The Rape of Europa

by Charles FitzRoy

  Rubens executed a number of works for Philip IV’s aunt the Archduchess Isabella and her husband the Archduke Albert, joint rulers of the Spanish Netherlands. Isabella was impressed with Rubens’ intelligence and sent him to Spain in 1628 in the role of a diplomat, rather than a painter. The snobbish Spanish grandees were not impressed at the painter’s new-found status, the Duke of Aarschot writing dismissively to Rubens: ‘I should be very glad that you should learn for the future how persons in your position should write to those of my rank.’ Rubens, however, was more concerned to win the friendship of the king, and brought with him eight of his own paintings which were soon displayed in a state room in the Alcázar. As he had hoped, the king was full of admiration and the painter was soon enjoying a close relationship with Philip.

  Rubens was an indefatigable worker and, despite his arduous diplomatic duties negotiating a peace treaty between Spain and England, he still managed to find time to execute a large number of paintings, notably an Equestrian Portrait of Philip IV, with a landscape showing the view out of the window of the Alcázar. It was hung as a pendant to Titian’s Equestrian Portrait of Charles V, a true vote of confidence for the Fleming. In effect, it proclaimed Rubens as the heir of Titian. There is a note of self-satisfaction in the letter Rubens wrote on 2 December to his friend Nicolas-Claude Peiresc, the French astronomer, antiquary and collector, describing the intimate relationship he enjoyed with the king: ‘[Philip IV] takes an extreme delight in painting, and in my opinion this prince is endowed with excellent qualities. I know him already by personal contact, for since I have rooms in the palace, he comes to see me almost every day’. The two men obviously got on very well. At the end of the month Rubens was writing to Jan Gevaerts, the poet, philologist and historiographer: ‘The king alone arouses my sympathy. He is endowed by nature with all the gifts of body and spirit, for in my daily intercourse with him I have learned to know him thoroughly. And he would surely be capable of governing under any conditions, were it not that he mistrusts himself and defers too much to others.’

  Staying in the Alcázar, Rubens was in an ideal position to study the Titians which formed such a prized part of the royal collection, and he managed to make an astonishing number of copies (there is no record of Rubens copying the work of any other artist). According to Velázquez’s father-in-law Francesco Pacheco: ‘He copied every work by Titian owned by the king, namely the two bathing scenes [Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto], Europa, Adonis and Venus, Venus and Cupid, Adam and Eve, and others …’

  Rubens attached a lot of importance to these copies and kept them in his studio until his death in 1640. He particularly admired the Rape of Europa and was reputed to have referred to it as the first painting in the world; his copy is very faithful to the original. It was bought by Philip IV for 1,450 florins from Rubens’ estate after the artist’s death in 1640, along with a number of further copies after Titian including a much-cherished self-portrait of the artist in old age.

  The Italian painter and engraver Marco Boschini, who had studied under Palma Giovane, who in turn had worked in Titian’s studio, described Rubens’ passion for Titian in a poem:

  Rubens was as preoccupied with Titian

  As a lady has her heart with her lover

  And when he spoke of Titian

  The marvels he had seen made by him

  He confirmed in just truth

  Without passion, but with certainty

  That Titian had been the ultimate in painting

  And the greatest master of all

  As well as copying Titian’s work, Rubens was also inspired to produce original works of his own based on Titian’s poesie. These included his Venus and Adonis where the painter has reversed the composition so that the female nude, fully visible to the spectator, appears even more alluring than in Titian’s original. Some of his most beautiful mythological paintings hung in the Alcázar, including his romantic Garden of Love, hung in the king’s bedroom. Two other favourites of the king were Rubens’ erotic Three Graces and Diana and Callisto, a subject already painted by Titian, where Rubens focuses the spectator’s attention on the disgraced nymph, who bears the features of the artist’s beautiful second wife Hélène Fourment.

  Rubens was now regarded, in the words of the Spanish writer Lope de Vega, as ‘the new Titian’ and he was to play a crucial role in the rediscovery of the Venetian artist whose works were still little known in Spain outside court circles. The brilliant colours and the freedom and energy of his brushwork paid obvious homage to the Venetian and the large number of works he executed for the Spanish king made a strong impact on Spanish artists working in Madrid. Artists such as Francisco Rizi and Francisco de Herrera the Younger painted with a virtuosity that owes a clear debt to both Titian and Rubens.

  Rubens himself did not stay long in Spain, leaving in April 1629 laden with gifts, including a valuable ring worth 2,000 ducats given by the king. He continued his diplomatic mission in England, where negotiations ultimately led to the successful conclusion of a peace treaty in 1630, for which Charles I knighted the painter in Inigo Jones’ Banqueting House in Whitehall, beneath the ceiling on which he had painted the Apotheosis of James I. In 1631, Isabella petitioned Philip IV on Rubens’ behalf that he should be granted a similar honour, citing the precedent set by Titian who had been knighted by Charles V, and Philip made haste to acknowledge the request. Interestingly, the petition stressed that Rubens was in a class of his own, and that ‘his services in important matters … will not have the consequence of encouraging others of his profession to seek a similar favour’.

  Velázquez was a generation younger than Rubens but a mutual love for the paintings of Titian helped to draw the two artists together. As Pacheco recorded: ‘[Rubens] communicated little with painters. He only established a friendship with my son-in-law … and together they went to see the Escorial [to study the Titians].’ Velázquez, however, paid homage to Titian in a subtler and less overt manner than Rubens. Unlike the Fleming, he did not make direct copies of paintings of the Venetian master.

  Rubens encouraged Velázquez to go to Italy to study the works of the great Italian masters. Within three months of the former’s departure, Velázquez had left Madrid for Italy where he was to spend 18 months. He greatly admired the works of Titian and Tintoretto in Venice, and Raphael and Michelangelo in Rome. Sadly, the self-portrait that Velázquez executed in 1630 while in Rome, ‘a famous likeness of himself’, as Pacheco described it, ‘painted in the manner of the great Titian’, has been lost. Back in Madrid Velázquez assumed the role of court painter, executing portraits of the king and members of the royal family in his studio in the Gallery of the North Wind in the Alcázar, which he had invited Rubens to share on his visit to Madrid. The two artists got on very well and it seems that Velázquez accepted the fact that, when commissioning mythological paintings, Philip preferred the internationally renowned Fleming.

  In 1650, Velázquez was to visit Italy again. This time the painter went with specific instructions from the king to purchase works of art, both paintings and antique sculpture. He assured Philip that he would succeed in this, listing the Italian artists he ranked highest, with Titian top of the list. However, although Velázquez had ample opportunity to refresh his knowledge of the greatest artistic treasure-trove in Europe, his attempt to buy top quality Old Masters proved largely unsuccessful. His most notable purchases were two paintings by Veronese and numerous casts of antique statues.

  On his return Philip IV appointed Velázquez to the office of Palace Marshal. This office was largely devoted to arranging court festivities and overseeing daily affairs. It shows the overwhelming importance attached to court protocol that one of the foremost artists in Europe should have devoted so much of his time to such weighty matters as opening the king’s doors and windows, making sure that Philip was correctly attired, and placing the king’s chair in the right spot when he dined in public. The job also involved Velázquez in the maintenance of the royal collecti
on and, in the 1650s, he was put in charge of the decoration of the Alcázar. The Rape of Europa was now moved to a long, formal gallery overlooking the Garden of the Emperors, where it was hung between Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto. Lazaro Diaz del Valle, writer, genealogist and historian, and author of The Lives of Artists, a work similar in concept to that of Vasari in Italy, considered ‘that there is no Prince in all the earth who has his Alcázar adorned with such precious and admirable paintings and statues of bronze and of marble, nor such rare, showy, furnishings.’

  Velázquez was an important figure at court and, to cement his status, he longed to emulate Titian and Rubens and earn a knighthood from the king. To do this he needed to overcome the in-built conservatism of the Spanish nobility who controlled the Council of Orders, the governing body that awarded honours. The nobles continued to regard the profession of a painter as that of a mere artisan, and there was considerable resistance before Velázquez was finally awarded the coveted Order of Santiago in 1659. This is the cross that the painter so proudly displays in Las Meninas, his final masterpiece.

  As Palace Marshal, Velázquez had the run of the palace and was therefore one of the few with the opportunity to study the Rape of Europa and Titian’s other poesie. The morality of Counter-Reformation Spain, where the whole question of depicting the nude in art aroused considerable controversy, meant that the king would never have dared to display these paintings in public. Foreign artists may have been permitted to paint nudes, and Rubens was keen to emulate Titian in taking advantage of this, but Spanish artists were forbidden to do so and anyone suspected by the Inquisition of painting ‘obscene pictures’ could have their works seized or repainted, and the artist could suffer excommunication, a fine of 1,500 ducats and even banishment for one year.

  There were, however, double standards, and some collectors ignored the ban on painting nudes and while others sought out erotic works. As one commentator recorded, figures at the court of Philip IV greatly ‘appreciated painting in general, and the nude in particular, but … at the same time, exerted unparalleled pressure on artists to avoid the depiction of the naked human body’. This discrepancy is portrayed very clearly in Lope de Vega’s play La Quinta de Florencia where an aristocrat commits rape after viewing a scantily clad figure in a mythological painting by Michelangelo (interestingly the playwright chose an Italian, not a Spanish artist).

  Velázquez, too, ignored the ban and painted a number of nudes, none of which have survived with the exception of Venus at her Mirror, better known as the Rokeby Venus (after leaving Spain during the Peninsular War, it hung in Rokeby Hall in Yorkshire until 1906, when it was bought by the National Gallery, London). This beautiful painting, painted in sumptuous colours and in a wonderfully free style, shows a very obvious debt to Titian.

  Velázquez paid more direct homage to Titian in his painting known as The Spinners or Arachne’s Fable, executed in 1656–8. Like Titian’s poesie, Velázquez chose a myth from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, depicting the scene where Arachne had the temerity to challenge the goddess Minerva to a spinning competition. It is one of the Sevillian painter’s most sophisticated compositions. On the surface the painting depicts a tapestry works, perhaps the Royal Factory of St Elizabeth in Madrid (Velázquez knew the Factory intimately since one of his jobs as Palace Marshal was to supply tapestries for religious feasts and public festivals). In the painting, spinners are hard at work in the foreground, while in the background Minerva, wearing a helmet and watched by three courtly ladies, appears before Arachne, who is standing in front of a tapestry depicting the Rape of Europa, a copy of the Titian.

  On closer inspection the picture appears like a theatrical performance, a picture within a picture, the two main protagonists appearing twice: Arachne on the right in the foreground winding a ball of yarn (an allusion to her subsequent transformation into a spider for daring to challenge the goddess), while Minerva appears disguised as the old woman handling the distaff, before they reappear in the middle distance. The light pours in through windows on the left of the composition, brilliantly illuminating the figures in the background.

  All sorts of allegorical interpretations have been put forward and it is possible that the composition represents the Art of Painting, and that the courtly ladies in the middle distance, who present such a contrast with the working spinners in the foreground, may be the Muses, with the lady standing beside the viol de gamba, propped up in the alcove, representing the Muse of Music. What is clear is that the depiction of the Rape of Europa as the subject of the tapestry in the background is a deliberate act of homage by the Spanish artist to Titian. Velázquez’s painting was highly regarded by contemporaries. The first record of the painting was in 1664 when it was owned by Don Pedro de Arce with a valuation of 500 ducats, considerably higher than that of any of the other important Spanish and Italian works in his collection.

  Interestingly, Velázquez’s last great work, Las Meninas, also pays homage to the Rape of Europa, but more indirectly. The painting depicts a group of royal children, with their maids of honour (known as las meninas) who have just entered a vast room in the Alcázar, where the painter, standing at an easel, is at work. A mirror in the background shows the king and queen, who seem to be posing for the artist. On the back wall are two mythological paintings by Rubens, one of them depicting the Rape of Europa, a work that was strongly influenced by Titian’s original.

  The collection formed by Philip IV was the finest in Europe. His long reign, though disastrous politically, was a golden age of Spanish arts and literature. The king studied history and geography and spoke several languages, earning himself the epithet of the Planet King, the sun that blazed at the centre of the Spanish Court. This idea was to be taken up by Philip’s son-in-law the French King Louis XIV, who was to portray himself as the Sun King. The Spanish king attended literary salons where he and his friends could indulge in a light-hearted analysis of contemporary literature and poetry. Philip also loved the theatre and attended plays by Lope de Vega, Pedro Calderon de la Barca and Tirso de Molina, who wrote the best dramatists of the age. Their humorous and cynical plays poked fun at the rigid morality of Spanish society.

  But Philip made his strongest mark in the visual arts. As well as carrying out work restoring and improving the Alcázar, the king continued the tradition of his ancestors in building two new palaces, the hunting lodge Torre de la Parada and Buen Retiro, and filling these palaces with paintings he had commissioned. These were to hang alongside the great collection of Old Masters that he had inherited. Vicente Carducho noted the pre-eminence of the Venetian School: ‘There are many paintings [in the Alcázar] and the most esteemed of all were always those by Titian, in which colour achieves its force and beauty’.

  When Philip IV decided to decorate Torre de la Parada in the late 1630s, he preferred to commission mythological subjects from Rubens rather than Velázquez. Like Titian before him, Rubens was treated as a court painter in absentia. For Philip IV, his work contained a pastoral lyricism close to that of Titian’s poesie. The Fleming was also a famously fast worker with a well-organized studio. During the 1630s he despatched over 100 paintings from his workshop in Antwerp to Madrid.

  Velázquez’s paintings for the royal hunting lodge consisted of portraits of the royal family, antique subjects, two paintings of dwarves and one hunting scene. Few other Spanish artists were represented, giving some justice to the bitter criticism made by the painter Juseppe de Ribera, a major Spanish artist working in Naples, where he felt that he could earn more commissions than in his native land. He considered Spain ‘a loving mother to foreigners and a very cruel stepmother to her own sons’.

  The king’s preference for Rubens was not shared by his chief minister Olivares. The palace of Buen Retiro, the other major royal residence to be decorated during this period, was placed under the overall control of the count-duke, who proceeded to fill the interior with Spanish paintings. To demonstrate his powerful position, Olivares placed his portrait b
y Velázquez beside that of the king, an unheard of liberty. The count-duke was a great admirer of Velázquez, a fellow Andalucian, and hung many of his finest works in the palace: the Surrender of Breda (Prado, Madrid), a major Spanish triumph in the Thirty Years’ War, Apollo in the Forge of Vulcan (Prado, Madrid), the Water-Carrier (Apsley House, London) and several equestrian portraits of the royal family. The Surrender of Breda hung in the central room, known as the Hall of the Realms, as part of a series of 12 scenes of great Spanish victories in the Thirty Years’ War, designed to impress all visitors with the increasingly illusory might of Spain. Many of these battle pieces were by Francisco de Zurbarán, who also executed a series of scenes from the Labours of Hercules (Prado, Madrid), the mythical hero from whom the Spanish Habsburgs (along with many other royal families) claimed descent.

  Olivares wanted Buen Retiro to be a palace of the arts, with its own theatre, galleries and ballroom. Tournaments and jousts were staged in the bull ring and the gardens, adorned with fountains, alleys, hermitage chapels and artificial lakes. Works of art were brought from all over the Spanish Empire: tapestries from Lisbon, Leone Leoni’s bronze statue of Charles V from Aranjuez, and Old Masters despatched by the Spanish viceroy from Naples. There was also a gallery with 50 paintings by northern artists working in Rome, including works by Claude Lorraine, Nicholas Poussin, Jan Both and Gaspard Dughet. The finest work Rubens executed for Olivares’ palace was the Judgement of Paris. The painting of the three nude goddesses, one of them modelled on the artist’s second wife, was regarded as so erotic that it was kept behind a curtain.

  Building these two royal palaces and filling them with major works of art proceeded throughout the Thirty Years’ War, despite the political and financial disasters that afflicted Spain. During the 1620s the Spanish armies scored a number of military successes, such as the capture of Breda in the Netherlands, painted by Velázquez. The tide turned when France and Sweden entered the conflict in the 1630s, their cavalry and musketeers inflicting a number of defeats on the Spanish pikemen who had previously been such a potent force on European battlefields. To finance the ruinously expensive war Castile, the heartland of Spain, was forced to endure punitively heavy taxation. Olivares’ attempts to distribute this financial burden among other Spanish provinces and in the empire overseas led to the outbreak of widespread revolts in Portugal, Catalonia, Naples and Sicily during the 1640s. These revolts led to the dismissal of the count-duke as chief minister.