Scribble, Scribble, Scribble

by Simon Schama

  Which is not to say that the painters on show at the National Gallery – even Rembrandt – were free to do their thing any way they saw fit. Some had been to Italy, and even those who hadn’t (like Rembrandt) were acutely conscious of the idealising strictures of classicism. At each end of the spectrum there were those unbothered by the conflict – pure Italianisers or pure parochialists – but the strongest were somewhere in between and struggled not just with the conflicting demands of imaginative idealism and natural truth, but with a similarly exacting conflict between the obligations of social form and the lure of vitality. In some of the most powerful portraits, dynamism – the implication of movement – has the upper hand, even when the subject is actually standing quite still. So Andries de Graaf, the potentate of Amsterdam money and politics, in Rembrandt’s slick version of him in 1639, gets the full gentiluomo treatment, leaned against a truncated classical column, legs elegantly contrapposto, his trim frame exuding silkily understated nonchalance. But the billowing swathe of his right sleeve seems to take on a rhetorical life of its own, as if blown by the Dutch breezes, implying the dynamic citizen-hero that Rembrandt presumed de Graaf wished to personify. He may have presumed wrongly, as de Graaf was one of those who expressed his unhappiness with the master’s efforts.

  The trade-off between grandeur and energy, monumentalism and the life-force, became even more problematic when artists were commissioned (at a lucrative rate per head) to paint group portraits. Adding to the challenge was the requirement, understood as built into the contract (and famously ignored by Rembrandt in The Night Watch), to produce acceptable individual likenesses at the same time as communicating the collective ethos of the company. This is still a tough call for corporate photographers (whether of company retreats or the school cricket team), who do exactly what the most mechanical of the Dutch portraitists did in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: line them up along the picture plane till they run out of heads, or else stack them up in terraced rows. To make the job still more complicated, group portraitists had to register niceties of rank within the companies, so that at a militia banquet no one would confuse the captain with his lieutenants. Unsurprisingly, the results were inhumanly wooden, an additive arrangement that managed, in the memorable phrase of Rembrandt’s student van Hoogstraten, to make the sitters look as if they could all be decapitated with one sweep of the sword.

  There was one further non-negotiable requirement made of group portraits. In addition to documenting the internal coherence of the company, they also had to engage with those who stood before the paintings, blessing their good fortune that the fate of Amsterdam or Haarlem was in such capable, confidently civic, inexhaustibly virtuous hands. The great Austrian art historian Alois Riegl, in the work he wrote on Dutch group portraiture in 1902, believed this two-way stretch to represent a breakthrough in the genre, reconciling as it did the internal, but locked-off, coherence of Italian art with the outwardly directed exuberant show of the Netherlands. For the first time, so Riegl believed, the connection between subject and beholder had been brought together in compositions that invited cross-frame attentiveness. That might be true, but it was also a genre of inspired social fraud, for this bond between Them and Us came into its own precisely at the moment when the regents of the Dutch towns were becoming a caste of unaccountable oligarchs. Ah, the whoppers that faux-naturalism commits.

  The pictorial strain of doing all these things simultaneously, having multiple figures participate in a credible scene – chatting, drinking, charitably condescending to orphans or the aged, anatomising – at the same time that they bond with us, was a severe formal test of the available talent. The unavoidability of tables in banqueting pieces meant that figures who would otherwise be showing us their backs have to turn round or lean at forty-five degrees, a move not all group portraitists could convincingly bring off. In merely workmanlike hands the paintings either coagulate in a congested scrum or else fall apart. Hals and Rembrandt were not the only virtuosi who could pictorially multitask. Nicolas Pickenoy and Thomas de Keyser, both represented in the National Gallery show, were dependable workhorses in the genre, but their efforts to make the ensembles come credibly alive are tentative and always play second fiddle to their obligations to deliver likeness and rank. Even Hals, the supreme virtuoso of space and figure-juggling, could buckle under the strain. The Meagre Company, the Amsterdam militia piece in the show, is by two hands: Pieter Codde’s as well as Hals’s, because of a two-year row with the militia officers over whether Hals would finish it in Amsterdam or have it sent back to Haarlem where he was nursing, so he said, a bad leg. (They believed he was stalling for more money.) Exasperated, the company of crossbowmen turned to the local talent, Codde, who may have been in the militia himself. But Codde proved not much more dependable, spending a night in jail in irons along with the maid with whom he was conducting an affair. The double-painting breaks in two, precisely at its gallant centre figure. To the left is Hals’s assured flash and dash; to the right, Codde’s painfully laboured attempts at spontaneity. No wonder Codde never went near full-length figures again.

  The two Rembrandt group portraits – The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp of 1632 and The Staalmeesters: Syndics of the Clothmakers’ Guild from three decades later (1662) – bookend his Amsterdam career and are both stupendous masterpieces that would alone be worth the price of admission. Throwing caution to the winds, Rembrandt bet on making collective dramas that embodied the ethos of the group, while not compromising either on likeness or the connection made from the painting to beholder. But the balance between attention within and attention beyond the frame could not be more different. In the Tulp, all eyes within the arrowhead arrangement of intense concentration are locked on to the professor-anatomist, who dissects the flexor muscles while demonstrating their action with his own free left hand. A single figure at the top of the pyramid, a pentimento revealing that originally he was hatted, looks at us while pointing to the criminal corpse in a concessionary gesture to memento mori. We anatomists are good, but let’s not get above ourselves; we all end up like that. But Rembrandt, at least conceptually, has smuggled himself into the scene with the implication that the painterly dexterity needed to bring off the painted anatomy lesson was analogous to the demonstration itself.

  The same covert self-insertion happens even more ingeniously in The Staalmeesters. It was long assumed that the drama of the scene, with one of the quality-control men rising to his feet, must have been in response to someone entering the chamber of their deliberations and, so Riegl thought, saying something that provoked a response. A cooler generation of critics thought this was so much fantastic projection and insisted this was ‘just five gentlemen in black sitting for their portraits’. But four years ago, in a stunning insight, Benjamin Binstock argued that since Rembrandt’s initial study drawings for a composition (which he later abandoned for the present arrangement) were made on account-book paper, it was very likely that those drawings were made in the very book we see depicted on their table, thus making artist and sitters true partners in the composition. The two figures, one of whom gestures at a page the other holds, are thus debating the making of art – this work of art.

  This subtle visual essay in the collaboration between painter and patrons would have been just the thing to tempt Rembrandt as an exercise in vindication, since he was doubtless still smarting from his greatest fiasco four years before, when his painting of Claudius Civilis and the oath of the Batavians had been rejected by the regents of the town hall, leading him to mutilate the masterpiece. The connection between the two, Binstock further argued, is not just their similarity as groups around a table, but the fact that The Staalmeesters was painted on the rough herringbone canvas intended for a replacement for the repudiated Batavians. It gets even better. If the syndics are paying attention to the drawings in the book and then to someone in the room, that someone must surely be Rembrandt himself, so that the syndics are actively glancing from book to paint
er, taking in the changes he has made to the very scene that we now see. This is a gesture of co-option beyond anything Riegl could have imagined. The master has put himself in our shoes, and vice versa, in a quality-control drama of composition. The syndics are still checking the cloth, but it is in fact the weave of a canvas.

  The secret of The Staalmeesters can stand for the peculiar genius of Dutch art at this moment in its history; one that wore its prodigious ingenuity lightly. What seems to be the most straightforward visual culture turns out to be a Chinese puzzle; an endless enquiry into the observation and representation of seen things and people. The Dutch were obsessed with nature all right, but very often, and with a confounding depth, that turns out to be the nature of picturing itself.

  Rubens

  Guardian, 22 October 2005

  The thing about entitling your show Master in the Making is that it assumes a public already sold on just what it was that got made. But that couldn’t be less true in the case of Rubens. In any given museum on any given Sunday, the empty gallery is invariably ‘Flemish, 17th Century’, where gatherings of massively upholstered nudes shift their dimpled weight opposite a collision of horses and carnivores, while by the door an obscure and pallid saint embraces his martyrdom with rolled-up eyes. Punters enter, take a quick gander, assume the proper expression of the glazed, the cowed, the awed and the baffled, and then accelerate towards the door marked ‘Rembrandt’.

  Which is a shame, since there are peculiar exhilarations to be found in Rubens that are reproduced nowhere else in baroque art: the strenuous manipulation of sensation, even profound emotion, through purely pictorial muscle; incomparable draughtsmanship; eye-popping colour. Not for Rubens the darkling palette and the stripped-down casting of Caravaggio (though he took much else from the master whose scandalously naturalistic Death of the Virgin he tried to buy for the Duke of Mantua), nor the introspective psycho-probes of Rembrandt. Rubens is all about meaty animal energy and high-voltage design, the play of what one seventeenth-century biographer called his furia del pennello – the fury of the brush.

  But Rubens’s surging line was never simply a virtuoso flourish. It was always put at the service of the controlled orchestration of bodies in motion. And as a colourist, no one since Titian and Giorgione came close. Whether he was confecting the most delicate flesh tones or throwing screaming vermilion at the canvas, it was with an eye to modelling forms rather than just filling them, thus making the ancient and tedious battle between disegno and colore moot.

  Put all these gifts together and you get what contemporaries came to recognise as an incomparable marvel – the ‘god of painting’, as one of those recommending him for an Antwerp altarpiece in 1609 wrote. When he is operating at the height of his powers – as in the Courtauld oil sketch for the Descent from the Cross, or the adorably nipple-guzzling Roman Charity from the Hermitage – Rubens knocks the stuffing out of you, altering your breathing pattern.

  So will this show at the National Gallery be that kind of conversion experience? If it turns out that way – and anyone who loves Rubens and wants to make the enthusiasm infectious must dearly hope so – it will be a triumph of art over concept. For the exhibition is very high-minded: it is so relentlessly bent on tracking each and every influence that went into the evolving artist’s manner (though it omits some of those that meant most to him in his earliest days, such as the woodcuts of Holbein and Tobias Stimmer) that at times it seems in danger of disappearing up its own erudition. There are great and good things to be learned here about Rubens’s compositional technique, but the overwhelming emphasis on process has tilted the choice of works towards those that can be unpacked as a cluster of compositional drawings, sketches and alternative versions. So we get two versions of Susanna and the Elders, neither sensational, rather than Rubens’s self-portrait with his first wife, Isabella Brant – a hymn to conjugal fertility – which certainly is.

  There’s something airless about a show conceived and executed from a place so deeply internal to the academy of connoisseurs that you can practically smell the Chardonnay. In short supply (for the most part) is what, far more than this bit of Raphael or that bit of Michelangelo, actually made Rubens Rubens: what the painter would have called wellust and we – because English doesn’t have a name for it (goodness, I wonder why?) – would call joie de vivre, a hungry instinct for the flesh.

  I suppose you have to admire the unfashionable courage of an exhibition so single-mindedly cool to history or biography. I’m among the ranks of those who think the pendulum has swung a little too far away from formal analysis and towards historical context in recent years, so that the pure visual charge of art has sometimes been suffocated beneath data-bloated compendia of prices and patrons. No danger here, though, of stooping to vulgar context. No danger of letting the visitor know, for instance, that Rubens grew up in the most bloody theatre of religious war in Europe; that his father – a Protestant convert! – was imprisoned and nearly executed for an affair with the Princess of Orange; that his most important Antwerp teacher, Otto van Veen, criss-crossed confessional lines between Calvinist Leiden and militantly Counter-Reformation Antwerp, or that the painter’s early life was a succession of personal, as well as painterly, dramas. Granted that the early Battles of the Amazons aren’t despatches from the front; granted that they owe much to Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari. But isn’t it interesting, nonetheless, to wonder whether the bristling cavalry that appears incongruously behind the classical figures don’t owe something to Rubens’s response to contemporary history?

  This isn’t just a quibble about wall captions. It’s hard to think of a painterly career more tightly entwined with the great events of his time, as well as with the classical pedigree of his craft. And many of those events go straight to the heart of his ‘making’. Rubens, after all, first became an artist in Antwerp – a city in which the legitimacy or illegitimacy of sacred image-making had driven men to violence. Nine years before Rubens was born, Calvinist iconoclasts had smashed statues, ripped paintings from the walls of the cathedral. There was a Catholic restoration, but before Rubens was apprenticed there had been another return of Protestant whitewash before it was finally and permanently restored to the Catholic Counter-Reformation. So the intense fervour of Rubens’s religious painting is not just art, but spiritual weaponry. And his early career is as much a journey through a war zone as a prolonged exercise in the absorption of classicism.

  In fact, the formative period in Italy from 1600 to 1608 is problematic in ways more fascinating than a genealogy of influences can possibly suggest. Like all aspiring artists in Rome, Rubens devoted himself to studying the sculptured riches of antiquity and duly drew the usual suspects: the Farnese Hercules, the Laocoön, the Apollo Belvedere. But the curators are right to insist on his brilliantly expressive amendments, all designed with a view to animating the sculpture. According to his eighteenth-century admirer Roger de Piles, Rubens warned against ‘the effect of stone’. He undoubtedly agreed with his brother Philip who wrote to him: ‘Away with that apathy which turns men not into human beings but rather into iron, into stone, a stone harder than the Niobic stone of mythology which overflowed with tears.’ Rubens’s work, then, became an articulate dialogue between classicism and naturalism.

  It was also a decisive intervention in the stale dispute between what northern and southern painting were supposed to be. Most famously, Michelangelo, in a conversation with Francesco da Olanda, had let it be known that Flemish artists were tremendously good at painting trees and grass and peasants, the implication being that they were mere skilled illusionists rather than true artists possessed by the divinity of an idea. More than any other Flemish artist before him, Rubens would decisively overthrow the stereotype, establishing himself as a supreme history painter. Without ever apologising for his own gift for earthy naturalism (the sublime landscapist is already evident in detail from early works), he cast himself as a palette-toting humanist philosopher: the pictor doctus, the learned pa
inter.

  It’s a pity, then, that the person most influential in this vocational reinvention – his brother Philip – is largely missing from the exhibition, notwithstanding the fact there are two group portraits that bring the brothers together, one of which happens to be a knockout masterpiece. For Rubens – unlike the archetypal caricature of the isolated melancholic genius (Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Salvator Rosa) – was the most sociable and fraternal of artists. In Rome he mixed with the likes of Dr Johannes Faber, who treated him for a bout of pleurisy and who was, among other things, a friend of Galileo, and a naturalist who had written works on dragons, serpents and parrots.

  Fraternity and friendship for the Rubens brothers was not just a sentiment but a philosophy: a golden chain of connections binding like-minded men to each other, and to their teachers in the recent and remote past. The dazzlingly beautiful and moving Four Philosophers, painted in the year of Philip’s premature death in 1611 and now in the Pitti Palace, anthologises all the deepest thoughts and emotions that made the young Rubens tick. In a classical niche is a vase of four tulips – two open, two shut – not just the northern bloom par excellence imported to the world of the classical south, but emblems of two living and two dead men. The dead are Philip and his teacher, the neo-stoic philosopher and philologist Justus Lipsius. But the chain stretches further, for behind Lipsius and beside the tulips is a bust then thought to be of Seneca, the stoic who counselled men to bend but not break under the worst that fate and history could bring your way: war, tyranny, plague and untimely death. In the end there would be redemption, so images of Roman antiquity and Roman Christianity (a marbled pillar and a view to the church of St Theodore on the Palatine) are paired, while behind the foreground figures stands the no longer quite so young Pieter Paul Rubens, swathed in black.