The Rape of Europa

by Charles FitzRoy

  Remarkably, despite these setbacks, Philip continued to buy the best paintings that came on the market. When there was a sale following Rubens’ death in 1640, the king instructed his agent to bid for major works such as the Rest on the Flight into Egypt and the Peasant Dance. A decade later Philip had an even better opportunity to make important additions to the royal collection. In England Charles I, who had formed an outstanding collection of painting following his visit to Madrid in 1623, had proved a disastrous ruler. His political and religious policies aroused increasing opposition which culminated in civil war in the 1640s, ending with Parliament’s defeat of the royalist forces and the imprisonment of the king. Late in 1648 Charles was put on trial, and on 30 January 1649 he was beheaded outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall, which had been so lavishly decorated by Rubens. Following the king’s execution, Oliver Cromwell, leader of the Commonwealth, decided to sell off Charles’ art collection.

  This was a golden opportunity for Philip to add to his collection. As early as 1645 he heard that the English king’s enemies in Parliament were considering selling some works from the royal collection, and wrote to his ambassador in England, Don Alonso de Cardenas, to look out for possible acquisitions. He was, as always, particularly interested in paintings by Titian and Veronese. When Cromwell authorized the sale of Charles’ collection of works of art Philip was determined to benefit from this unique opportunity. In order not to be seen to be too obviously taking advantage of the plight of a fellow monarch, he encouraged his chief minister Don Luis de Haro, Sixth Marquis of Carpio, nephew of the disgraced Olivares, to buy masterpieces in the sale, using Cardenas as his agent. The king would then acquire them from Don Luis after they had been inspected and valued by Velázquez.

  The system worked extremely well and Cardenas proved a highly effective agent, purchasing major works by Raphael, Andrea del Sarto, Durer and Philip’s favourite Venetian artists. Among the Titians the king acquired were a set of 12 paintings of the Caesars, a Rest on the Flight into Egypt and a half length Venus. In addition, the enterprising Cardenas bought two Titians that Charles had acquired in Madrid in 1623: the Allocution of the Marquis of Vasto and Lady in a Fur Wrap. Philip was particularly pleased to buy back the Portrait of Charles V with a dog, a key component of the Habsburg patrimony, which he had given to the Prince of Wales.

  In a further irony the portrait was bought by Cardenas from Balthasar Gerbier, who had accompanied Charles to Spain, for £200. In an act of breath-taking hypocrisy, Gerbier, fearing that his former royalist connections would land him in trouble with the new government, now disclaimed his previous career as artistic agent for the king, railing against the money ‘squandered away on braveries and vanities; On old rotten pictures, on broken nosed Marble’. Mythological paintings by Titian continued to fetch very high prices. The French ambassador Antoine de Bordeaux-Neufville managed to acquire his Venus del Pardo, another gift to Charles from Philip IV, but was obliged to pay the enormous price of £7,000.

  Philip wanted to compare his new purchases with the greatest paintings in his collection. Many of them were brought to the Sacristy of the Escorial where they were hung alongside religious works by Titian commissioned by Philip II: his Gloria, St Margaret with the Dragon, Penitent St Jerome, Martyrdom of St Lawrence, Entombment, Ecce Homo and Christ in the Vestibule. To give some idea of the extraordinary wealth of paintings by Titian in the royal collection, when the Sacristy was rehung by Velázquez in 1656 he replaced these masterpieces with an equally impressive array of paintings by the Venetian artist: St Catherine at Prayer, the Penitent Magdalen, the Tribute Money and Mater Dolorosa. No wonder Don Luis de Haro was moved to write to Cardenas, praising the ‘many magnificent works by Titian in San Lorenzo de Real’. The royal collection remained intact, an inventory of its contents at Philip’s death in 1665 listing some 2,000 paintings, including 614 ‘originals’ by Titian.

  By this date there was a general, broad appreciation of the radical technique of Titian’s late works, such as the Rape of Europa, particularly among his fellow artists. Francesco Pacheco described this technique in his highly influential Art of Painting: ‘It is commonplace, when a painting is not finished, to call it “smudges of Titian”’. Friar Hortensio, a leading theologian at court, who often preached before the king, was also astonished at his seemingly miraculous ability to create a realistic image with such broad brushstrokes: ‘a Titian painting is no more than a collection of warring smudges, a dash of shadowy red glows, but seen in the light in which it was painted, it is an admirable and spirited mass of colour, a lively painting that, beheld by the eyes, lays doubt to the truth.’

  The pleasure that Philip IV took from his art collection provided some consolation for the personal and political calamities that afflicted his old age. The death of Queen Isabella in 1644 was followed by that of his son and heir Balthasar Carlos, and his son Philip by his second marriage to his niece Mariana of Austria (this marriage was one of a considerable number of intermarriages between the Spanish and Austrian branches of the Habsburg family). But he continued to sit for his court painter, and Velázquez’s portraits of the king in old age, his sad, mournful face gazing out at the spectator, are some of the artist’s finest works.

  Philip’s personal tragedies coincided with political disaster. At the Treaty of Munster in 1648 Holland ended 80 years of warfare with Spain, and finally gained its independence. Eleven years later Spain made peace with France at the Treaty of the Pyrenees, making a number of important territorial concessions in Flanders and Catalonia. After the treaty was signed, Cardinal Mazarin, the chief negotiator, gave his Spanish counterpart, Don Luis de Haro, a highly esteemed painting by Titian.

  Owing to the death of his two elder sons, Philip was succeeded by his third son, Charles II, at the tender age of four. The young king suffered from extensive physical, intellectual and emotional disabilities. He had only just learned to speak, and even then his tongue was so large that his speech was all but unintelligible. This also meant that he was unable to chew and he frequently drooled uncontrollably. It was to be four more years before he could walk and his health was so frail that he did not attend school. Charles’ disabilities were widely attributed to his inbreeding; for generations the Spanish and Austrian branches of the Habsburgs had been inter-marrying so that all eight of Charles’ grandparents were descendants of Joanna and Philip I of Castile. Moreover, his mother was niece of his father.

  The severely handicapped young king inherited a country that was bankrupt, plague and famine were widespread in the countryside, and the government’s hold on the still extensive Spanish Empire was under grave threat. Portugal had regained its independence in 1668, with the consequent loss of an overseas empire encompassing Brazil, the East Indies and parts of India. During Charles’ infancy, his mother acted as regent, relying on a series of favourites whose chief merit was that they enjoyed the queen’s fancy. With the country in severe decline, people looked for scapegoats to blame for the nation’s ills. The king himself was widely thought to be afflicted by sorcery, which had caused his disabilities, a theory to which Charles himself subscribed. The Spanish Inquisition engaged in widespread persecution of unbelievers and carried out a number of autos-da-fe, with victims garrotted or burnt at the stake.

  However, despite the desperate state of the nation, the arts continued to flourish. Visitors were amazed by the splendour of the works displayed in the royal palaces. A Frenchman visiting the palace of Buen Retiro in Madrid in 1667 recorded the extraordinary legacy of Philip IV:

  In the palace we were surprised by the quantity of pictures. I do not know how it is adorned in other seasons, but when we were there we saw more pictures than walls. The galleries and staircases were full of them, as well as the bedrooms and salons. I can assure you, Sir, that there were more than in all of Paris. I was not at all surprised when they told me that the principal quality of the deceased king was his love of painting, and that no one in the world understood more about it than
he.

  Although there was no longer a painter of the stature of Velázquez, artists such as Alonso Sanchez de Coello, Juan Carreno de Miranda, Francisco Rizi and Francisco Herrera the Younger proved worthy successors, painting in a dramatic, Baroque style that was so popular throughout Catholic Europe. They studied works in the royal collection, but it was now Rubens, rather than Titian, who provided the strongest influence. Antonio Palomino, appointed court painter in 1688, was to write a three-volume Account of the lives and works of the most eminent Spanish Painters, Sculptors and Architects, published in 1715–24, in which he included Titian, Rubens and the Neapolitan Luca Giordano, the three foreign artists he perceived to be most influential on Spanish painting, despite the fact that the Venetian had never set foot in Spain.

  The king loved art, perhaps seeking solace from his grave afflictions. At the end of his reign, he turned to Italy, as his great-grandfather Philip II had done before him. Charles succeeded, where his father had failed, in persuading Luca Giordano, a brilliant master of fresco and nichnamed ‘fa presto’ for the speed with which he worked, to come to Madrid, where he painted a number of stupendous frescoes glorifying the Habsburg dynasty. It brought to an end the golden age of Spanish painting, just as the dynasty itself was about to die out.

  Charles II died in 1700, the last of the Spanish Habsburgs. European heads of state had watched with fascination for several years the gradual demise of the invalid king. By the time of his death Charles was speechless and stone deaf, suffering from constant fits of dizziness and nausea. He was subjected to the most dreadful treatments, ranging from conventional methods such as bleeding and applying leeches, to more outlandish ones: freshly killed pigeons were placed on his head and the steaming entrails of slaughtered animals on his stomach. Eventually his doctors despaired of saving the unfortunate monarch and the last Spanish Habsburg finally expired in the Alcázar in Madrid on 1 November 1700. His coroner pronounced that his body ‘contained not a single drop of blood, his heart looked like the size of a grain of pepper, his lungs were corroded, his intestines were putrid and gangrenous, he had a single testicle which was as black as carbon and his head was full of water’. In this gruesome way the Habsburg dynasty, that had brought such glory to Spain, came to an ignominious end.

  The pitiable death of Charles II seemed symbolic of the demise of Spain as a great power. While England, Holland and France had utilized their economic, financial and military resources, and had seen major developments in science and philosophy, the reign of Charles II had been a time of political and intellectual stagnation. Olivares’ attempt to reform Spain’s administration by the creation of a uniform taxation among the various provinces had been thwarted by Spain’s military defeat and economic collapse. His less capable successors were content to preside over an inward-looking country whose dominant characteristics appeared to be superstition, idleness and ignorance.

  Across the Pyrenees, the increasingly powerful and aggressive France under her ambitious King Louis XIV determined to take full advantage of this apathy. He had launched a series of invasions of the Spanish Netherlands which Spain was ill-equipped to prevent. By 1700, Louis’s success meant that France had replaced Spain as the dominant nation in Europe. The Rape of Europa, which had travelled from Venice to Spain, following the rising fortunes of the Habsburg monarchy, was about to move to a resurgent France, where it was to be housed in one of the most splendid palaces in the kingdom.

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  The Dukes of Orléans and the Palais-Royal in Paris

  At the beginning of the eighteenth century, France dominated Europe both politically and culturally. Her artists, writers and composers had perfected a restrained version of the Baroque style. The French took great pride in the achievements of their artists. When Gian Lorenzo Bernini, probably the most famous artist in all Europe, came to Paris in 1664 to design the east front of the royal palace of the Louvre (automatically assuming that he would be given the commission) he was amazed when it was awarded to the virtually unknown Claude Perrault instead. Symptomatic of this general cultural shift from Italy to France, the French language was to become the lingua franca of courts throughout Europe in the eighteenth century.

  Painters of the calibre of Nicholas Poussin and Claude Lorraine had chosen to work in Rome in the earlier part of the century, but their successors preferred to remain in France where they could enjoy the lavish patronage of Louis XIV. When Sir Christopher Wren, architect of the rebuilding of London following the Great Fire of 1666, went abroad to study architecture, he came to look at buildings in Paris, not Rome. As a measure of this new interest in the arts, Louis XIV’s chief minister Colbert founded a series of Academies devoted to Belles Lettres, Science, Architecture and Music. In addition Colbert reorganized the Academy of Painting and Sculpture, and set up the French Academy in Rome.

  The best example of the French version of the Baroque style was the palace of Versailles, which was to serve as a model of princely magnificence for rulers from all over Europe. Unlike Philip II, whose palace of the Escorial, hidden away in the Guadarrama mountains, had attracted few visitors, every prince in Europe came to admire Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles, which proclaimed the power and splendour of the Sun King, and returned home determined to replicate this statement of royal magnificence. Versailles became the show-piece for all the leading French artists. Foreign visitors were deeply impressed by the splendour of the architecture of Jules Hardouin Mansart, the paintings of Charles Le Brun and the immense park laid out by André Le Notre. In the palace theatre they could watch plays by the greatest dramatists of the day: tragedies by Jean Racine and Pierre Corneille, and comedies by Molière. Louis XIV loved music, and visitors had frequent opportunities to listen to the operas and sarabandes of his favourite composer Jean-Baptiste Lully.

  Every aspect of the Sun King’s life was governed by a public display of his royal majesty. Those deemed important enough were granted the privilege of attending the king’s Grand Levée, where he was washed, combed and shaved, his walk through the magnificent Galerie des Glaces to the Royal Chapel, where he attended mass, his afternoon sortie into the grounds of the palace for a promenade or a hunt, and his Grand Public Supper. The timing of these activities was so precise that the Duke of Saint-Simon, in his Memoires, claimed that he could calculate precisely what the king was doing from a distance of 300 leagues. Foreigners who came to Versailles were awestruck at the mystique surrounding the Sun King.

  However, Louis XIV’s grandiose ambitions came at a price. The wars that France waged during the later seventeenth century, and the cost of building and maintaining Versailles, proved immensely expensive. The mercantile system devised by Colbert promoted and protected French manufactured goods, with an open invitation to workmen from foreign countries while prohibiting French workmen from emigrating. Within France roads and canals were improved, and overseas special privileges were granted to the French East India Company. Colbert’s investment in luxury goods such as the Gobelins and Beauvais tapestry works helped to establish France as the arbiter of European taste.

  These economic policies were not, however, totally successful. State interference proved overly restrictive on workers, discouraged inventiveness and had to be supported by high tariffs. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which ended a century of freedom of worship for Huguenots, brought about the emigration of some 200,000 Protestants, many of them highly skilled workers. Their displacement to France’s opponents in England and Holland was a major economic blow, and mirrors the forcible eviction from Spain of the Jews in 1492, and of the Moors under Philip II and Philip III. Despite attempts at tax reform through the capitation which taxed everyone including the nobility and the clergy, though members of both bodies could buy an exemption, and the dixième, a tax on income and property value – France was massively in debt.

  In addition French military supremacy, like that of Spain before it, meant that the nation attracted many enemies. To counter Louis’s grandiose ambi
tions, his opponents, Habsburg Spain and Austria and Holland, formed a series of alliances to limit French expansionism. In the 1690s they were joined by England, where the pro-French Charles II and his brother James II (their mother Henrietta Maria was sister of Louis XIII and they were therefore first cousins of Louis XIV) were succeeded by William III, married to James’ daughter Mary. During the following century it was to be England, or Great Britain as it became, (James VI of Scotland had succeeded to the English throne as James I in 1603, but the two nations were only formally united in the Act of Union of 1707) that was to prove France’s most redoubtable opponent, destroying French dreams of creating a worldwide empire.

  The first attempt to challenge French supremacy was caused by the death of the childless Charles II of Spain in 1700. The best claimant to succeed him was the Dauphin Louis, son of Charles’ half-sister Maria Theresa, and the nephew of Philip IV. Louis had a better claim than the other main contender, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, Charles’ first cousin. Since the succession of either candidate would dramatically alter the balance of power in Europe in favour of France or Austria, the two claimants had handed on their claims to the crown to their younger sons, the Dauphin naming Philip, Duke of Anjou and Leopold the Habsburg Archduke Charles. By this means they intended to preserve Spain’s independence by separating their own position as rulers of France and Austria with that of their respective descendants. England and Holland, fearful of this dramatic change to the balance of power, backed a third candidate, the Electoral Prince Joseph Ferdinand of Bavaria, who had a more distant claim to the Spanish crown, as a compromise candidate.