freight, the popular perception of Rubens has sunk to a lowest-common-denominator view of the artist as an indefatigable promoter of Baroque power with a special predilection for plump ladies. The term “Rubenesque” entered the lexicon as a euphemism for a voluptuous female figure in 1913, in the women’s magazine Maclean’s—the editors found his taste “eccentric.” Indeed, modern audiences, for the most part, admire rather than adore him. His works can be impenetrable, and they do not leave obvious traces of a troubled personality; Rubens was not the maladjusted, self-destructive genius so many of us have come to expect of great painters. Those characteristics more aptly describe his brooding contemporaries Caravaggio and Rembrandt, both more popular today. Rubens, however, was famously well-balanced. If nothing else, that much is clear from even a brief glimpse at one of his very few self-portraits. There is no great sense of introspection in these pictures, no hinting at unfathomable psychological depths, no access given to the inner workings of a complex mind. The traditional polarity of the portrait is inverted: you are not invited to gaze in at the soul of Peter Paul Rubens; instead, he looks out appraisingly at you, betraying little more than a commanding self-possession.
The formalist reduction of Rubens began in the decades following his death, and one of the chief culprits was his own biographer, Roger de Piles. Like Rubens, de Piles conducted diplomatic work under the cover of a career in the arts (as a collector and critic), and actually penned his influential Abrégé de la vie des peintres (Short History of the Lives of the Painters) while imprisoned in The Hague for spying on behalf of France. His notorious Balance des peintres, published in 1708, graded fifty-six contemporary and historical artists on a scale of 0 to 18 (the higher the better) in the categories of composition, drawing, color, and expression. Rubens’s combined score of 65 was equaled only by Raphael. Leonardo and Michelangelo received 4s in color; Rembrandt was done in by a 6 in drawing; Caravaggio got a 0 for expression.
On de Piles’s ledger, Rubens received his highest marks for composition and color, and it was on these terms that he was most celebrated in Paris. His “design,” however, was a point of contention. Nationalist critics advocated the more severe classicism of Nicolas Poussin, and connoisseurs divided between camps of Rubenistes and Poussinistes. Compared with the Frenchman, Rubens appeared almost wanton in his handling of the body, an artist to be appreciated primarily for his bravura application and modulation of color. The aestheticization of the Rubens legacy was only accelerated by his association with the painters of the rococo, Antoine Watteau and François Boucher most prominently, who freely adapted his style in pictures of sweet, frivolous pleasure. As the esteemed historian Kenneth Clark wrote, “Rubens did for the female nude what Michelangelo did for the male. He realized so fully its expressive possibilities that for the next century all those who were not the slaves of academicism inherited his vision of the body as pearly and plump.”
Rubens would always be an “artist’s artist,” a painter admired for his technical virtuosity and creative invention. “He dominates,” wrote Eugène Delacroix, “he overwhelms you with so much liberty and audacity.” Some have considered him too overpowering. The English critic John Ruskin, in 1849, called him “vulgar,” a sentiment echoed two decades later by the American painter Thomas Eakins. “Rubens is the nastiest most vulgar noisy painter that ever lived,” Eakins wrote. “His men are twisted to pieces. His modeling always crooked and dropsical and no marking is ever in its right place or anything like what
one sees in nature … His pictures always put me in mind of chamber pots.”
That attitude has been, for the most part, an aberration. Rubens’s work has been a vital source for painters of various periods, schools, and nationalities. His influence is evident in the work of Auguste Renoir, Willem de Kooning, and Lucian Freud. The opacity of his paintings, along with his attention to the painted surface, anticipated the implacability and object fetishism of so much contemporary work, in particular the minimalist and conceptual movements. His workshop production remains a standard, in terms of both its scale and its profitability, by which others are measured even as art making has become an industrialized process. His works still command top dollar. In 2002, a “lost” Rubens Massacre of the Innocents (it had been incorrectly attributed) was sold at auction for the equivalent of $86 million, then the fourth-highest figure on record for a painting.
One of the more poignant references to Rubens can be attributed to Pablo Picasso, one of the few painters in history who could match his natural genius, and ironically one who was said to abhor him. Rubens was nevertheless an unavoidable touchstone for the Spaniard, and Rubens’s monumental meditation on the unholy cost of violence, The Horrors of War, was inevitably a source of inspiration when Picasso began work on his response to the Nazi bombing of the Basque village of Guernica, in late April 1937. That immense black-and-white canvas, more than twenty-five feet across and eleven feet tall, quoted Rubens’s earlier work, but with a savage, unrelieved brutality. It first was exhibited at the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 Paris World’s Fair and then traveled around the world, drawing attention to and raising funds for the republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. Three centuries earlier, Rubens had been similarly moved by the plight of innocent civilians in his own homeland.
