Master of Shadows

by Mark Lamster

  Rubens was fortunate to have found his way into Vincenzo’s illustrious stable of cultural luminaries. The Gonzagas had a long and distinguished history as patrons of the arts, a practice they had found to be both politically expedient and personally satisfying. The equation was simple: art begat prestige. Isabella d’Este, who sat for both Leonardo da Vinci and Titian, and her son Federico II—Vincenzo’s grandfather—were only the most ambitious in a long line of collectors who used the family cultural program to promote what was, effectively, a provincial outpost with limited military capacity to a place of prominence on the international political stage. Only the Vatican could claim a superior collection of old-master works. In fact, the visual arts were but one component of the Gonzagas’ patronage. The poet Torquato Tasso was a favorite of Vincenzo’s. Literature, music, theater, and other humanistic studies were equally celebrated. Rubens’s tenure at the Gonzaga court coincided with that of the composer Claudio Monteverdi, who premiered his opera L’Orfeo for the duke in 1607. The astronomer Galileo Galilei was also a visitor to the Mantuan court during Rubens’s stay, and there is reasonable (though not conclusive) evidence that he is the mysterious unidentified figure in a multi-person portrait, The Mantuan Circle of Friends, Rubens painted in 1601.

  Despite Mantua’s physical charm and the great minds that surrounded him, Rubens was naturally restive. In the year he spent in that city after his return from Spain, he completed just one major project for the duke: an altar for the city’s new Jesuit church, with portraits of the duke (a ringer for the painter) and his wife at the base of the central panel. In truth, Rubens had never been happy as a courtier, dating back to his aborted appointment as a page to the Countess of Ligne-Arenberg, during his adolescence. The formality was stultifying, and the obligations drained his time and energy from the work he not only enjoyed but also considered his true calling. Mantua was, in the end, a provincial city, and he was anxious to reunite with his brother in more cosmopolitan Rome, international center of artistic patronage.

  Rubens’s personal romance with Rome had begun during his eight-month residency in the city in 1601. At that time, he had engrossed himself in Rome’s unrivaled cultural patrimony, visiting both its ancient wonders and its more recent works, Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling and Raphael’s Vatican frescoes being the most prominent among them. The recently uncovered Aldobrandini Marriage, a fresco dating to the first century A.D., struck him so powerfully that he could recall its composition in exacting detail nearly two decades later. He documented all that he saw, and his ideas on whatever subjects interested him, in a notebook he carried with him on his forays around the city. Nothing escaped his attention. In that leather-bound book were architectural drawings; notes on anatomy, optics, proportion, and symmetry; classical quotations; poetry; and copied details from paintings of diverse genres and periods. Those sketches would serve as inspiration and source material for his practice in the years to come, and he supplemented them with original old-master drawings he purchased and occasionally tweaked to meet his own tastes and standards. Even at such a relatively young age, his confidence in his own vision was extraordinary, almost excessive.

  Rubens was a busy student during those eight months, but his primary energies were given over to a prize commission landed in large thanks to his brother. The archduke Albert, sovereign of the Spanish Netherlands, was in the market for an altarpiece to be gifted to the Roman Church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. Albert had been a cardinal prior to assuming power in the Low Countries, and was a patron of Santa Croce, where he received his orders. Though he was a devout man, Vatican hard-liners found him disconcertingly moderate, especially in regard to the Protestant revolt within his dominion. An extravagant expression of devotion would therefore serve as a prudent political gesture. Conveniently, Albert’s representative at Rome was the son of Jean Richardot, president of the Flemish Council of State, for whom Rubens’s brother Philip had served as a personal secretary. Rubens was in the right place at the right time; that he was Flemish only made the gift, from the archduke to the people of Rome, more fitting. The three-panel altar, with Saint Helena with the True Cross as its centerpiece, was not a masterpiece—Rubens had not yet shed the stiffness of the Antwerp tradition in which he had trained—but the commission was prominent enough to place him in the minds of Rome’s connoisseurs.

  In 1605, with the successful embassy to Spain now under his belt, and having duly paid his respects to Vincenzo in Mantua, Rubens petitioned the duke for the right to relocate to Rome, where the continued upward trajectory of his career would only redound to the glory of his patron. Rubens got his release, but soon after being granted his furlough, he was unceremoniously recalled to Mantua. In the short time he had spent in Rome, however, he had managed to win for himself another prize commission: an altar-piece for the Chiesa Nuova, the magnificent new church built by the Oratorian movement. It was an extraordinary opportunity. That Rubens had won the job was a small miracle in its own right, even if the competition was thinned a bit by the fact that the presumptive favorite, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, was at present on the lam. (The irredeemable painter had murdered a local gangster in a fit of jealous rage.) There were other candidates, all Italians, but Rubens, growing in political savvy, had recruited several heavyweights to support his bid, among them the cardinals Scipione Borghese (nephew of Pope Paul V) and Jacobo Serra (treasurer of the Vatican states).

  With that job on his plate, and with his salary in constant arrears, Rubens was not anxious to return to Mantua. While dodging requests that he come back, he peppered Chieppio with letters dunning the duke for payment of his overdue salary. Rubens only accepted the Chiesa Nuova commission, he wrote, “out of pure necessity” to keep up his own expenses. This was something less than the whole truth, but it left Rubens emboldened enough to beg that his recall be conditional on the duke giving “his princely word” that he be allowed to return to Rome. Rubens larded up this impudent missive with sufficient obeisances to avoid a charge of ingratitude, or even outright insubordination, but the shift in the tenor of his relationship with Vincenzo was plainly evident.

  Beyond his elevated stature, the time spent in Rome was a pleasure for Rubens, one of the most fruitful and enjoyable periods of his life. He shared a comfortable house with his brother and two servants on the Strada della Croce, not far from the Piazza di Spagna. Though his stay hadn’t begun well—he was diagnosed with pleurisy, a painful inflammation of the chest that restricts breathing—he recovered quickly, and the two brothers became fixtures among a circle of expatriate scholars, artists, and other men of prominence. Rubens himself cut a handsome figure about town. Women couldn’t help but point out the handsome man known as Il Fiammingo (the Fleming) who dressed like a gentleman, rode a horse with natural grace, and audaciously wore the golden chain of an aristocrat even though he held no title. Word had spread about the portraits he had made on a side trip to the court of Genoa. With a few strokes of his brush, it was said, he could transform even the most ordinary matron into a Venus. They knew what he had done for the marchesa Spinola Doria; she was attractive, but no goddess. This was treatment they could most certainly not expect from Caravaggio, the most famous and notorious of Roman painters; he’d sooner transform the most beautiful woman—even the Virgin herself—into a common streetwalker. This, in fact, was precisely what Caravaggio had done in his altarpiece for the Church of Santa Maria della Scala, a work so offensive to that church’s Carmelite fathers that they refused to accept it. Rubens, however, knew a good thing when he saw it, and arranged for Vincenzo to pick it up for the Mantuan state collection at a cut rate of 350 crowns.

  Rubens admired Caravaggio, or at least the emotional force of his characters and the sureness of his manipulation of paint on canvas. Temperamentally, the two artists could not have been more different. Caravaggio was a man of the street, a habitué of prostitutes, and, as his present circumstance illustrated, tragically quick to violence. Rubens was never one for that typ
e of behavior. He gravitated instead toward his brother Philip’s intellectual circles; at heart he was a gentleman scholar, more interested in a colloquy on the significance of an antique coin than in a night of carousing among the demimonde at the ball courts along the Via di Pallacorda—Caravaggio’s running ground. Indeed, Rubens often seemed as if he would have been happier in another era altogether: he set aside time every day for the study of classical history and literature, and with his brother collaborated on the production of Electorum, a philological study of ancient Rome, with Philip as the principal author and Peter Paul his consultant and illustrator. (The handsome volume was published in Antwerp by Jan Moretus, proprietor of the distinguished Plantin Press.) It was during this time that Gaspar Scioppius, one of the foremost Catholic theologians of the period, wrote of Rubens, “I know not which to praise most, his ability in painting, in which he attains the most exalted rank attained by any man of this century, or his knowledge of literature, his enlightened taste, and the all too rare agreement between his words and his deeds.”

  For all its joys, Rubens’s time in Rome was not without challenges. By late 1607, his prize commission for the altar of the Chiesa Nuova had somehow transformed from personal triumph into an embarrassing professional fiasco. His first attempt at the job, a resplendently enrobed Saint Gregory standing beneath a portrait of the Virgin cradling an infant Jesus, was rejected after installation, though the painter deemed it “by far the best and most successful work I have ever done.” The excuse was that it was too hard to see from the pews, though in truth it might have been just a bit too resplendent for the comfort of his ascetic Oratorian clients. Rubens hammered out a replacement, and on slate to cut glare, but receiving payment for it proved almost impossible. (He would not be compensated until 1612.) He was also stuck with the original, which he was forced to try pawning off on Vincenzo, a humiliating development. The piece had been commissioned at a rather steep 800 crowns, but he told Chieppio that the duke could pay what he wished and on the terms of his choosing—“except for one or two hundred crowns, which I shall need now.” This he followed with a pitch that now seems more suitable to a carpet dealer: “I will tell you that the composition is very beautiful because of the number, size, and variety of figures of old men, young men, and ladies richly dressed. And although these figures are saints, they have no special attributes or insignia which could not be applied to any other saints of similar rank. And finally, the size of the picture is not so excessive that it would require much space; it is narrow and tall. All in all, I am certain that Their Highnesses, when they see it, will be completely satisfied.” It was a hard sell, and an indication that, for all of its exalted ability to confer prestige, painting remained a craftwork sold by the yard. The Gonzagas, in any case, weren’t buying.

  Rubens had other problems. Back in Antwerp, the brothers had lost their older sister Blandina to plague, and now their mother, Maria, was ailing with lung disease. Philip returned to her side. Peter Paul, after eight years abroad, wanted to join him, but his obligations to the duke prevented his departure. Vincenzo was generous enough to allow his prized painter to station himself in Rome, but not quite ready to let him quit Italy for his Antwerp home, from whence he might not return. Repeated efforts to procure a furlough came to nothing. Back in Flanders, Philip appealed directly to his brother’s former client, the archduke Albert, who was happy to assist. “As he is my vassal, I have the desire to give him satisfaction,” Albert wrote to Vincenzo, in the late summer of 1607. The duke might have suspected Albert’s real desire was to add Rubens to his own company of image makers, and so the request was politely refused, with Vincenzo coyly suggesting that Rubens preferred to stay in Rome, and far be it from him to interfere in the matter.

  By October 1608 the deterioration of Maria Rubens was accelerating at a rate that made Peter Paul’s continued presence in Rome impossible, regardless of the consequences. On the twenty-sixth of the month, a letter arrived from Philip with news that their mother was now coming to the end of her battle. With that, Rubens summoned his trusted pupil Deodate del Monte and began to put the house on the Strada della Croce in order. There were bills to settle, friends to bid farewell, possessions to pack against the hazards of a long journey over difficult terrain. (He had learned of these travails the hard way, and so was doubly careful in packing his own works.) When preparations were complete, the horses watered and saddled, there was one final matter to settle: a letter to Chieppio begging forgiveness in advance for his “impertinence” in leaving without authorization. He knew the duke himself was at present en route back from the Netherlands—a trip to a spa on which Rubens had not, to his frustration, been invited—and pledged he would try to meet up with him on the way, if only to beg the pardon of His Most Serene Highness in person. The letter, by turns fawning and passive-aggressive, was a small masterpiece of artful groveling, a form in which Rubens was by now expert. “It will be hard for me to go attend this scene,” he wrote of his mother’s bedside. “One can hope of no other outcome than the end common to all humanity.” Even in a moment of personal distress, Rubens could summon a formidable capacity for eloquence. It was a trait he had fully developed in the duke’s service, and it would serve him well throughout his career.

  There was something else he would carry with him back to Antwerp, a change to his identity that marked his intellectual growth. Peter Paul Rubens would henceforth sign his name Pietro Pauolo Rubens. He may have been leaving Rome, but he was taking a bit of Italy along with him.

  CHAPTER II

  EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF

  Who is of so hard and flinty a heart that he can anie longer endure these evils? Wee are tossed, as you see, these manie yeares, with the tempest of civill warres: and like Sea-faring men are wee beaten with sundrie blastes of troubles and sedition. If I love quietnesse and rest, the Trumpets and ratling of armour interrupt mee. If I take solace in my countrie garden and farmes, souldiers and murtherers force me into the Towne. Therefore I am resolved, leaving this infortunate and vnhappie Belgica (pardon mee my deere Countrie) to chaunge Land for land, and to flie into some other part of the world.

  —JUSTUS LIPSIUS

  Rubens could be forgiven for thinking he had returned to a city of ghosts. The journey back to Antwerp from Rome took him more than a month, and when he finally arrived at the family residence on Kloosterstraat, in the second week of December 1608, it was already too late. Maria Rubens had passed away on October 19, a week before Philip Rubens’s final letter had even reached his brother on the Strada della Croce. At least, in her will, Maria had taken care to inventory the beautiful paintings her son had created, with instructions that they be returned to him. That must have been a small consolation.

  His mother was gone, and Antwerp was a haunted vision of its former self. The conflict between the Spanish and the rebellious Dutch had exacted a devastating toll on the city. The Scheldt, Antwerp’s connection to the North Sea and its economic lifeline, was blockaded by the Dutch navy. The English diplomat Dudley Carleton, visiting just a few years later, lamented the sad state of a city he considered unmatched “for the bewtie and uniformitie of buildings, heith and largeness of streetes, and strength and faireness of the rampars.” Those buildings and streets were lovely but barren, save for untended wild grasses sprouting up across the emptiness. “In ye whole time we spent there I could never sett my eyes in the whole length of streete upon 40 persons at once,” he wrote. “I never mett coach nor saw man on horseback: none of owr companie (though both were workie days) saw one pennie worth of ware ether in shops or in streetes bought or solde. Two walking pedlers and one ballad-seller will carrie as much on theyr backs at once as was in that royall exchange.”

  For as long as Rubens had known it, from the very first time he passed through its gates in his eleventh year of boyhood, Antwerp had been in decline. The city was the Rubens family’s ancestral home, and in the artist’s maturity (and in posterity) he would be celebrated as its favorite son. But in
truth he was not born there, or even in the Low Countries. This fact was occasionally omitted from the record by Flemish nationalists who wished to claim him entirely as their own, and by hagiographic biographers unwilling to let the embarrassing circumstances of his youth besmirch the image of a flawless genius. Rubens himself was understandably reluctant to address the subject of his family’s sad story, a saga inextricably intertwined with the greater history of the Low Countries.

  Rubens’s predecessors, on both his maternal and his paternal sides, had made Antwerp their home for generations. His mother, Maria, née Pypelinckx, was born in Antwerp in 1538 to a respectable burgher family. At the age of twenty-three she married Jan Rubens, a natural charmer eight years her senior. He had just returned from seven years studying civic and canon law in Italy. It seemed a perfect match. Though his family was not quite as prosperous as hers (he came from a line of druggists), they were landowners, and he was considered a man of solid potential. Jan had lost his own father at a tender age, but his mother had remarried to a successful grocer named Jan de Lantmetere, the brother of an alderman.

  The Antwerp that Jan and Maria Rubens knew in their youth was a thriving metropolis, an international center of commerce and culture. In 1561, the same year they celebrated their vows, the cornerstone was laid for an enormous new town hall on the Grote Markt, Antwerp’s market square. With a wedding-cake central portico capped by a triumphal arch and a toy temple, the building was a six-story advertisement of civic pride. Cornelis Floris de Vriendt, a sculptor by trade, favored it with the most fashionable classical forms—a rusticated stone base, Ionic and Doric columns, obelisks for finials—but there was no restraining its quintessentially Flemish character. The sheer volume of decoration was telling. Antwerp was unafraid to put on airs—its citizens even called themselves sinjoren, or “sirs”—and de Vriendt’s giant block conveyed the special combination of aspiration and joviality that defined the place.