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Peter Paul Rubens
Rape of Ganymede
c. 1637-38
Museo del Prado, Madrid
The painting's subject is taken from
Ovid's Metamorphoses. The figure of the
young man is reminiscent of one of the
sons in the ancient Roman group statue
of Laocoon, and the harsh, bright colours
recall Caravaggio's naturalism. Rubens
was often to return to these sources in his
more sensual paintings, translating them
into images of dazzling sensuality.
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Peter Paul Rubens
born June 28, 1577, Siegen, Nassau, Westphalia [Germany]
died May 30, 1640, Antwerp, Spanish Netherlands [now in Belgium]
Flemish painter who was the greatest exponent of Baroque painting's
dynamism, vitality, and sensuous exuberance. Though his masterpieces
include portraits and landscapes, Rubens is perhaps best known for
his religious and mythological compositions. As the impresario of
vast decorative programs, he presided over the most famous painter's
studioin Europe. His powers of invention were matched by
extraordinary energy and versatility.
Education and early career.
Rubens was born in the German town of Siegen, in Westphalia. His
father, Jan Rubens, a lawyer and alderman of Antwerp, had fled the
Spanish Netherlands (present-day Belgium) in 1568 with his wife,
Maria Pypelinckx, and four children to escape religious persecution
for his Calvinist beliefs. After Jan's death in 1587, the family
returned to Antwerp, where young Peter Paul, raised in his mother's
Roman Catholic faith, received a classical education. His artistic
training began in 1591 with his apprenticeship to Tobias Verhaecht,
a kinsman and landscape painter of modest talent. A year later he
moved on to the studio of Adam van Noort, where he remained for four
years until being apprenticed to Antwerp's leading artist, Otto van
Veen, dean of the painters' guild of St. Luke. Van Veen imbued
Rubens with a lively sense of painting as a lofty humanistic
profession.
Most of Rubens' youthful works have disappeared or remain
unidentified. The “Portrait of a Young Man” (1597; Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York City) is his earliest dated work. In 1598
Rubens was admitted into the painters' guild in Antwerp. He probably
continued to work in van Veen's studio before setting off on a
sojourn in Italy in May 1600. In Venice he absorbed the luminosity
and dramatic expressiveness of the Renaissance masterpieces of
Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. Hired by Vincenzo I Gonzaga, duke
of Mantua, Rubens proceeded to Mantua, where his chief duties were
to make copies of Renaissance paintings, mainly portraits of court
beauties. In October 1600 Rubens accompanied the duke to Florence to
attend the marriage-by-proxy of Gonzaga's sister-in-law Marie de
Medicis to King Henry IV of France, a scene Rubens was to re-create
a quarter-century later for the queen. By the end of the first year
he had traveled throughout Italy, sketchbook in hand. The copies he
made of Renaissance paintings offer a rich survey of the
achievements of 16th-century Italian art.
In August 1601 Rubens arrived in Rome. There the new Baroque style
heralded by Annibale Carracci and Caravaggio—a bold naturalism
coupled with a revival of the heroically idealized forms of
Michelangelo and Raphael—was quickly assimilated by Rubens. His
first major Roman commission was for three large paintings (1601–02)
for the crypt chapel of St. Helena in the Basilica of Santa Croce.
In 1603 Gonzaga sent him on his first diplomatic assignment to Spain
to present a shipment of paintings to King Philip III. For Philip's
prime minister, the duke of Lerma, Rubens painted his first major
equestrian portrait (1603; Prado Museum, Madrid), which took the
Venetian tradition of Titian and Tintoretto a giant step forward in
the conveyance of physical power and psychological confrontation.
Toward the end of 1605 Rubens made his second trip to Rome. With his
brother Philip he undertook an intensive study of ancient art and
philology and began to amass a sizable collection of Roman
sculpture, reliefs, portrait busts, and ancient coins. In 1606 he
received his crowning commission in Rome: the painting over the high
altar of the Chiesa Nuova (Church of Santa Maria in Vallicella),
whose precious icon Rubens enshrined in an apotheosis borne aloft by
a host of putti—a quintessentially Baroque conceit that was later
adapted in sculpture by Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
Return to Antwerp.
In October 1608, having received news that his mother was gravely
ill, Rubens rushed home to Antwerp—but too late. Yet despite his
personal loss, his arrival was otherwise timely. His brother Philip
had been appointed secretary of Antwerp. More important,
negotiations for the Twelve Years' Truce (1609–21) were being
concluded between the Dutch separatists and Spain, which raised the
prospects of peace and economic recovery for war-torn Flanders.
Rubens was commissioned to paint for the Antwerp Town Hall a
celebratory “Adoration of the Magi” (1609; Prado), which quickly
established his fame at home. Though he still yearned for Italy, the
Spanish Habsburg regents of Flanders, the Archduke Albert and
Archduchess Isabella, made him an offer too good to refuse. As their
new court painter, Rubens was exempted from all taxes, guild
restrictions, and official duties in Brussels. He could remain in
Antwerp and organize his own studio. In October 1609 Rubens married
the 19-year-old Isabella Brant, and he celebrated their happy union
in his “Double Portrait in a Honeysuckle Bower” (1609–10; Alte
Pinakothek, Munich). In 1610 Rubens bought a magnificent townhouse
to which he annexed a palatial studio, classical portico, and garden
pavilion—an Italian villa transplanted to Antwerp.
The Twelve Years' Truce prompted a major refurbishing of Flemish
churches. The first of Rubens' two great Antwerp triptychs, “The
Raising of the Cross” (1610–11; Antwerp Cathedral), combined
Italianate reflections of Tintoretto and Caravaggio with Flemish
realism in a heroic affirmation of redemptive suffering. His second
triptych for Antwerp's cathedral, “The Descent from the Cross”
(1611–14), is more classical and restrained in keeping with its
subject. This work reflected Rubens' vigorous renewal of the early
Netherlandish tradition of Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling, and Rogier
van der Weyden. Its widespread fame was insured by the publication
of an engraving; among its future admirers was the young Rembrandt.
The decade from 1610 to 1620 witnessed an enormous production of
altarpieces for Roman Catholic churches—powerful, emotive images of
Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the saints—as Rubens became the chief
artistic proponent of Counter-Reformation spirituality in northern
Europe. Among his more important religious compositions from this
period are “The Last Judgment” (c. 1616, Alte Pinakothek) and
“Christ on the Cross”(also called “Le Coup de Lance,” 1620; Royal
Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp [see photograph]). Yet during this same
decade Rubens also produced many paintings on secular
themes—mythological, historical, and allegorical subjects, hunting
scenes, and portraits. Among the finest of his mythological
paintings is the “Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus” (c. 1617–18;
Alte Pinakothek), while the “Hippopotamus Hunt” (c. 1615–16; Alte
Pinakothek) typifies his vision of wild animal hunts.
Rubens was able to maintain this tremendous output owing to his
large studio of assistants, apprentices, collaborators, and
engravers. A major painting would often begin as a modello—i.e., an
oil sketch painted by Rubens on a small panel, after which he would
make preparatory drawings of individual figures within the
composition. The execution of the full-scale work would often be
entrusted to assistants, though Rubens would usually paint key areas
and thoroughly retouch the finished painting. Many of Rubens'
paintings were then reproduced in engravings, thereby guaranteeing
the wide disssemination of his compositions throughout Europe.
Rubens' most talented assistant was the young Anthony Van Dyck, 22
years his junior, who arrived at his studio as an apprentice about
1616 and stayed for four years. A true prodigy, Van Dyck quickly
absorbed Rubens' robust style—his muscular, graceful physiques and
sensuous interplays of light and colour—and faithfully imitated it
under the master's supervision. Rubens' own coproductions with
specialists such as the animal painter Frans Snyders and the
flower-landscapist Jan Bruegel mark the Baroque zenith of artistic
collaboration. At the same time, his “Four Continents” (c. 1615;
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), “Lion Hunt” (1621; Alte
Pinakothek), “Landscape with Carters” (c. 1618; Hermitage Museum,
St. Petersburg), and his many sketches from nature reveal his own
versatility in the specialized areas of landscape and animal
painting.
In 1616 Rubens received his first tapestry commission, a series
depicting the life of the legendary Roman consul Decius Mus. For
each scene he painted a modello, which his assistants then enlarged
into a full-scale canvas whose imagery was then duplicated in a
tapestry by weavers. From Sir Dudley Carleton, the English
ambassador to The Hague, Rubens acquired in 1618 a vast collection
of ancient sculptures. His interest in sculpture was not limited to
collecting. He designed monumental sculpture for the facade and
interior of the magnificent new Jesuit church (now St. Charles
Borromeo) in Antwerp, which was dedicated in 1621. He also
contributed to the church's architectural design. Its high altar,
enshrining his two interchangeable altarpieces devoted to Saints
Ignatius and Francis Xavier (1617–18; Kunsthistorisches), was
crowned by a semidome and illuminated by an oculus, resembling
Rubens' own recently completed “pantheon” for sculpture in his home.
In 1620 Rubens contracted to design 39 ceiling paintings for the
Jesuit church, to be executed by Van Dyck and other assistants after
his oil sketches revealing “the great speed and frenzy of his
brush.” Finished within a year, these paintings justified Rubens'
claim to be “by natural instinct, better fitted to execute very
large works than small curiosities.”
In 1621, following the expiration of the Twelve Years' Truce and the
death of Archduke Albert, the widowed infanta Isabella engaged
Rubens as her confidential agent in Spain's diplomatic search for
peace between Habsburg-controlled Flanders and the independent Dutch
Republic to the north. (The war between the Protestant Dutch and the
Catholic Flemings resumed, however, and was sadly to continue for
the rest of Rubens' life.) By this time Rubens' widespread fame as
“the painter of princes and the prince of painters” permitted him to
travel freely among royal courts for discreet meetings with
sovereigns and their ministers, who would discuss matters of state
while sitting for portraits.
In 1622 Rubens was called to Paris by the queen mother of France,
Marie de Medicis, to decorate one of the two main galleries of her
newly built Luxembourg Palace. The widow of Henry IV sought to
promote, in 21 huge canvases (1622–25; Louvre Museum, Paris), her
life and her regency of France in epic fashion. Marie's thwarted
career required an unprecedented exercise of poetic license, but by
exploiting his encyclopaedic knowledge of classical mythology and
allegory, Rubens raised her life to a mythic plane on which mortals
mingle freely with the Olympian gods. At the same time, he designed
for Louis XIII a tapestry cycle on the life of the Emperor
Constantine (1622–25; Philadelphia Museum of Art). During the 1625
marriage-by-proxy in Paris of King Louis's sister, Henrietta Maria,
to King Charles I of England, Rubens met the duke of Buckingham, who
commissioned Rubens to paint his equestrian portrait (1625;
destroyed; oil sketch in Kimbell Museum, Fort Worth, Texas), the
epitome of High Baroque flamboyance in that genre.
Rubens complained that he was “the busiest and most harassed man in
the world,” yet he continued to accept important ecclesiastical
commissions. His “Adoration of the Magi” (1624; Antwerp Museum) for
the Abbey of St. Michael was crowned by three monumental sculptures
of his own design. For the high altar of Antwerp's cathedral he
framed his “Assumption of the Virgin” (1624–27) with a marble
portico that featured a typically Baroque interplay of painting and
sculpture, spiritually “charging” the surrounding space.
Nor did Rubens neglect private patrons. In the 1620s he executed
masterly portraits of his physician and friend Ludovicus Nonnius (c.
1627; National Gallery, London), his future sister-in-law Susanna
Fourment (“Le Chapeau de Paille,” c. 1622–25; National Gallery,
London), and of his sons Albert and Nicolaas (c. 1624–25;
Liechtenstein Collection, Vaduz). His “Landscape with Philemon and
Baucis” (c. 1625; Kunsthistorisches) reveals, in a poetic vein, his
heroic and cataclysmic view of nature. In 1625 the infanta Isabella
commissioned from Rubens a vast tapestry cycle, the “Triumph of the
Eucharist” (1625–27; Descalzas Reales, Madrid). For these 20
separate hangings, which form his most elaborate and complex program
of religious art, Rubens invented a two-tiered architectural
framework featuring tapestries-within-tapestries, an unprecedented
display of Baroque illusionism.
In 1626 Rubens' domestic happiness was shattered by the death of his
wife Isabella. He soon embarked on a diplomatic odyssey in search of
a peace between England and Spain as a first step toward negotiating
a settlement with the Dutch Republic, which was England's ally. The
duke of Buckingham, who was the favourite of King Charles of
England, was negotiating to purchase Rubens' entire collection of
antiquities. In the course of their meetings, Rubens tried to
convince the skeptical Buckingham that England should cease
supporting the Dutch in their struggle against Spanish rule in
Flanders. Initially the Spanish king, Philip IV, was aghast that
such diplomacy be entrusted to a mere painter. But in August 1628
Rubens left for the Spanish court in Madrid en route to England.
During his seven months in Madrid, besides pleading for a peace
treaty with England, Rubens spent his time in the royal art gallery
painting copies of masterpieces by Titian, tow hose style he was now
completely attuned as he explored the great Venetian's fluent
brushwork, vibrant colours, and luminous modeling. Looking over his
shoulder was Philip IV's young court painter, Diego Velázquez. By
April 1629, England was ready to negotiate, and Charles I sent for
Rubens directly, indicating his eagerness to meet a man with his
international reputation for intellect and artistic genius. Philip
IV gave Rubens the title of “secretary of the king's privy council
of the Netherlands” in order to elevate the standing of his
painter-envoy at the foreign court.
In London, Rubens encountered a maze of factions and intrigues
through which he had to negotiate. Yet he prevailed, and it is to
him personally that the peace treaty of 1630 between England and
Spain can be attributed. He was awarded an honorary master of arts
degree from the University of Cambridge. Awaiting the arrival of the
Spanish ambassador, he painted his effusive “Allegory of Peace and
War” (1629–30; National Gallery, London) as a memento of his
successful diplomacy and gave it to the admiring English king. In
turn, Charles awarded Rubens a long-coveted commission to decorate
the ceiling of the royal Banqueting House, which had recently been
designed by the architect Inigo Jones as part of the Whitehall
Palace complex of buildings in London. On the eve of his departure
from England, Rubens was knighted by King Charles.
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Later career.
Back in Antwerp, Rubens was finally able to devote himself to his
“beloved profession” again. In December 1630 he married the
16-year-old Helena Fourment, youngest daughter of the silk and
tapestry merchant Daniel Fourment. Helena was to inspire some of the
most personal and poignant portraits of Rubens' later career, and
their marriage was as fruitful as it was blissful, producing five
children. Rubens often identified Helena with the goddess Venus, as
in his glowing “Venus and Adonis” (c. 1635; Metropolitan Museum). In
1631 Philip IV knighted Rubens—the only painter so honoured by the
kings of both England and Spain. Having lost all taste for politics,
Rubens finally retired from his diplomatic career.
The twilight decade of 1630–40 witnessed some of the most exuberant
works of the rejuvenated master as he broadened his painterly style
with looser, more tactile, almost “impressionistic” brushwork. In
his “Garden of Love” (c. 1630–32; Prado), a marital allegory imbued
with personal significance, an invented statue of Venus presides
over a gathering of lovers, while in his more archaeological “Feast
of Venus” (c. 1636; Kunsthistorisches), another statue of Venus
presides over a clamorous, pagan bacchanal. With similar abandon,
Rubens' “Kermesse” (c. 1630–35; Louvre) evokes the spirit of the
painter Pieter Bruegel in the joie de vivre of its dancing peasants.
For his new father-in-law, Rubens designed his fourth and final
tapestry cycle, the “Life of Achilles” (c. 1631–32). After
completing a radiant, autumnal vision of Roman Catholic spirituality
in the triptych of the “Ildefonso Altarpiece” (1630–32;
Kunsthistorisches Museum), he turned his attention to glorifying the
reign of King Charles's father, James I, in nine huge canvases for
the Whitehall ceiling (1632–34), his translation of Italianate
ceiling painting into England.
In December 1633 the infanta Isabella died. Her nephew and
successor, the infante Ferdinand, was welcomed as the new governor
by a series of triumphal arches and stages designed by Rubens and
erected along the processional route through Antwerp. These
temporary monuments of architecture, sculpture, and painting
required a virtual army of carpenters, sculptors, and painters all
working under Rubens as impresario. This grandest, though somewhat
ephemeral, of all his undertakings was later preserved in a volume
of etchings by Theodoor van Thulden. On a smaller scale, Rubens
continued to design book title-pages for the Plantin-Moretus Press
in Antwerp, owned by his childhood friend Balthasar Moretus.
At his country estate, Het Steen in Elewijt, which he purchased in
1635, Rubens painted his glowing “Landscape with a Rainbow” (1636;
Wallace Collection, London) and its pendant “Landscape with Het
Steen” (1636; National Gallery, London). These complementary views
of a countryside teeming with life celebrate the natural order of
creation and present an Arcadian vision of mankind in harmony with
nature. Such pictures alone, permeated with shimmering colour and
light, would ensure Rubens' fame as a landscapist, if no other works
survived. For Philip IV's hunting lodge outside Madrid, the Torre de
la Parada, Rubens painted more than 60 oil sketches inspired by
Ovid's Metamorphoses in which he reinterpreted the loves, conflicts,
and passions of ancient gods and mortals.
Despite frequent incapacitating attacks of “gout” (which was
probably arthritis), Rubens continued to accept a wide range of
commissions. In 1638 he designed a triumphal carriage, or parade
“float,” in the form of a ship to celebrate the Spanish naval
victory over the Dutch forces at Calloo. Yet his personal view of
war remained deeply pessimistic, as revealed in his painting “The
Horrors of War” (1637; Palazzo Pitti, Florence), a precursor of
Picasso's “Guernica.” Two of Rubens' late portraits now in the
Kunsthistorisches Museumin Vienna contrast the public man and his
private world. His stately “Self-Portrait” (c. 1638) presents Rubens
not as an artist but as a self-confident and proud—if aging and
visibly weary—knight wearing the sword of Charles I. By contrast,
“Het Pelsken” (c. 1636–38) reveals an intimate view of a nude Helena
modestly wrapping herself in fur. Rubens' final“ Self-Portrait with
Helena and Peter Paul” (c. 1639–40; Metropolitan Museum) features
his youngest son and namesake, born in 1637. Despite the rejuvenated
visage Rubens here gave himself, death was not far away. After a
severe attack of gout, he died in May 1640 and was buried in the
Jacobskerk in Antwerp. His eventual successor as Flanders' premier
painter was Jacob Jordaens, Van Dyck having died little more than a
year after Rubens himself.
Assessment and influence.
The art of Peter Paul Rubens is a fusion of the traditions of
Flemish realism with the classicizing tendencies of the Italian
Renaissance. Rubens was able to infuse his own astounding vitality
into a powerful and exuberant style that came to epitomize the
Baroque art of the 17th century. The ample, robust, and opulent
figures in his paintings generate a pervasive sense of movement in
vivid, dynamic compositions. Rubens was one of the most
assimilative, versatile, and productive of all Western artists, and
his almost limitless resources of invention enabled him to become
the master of the greatest studio organization in Europe since that
of Raphael in Rome a century before. The larger the scale of the
undertaking, the more congenial it was to his spirit.
The epic quality of Rubens' art represented only one side of his
multifaceted genius. A celebrated diplomat in his time, he was also
a scholar and humanist, a learned classicist and antiquarian, a
prodigious correspondent in several languages, and even an amateur
architect. His profound learning enabled him to draw upon a
wellspring of Biblical narratives, Roman Catholic theology and
hagiography, and Greek and Roman history and mythology for the
subject matter and iconography of his art. A devout Roman Catholic,
a loyal subject of the Spanish Habsburgs, a devoted husband, and the
father of eight children—this prosperous, energetic, thoroughly
balanced man presents the antithesis of the modern notion of
struggling artist.
Rubens' profound stylistic influence extended over three
centuries—from Van Dyck to the Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste
Renoir—and ranged far beyond Flanders. In Italy his influence was
decisive on the Baroque painters Pietro da Cortona and Luca
Giordano. In Spain, his early impression on the young Velázquez was
later superseded by his pervasive impact on Bartolome Esteban
Murillo, the most Rubensian of Spanish painters. At the Royal
Academy in France, the champions of colour over line—the Baroque
over the Classical—found their model in Rubens. The advent of the
Rococo style, heralded by Antoine Watteau early in the 18th century,
coincided with the triumph of these Rubenists. Among Rubens' English
beneficiaries were Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds. The
19th-century French Romantic painter Eugene Delacroix wrote that
Rubens “carries one beyond the limit scarcely attained by the most
eminent painters; he dominates one, he overpowers one, with all his
liberty and boldness.” Rubens' recurrent impact on artists was
almost as universal as the talents of the man himself. Painter,
diplomat, impresario, scholar, antiquarian, architect,
humanist—Rubens embodied the Baroque fulfillment of the Renaissance
man.
Charles Scribner III
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see also collection:
Peter Paul Rubens
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