by Mark Lamster
The loss of the fleet was a devastating blow to Spain, and left matters in the Low Countries at an impasse. Farnese, in particular, well understood the plight of the long-suffering Flemish population, and had few illusions as to their prospects. “It is the saddest thing in the world to see what these people are suffering; this country is ravaged by the king’s troops as well as by those of their enemies,” he wrote. Sensing the moment for compromise, he dispatched a key adviser, Jean Richardot, to meet with Philip back in Madrid. His mission was to press the Spanish king to entertain a peace proposal with the Dutch, a proposal that would have given the Dutch the right to freely practice the Protestant faith in exchange for an end to their rebellion. Richardot would remain an influential figure within Flanders for years—and a patron of both Rubens brothers—but in this task he was not successful. Philip was not prepared to negotiate with the Dutch. Time, he thought, was on his side. If the Dutch felt they could win a prolonged battle of attrition with the superior military and financial resources of Spain, surely they were fooling themselves.
IN FACT, THE DUTCH were more than capable of holding off the forces of Spain. Two decades after the Spanish fleet had been routed in the icy waters off the Flemish coast, the situation in the Netherlands remained at a stalemate, even as the players in the drama had, for the most part, changed. In 1584, William of Orange was permanently silenced by an assassin’s bullet while puttering down the stairs of his home in Delft. Maurice, his son with Anna of Saxony, Jan Rubens’s old paramour, took control of Dutch forces. With frigid blue eyes and a strawberry shock of a beard, he was an intimidating figure, and quickly proved himself to be a far more able commander than his father.
Maurice did not have to contend with the equally formidable Farnese for very long. The Spanish commander died in 1592, leaving a power vacuum in Flanders that was not filled until the arrival, four years later, of Archduke Albert of Austria, Philip’s nephew. Albert was soon joined, in both sovereignty and marriage, by Philip’s daughter, the infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia. The Spanish king was pleased with the match. Albert had always been one of his favorites, and he doted on Isabella. Title to the Spanish Netherlands was his wedding gift to the couple, though he granted it to them with a key stipulation. If the newlyweds failed to produce an heir, title would revert to Spain.
In fact, Albert and Isabella were never fully autonomous as sovereigns. For all their independence, they remained vassals of the Spanish king. Indeed, their policy making was overseen by a junta of Spanish councillors who answered directly to Philip II in Madrid. When he died, in 1598, the Spanish crown was assumed by Isabella’s younger brother, Philip III. He was not especially interested in overseeing Spanish affairs in the Low Countries, but his valido, Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, the all-powerful Duke of Lerma, was very much up to that task.
Rubens, of course, had become an intimate of Lerma’s during his embassy to Spain on behalf of Vincenzo Gonzaga. At the duke’s country retreat at Ventosilla, the two men had developed an easy rapport. If nothing else, they were united by their immense ambition. As Rubens was at work on his equestrian portrait of the duke, the two surely discussed the sad state of political affairs in the Low Countries. A natural entry into the subject would have come through their mutual respect for Jean Richardot, the old diplomatic hand and Rubens family friend. Lerma’s grand strategy for the greater Netherlands, by that time, was already beginning to coalesce, and over the following years would provide him with new leverage at the bargaining table. Under his direction, Spain signed treaties with both France and England, at once relieving Madrid of its two most feared adversaries and undercutting relations between the upstart Dutch provinces and their natural allies. On the ground, Lerma could rely on a new and extremely able military commander, Ambrogio Spinola, a Genovese adventurer of immense independent wealth. Spinola, using troops subsidized by his own fortune, won a series of victories for Spain that recouped territory lost to the Dutch. The most important of these triumphs was the 1604 capture of Ostend, after a three-year siege, from forces under the command of Maurice, the Prince of Orange.
With all that, the Spanish treasury was depleted, and Lerma was pressed to put a clamp on a regional conflict that had escalated into a global war. The growth of Dutch naval power, coupled with the formation of the East India Company and its nascent West India twin, represented an outright attack on Spain’s colonial empire. The two joint-stock corporations had been established as trade monopolies with broad authority—including military and diplomatic powers—to develop Dutch colonies overseas. Spain, for its part, considered the extraction of wealth from the Indies and the Americas to be its exclusive purview. Indeed, the Spanish treasury was kept afloat by the infusion of capital from its colonies. Threats to that lifeline were untenable for Madrid. When Dutch forces swiped key ports in the Spice Islands (Indonesia) in 1605, Lerma responded by secretly dispatching first Spinola and then the archduke Albert to meet with Dutch representatives in The Hague. Their goal was to secure a peace in which Spain would recognize Dutch independence in exchange for a withdrawal of the Dutch from their colonial interests in Asia and the Americas. Those far-off colonies were now more important to Spain than its claims on the Low Countries, the prized economic engine of northern Europe.
Lerma’s terms were met with hostility by militant factions in both Spain and the Netherlands. In Madrid, there was outrage at the very idea that Philip should abandon his sovereign territory at any price, and equal dismay that His Catholic Majesty might even consider the desertion of so many co-religionists still resident in Dutch territory. The outrage was only doubled when it was revealed that Albert had somehow put the Spanish offer of Dutch independence on the table without receiving the corresponding guarantee of a Dutch withdrawal from the Indies.
In the Dutch provinces, and especially Holland and Zeeland, where commercial interests were strongest, the prospect of relinquishing the enormous economic potential of the Indies trade was a nonstarter. Serious talks did not resume until February 1608, with Spinola and Richardot as chief Spanish negotiators. Their adversary was Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the advocate of Holland, political leader of the United Provinces. Again, the bargain was independence for withdrawal from the Indies, and again the result was deadlock. Oldenbarnevelt was in fact no less anxious for peace than Lerma, but like his Spanish counterpart he was constrained by the demands of a militant coalition that threatened his power. When the sides finally concluded the so-called Twelve Years’ Truce, in 1609, the only concession the Spanish managed to secure was a temporary freeze on Dutch colonial expansion, and the terms were so vague as to be almost worthless. The Spanish negotiators could not even convince the Dutch to lift their naval blockade of the Scheldt River, which had restricted Antwerp’s access to the North Sea at great cost to the city.
THE TWELVE YEARS’ TRUCE may have been a bad deal for Spain, but in the Low Countries it was welcomed with considerable celebration. Peter Paul Rubens, just returned from Rome and still mourning his devoted mother, was especially optimistic. It did not take a great clairvoyant to see that even with the Scheldt closed, Antwerp would benefit from a cessation of hostilities. If the river would not be the floating Broadway it had been in the previous century, when Antwerp was at the height of its powers, at least the city could rely on the excellent canal and transportation network of the southern Netherlands, which gave it indirect access to the North Sea and opened it to the world’s trade.
Rubens’s brother Philip was certainly prospering in this hopeful environment. Upon his return from Italy, he had become one of the city’s four councilmen, a post of considerable authority. He had also, by 1609, fallen in love with one of Antwerp’s fairest maidens, the beautiful Marie de Moy. Indeed, she was so attractive that Rubens quipped he might give up his own marital aspirations. “I will not dare to follow him, for he has made such a good choice that it seems inimitable. And I should not like to have my sweetheart called ugly if she were inferior to his.” But even as
Philip had been “favored by Venus, the Cupids, Juno, and all the gods,” he seemed incapable of closing the deal without his younger brother’s romantic direction. An artistic education was not, apparently, all that Il Fiammingo had picked up during his time in Italy. “I find by experience that such affairs [of the heart] should not be carried on coolly, but with great fervor,” he wrote. “My brother has also proved this, for since my arrival he has changed his tactics, after pining for two years in vain.”
The Rubens–de Moy wedding was a grand event in the old Antwerp style, and at some time during the festivities the best man, Peter Paul, was similarly struck by Cupid’s arrow. His Venus was Isabella Brant, the eighteen-year-old niece of his brother’s bride. Her father was Jan Brant, one of Philip’s colleagues on the Antwerp secretariat. Isabella possessed all the qualities Peter Paul saw in her aunt, and the two were married on October 3, 1609, in a ceremony that rivaled his brother’s. To commemorate the occasion, Rubens painted a disarmingly intimate double portrait of himself and his young bride, with the couple seated in complementary outfits beneath a bower of honeysuckle, which was traditionally associated with faithfulness and marital bliss. Isabella, in a burgundy skirt, looks out with a coy smile as her hand rests gently on his. The painter depicted himself sitting comfortably above her, his strong legs crossed casually in reddish stockings, with an aristocrat’s sword dangling from his left hand—a gentleman, but also a family man.
As the picture suggested, they were a happy couple, and now that Rubens was attached by what his brother called a “conjugal chain” to Antwerp, he chose to forsake Rome for good. The family expanded two years after the marriage, with the addition of a daughter, Clara Serena. Two boys followed: Albert in 1614 and Nicolas in 1618. In those blissful, bountiful years, Rubens proved his estimation of the entrepreneurial possibilities attendant upon the Twelve Years’ Truce to be entirely accurate, and demonstrated a gift for business that practically equaled his talent with oils. He knew well that the archduke Albert coveted his services as a painter, and had ever since Rubens’s days in Rome. Rubens’s old patron Vincenzo Gonzaga had put a check on the archduke’s attempts to lure the painter back to Flanders. But now the only obstacle Albert faced in adding Rubens to the roster of artists in his employ was Rubens himself. “I have little desire to become a courtier again,” he wrote. Servitude cramped his freedom and chafed at his ego, and he had fought against it even as a boy, when he had pressed his mother for release from the stultifying employ of the Countess de Ligne-Arenberg.
The archdukes Albert and Isabella were more than happy to satisfy his demand for independence. Rubens’s presence would not be required in Brussels, at least not daily. He could remain in Antwerp, with all the privileges of a court painter and an annual retainer of 500 florins, nearly double the income of a typical tradesman. To celebrate the appointment, he was given a gold chain valued at 300 florins. His title absolved him of taxes, and freed him from any obligation to the painters’ guild of Saint Luke, which had its own restrictions and levies. In exchange for this considerable munificence, Rubens was required to produce nothing but a single portrait of each monarch. All other commissions from the crown—occasional state portraits and other public works—were to be paid for on top of his salary.
The portraits Rubens made for the archdukes, half-length images of considerable formality, were nothing like that image of comfortable ease the artist created for himself and his new wife on the occasion of their marriage. The sovereigns were shown wearing serious expressions and all their finery: broad ruff collars, silk brocades, jewels, the full trappings of Habsburg power and prestige. Conversation during the sittings for those portraits surely extended to subjects beyond art. Jean Richardot, one of the archdukes’ closest political allies and a longtime friend of the Rubens family’s, had no doubt encouraged the two sovereigns to take advantage of the painter’s political acumen, and in particular his status as a favorite of the Duke of Lerma, the Spanish valido who exercised such enormous influence over their own affairs. The patent attaching Rubens to the service of the archdukes noted his qualifications in painting and, more cryptically, “several other arts.”
In addition to the patronage of Albert and Isabella, Rubens could rely on his connections to Antwerp’s political and merchant elite, the men and women who would rebuild the city’s economy during the truce years. It was from this group, and not the archdukes, that he received his first major commission after his return from Rome, and one loaded with political meaning. The Twelve Years’ Truce was to be formalized in an elaborate ceremony in Floris de Vriendt’s restored town hall, and suitable decoration for the room in which the event was to take place, the State Chamber, was required. Rubens responded with his most ambitious work to date, an enormous and almost obscenely sumptuous Adoration of the Magi, a composition jam-packed with figures, animals, and riches depicted with a furious energy in a glowing, honeyed light. The treaty’s signatories could not have escaped its thinly veiled symbolism: the Virgin (guardian of Antwerp) presents a baby Jesus (peace) to the three visiting kings (representatives of Spain, the Dutch, and the archdukes), whose servants bear with them gifts (the profits of accord). When the truce was signed, on April 9, 1609, the painting was in place. Rubens would have to wait a year for his 1,800-florin fee, but when the city did pay, it included a twenty-eight-ounce silver chalice as a token of respect.
In the year after he completed that commemoration of peace, Rubens erected a more personal monument to a woman who had endured so much hardship during the long years of conflict: Maria Rubens. On October 11, 1610, standing with his wife and brother, Rubens unveiled a new altar dedicated to his mother at her tomb in the Abbey Church of St. Michael. At its apex he placed the rejected altarpiece he had made for the Chiesa Nuova, which he had carried back with him from Rome. He was proud of it, and despite what the Oratorian fathers thought, he knew she would have been, too.
CHAPTER III
THE PRINCE OF PAINTERS
I cannot behold without ravishment the masterpieces in which you vie with nature. Courage, Apelles of our age, may your talents and your merit be recompensed by a new Alexander!
—DOMENICUS BAUDIUS
On one of Antwerp’s typically pleasant summer afternoons, with a cool breeze blowing in off the Scheldt and scudding clouds breaking across a crystalline sky, there was no more appealing place to spend a few hours than the lush private garden tucked behind the home of Peter Paul and Isabella Rubens. The painter designed it all, house and garden, having been inspired by the elegant Mantuan homes of the artists Andrea Mantegna and Giulio Romano. His good friend Jan van den Wouvere wrote that he built it expressly to astonish his many distinguished guests.
The property was located on the Wapper, a quiet canal street just off the Meir, Antwerp’s bustling commercial boulevard. Rubens purchased it in 1610 from the Harquebusiers’ Guild for 10,000 guilders, a princely sum. It was a great deal to pay, but the lot came with a handsome house in the traditional Flemish style—three redbrick stories with white stone trim and a steep roof punctured by stepped-gable windows—and an adjacent laundry house that, once demolished, would leave enough room for Rubens to build a new wing facing the street and, in addition, a pair of row houses to rent. In the back, there was space for a large formal garden.
It was a good five years before the Rubens family could actually move into their new home, and more than a decade before the artist was finally done tinkering and making alterations. The old Flemish house was gut renovated, and attached to it Rubens built a small Italianate palazzo to serve as his studio and workshop. The style of this building was something new to his neighbors, a precisely crafted jewel of classical design. The sketchbooks Rubens kept during his time in Italy attested to his careful attention to architectural detail. In 1621, he would even publish on this subject: a sumptuous two-volume monograph on the palaces of Genoa that so captivated him on his first visit to that city, years earlier. For the moment, however, Rubens did not build hi
mself a Genovese-style villa. He considered those buildings, though attractive, “suited to housing families of simple gentlefolk.” For his own home, he had something a bit more substantial in mind.
The contrast between Rubens’s two buildings—the older Flemish house that came with the property and the new Italianate wing he designed himself—was stark, a visual statement of loyalties divided. Inside, however, Rubens characteristically found harmony in the marriage of disparate traditions. Visitors entered through a heavy wooden door in the Flemish side, and from there were led into a courtyard enclosed by a portico that physically and metaphorically united the two wings of the house. Visible beyond was the garden, an Edenic space with a pavilion, fountains, and exotic trees selected especially by the artist. The triple-arched portico, a mash of heavily articulated forms surmounted by statues of Hermes and Athena (gods associated with diplomacy and the arts), was something entirely of Rubens’s invention, a translation into stone of his artistic and personal philosophy. Its elements, architectural and literary, were drawn from the classical tradition, but applied with the same unique blend of exuberance and bravado Rubens brought to canvas. To that end, Satyrs held aloft tablets with inscriptions from Juvenal that warned of life’s fragility and extolled the benefits of humility before the gods.
Rubens advocated humility as a general philosophy, but when it came to architecture, he made a distinction between houses that were solid blocks, like the Genovese buildings he recommended for “simple gentlefolk,” and those with open courts at their hearts, like his own, which he considered appropriate for a sovereign prince. Rubens was similarly unafraid to suggest, with a wink and a nudge, a suitably elevated place for his talents in the canon of art history. Across the courtyard facade of the workshop, Rubens re-created in what appeared to be low sculptural relief the works of his esteemed forebears, the most famous painters of Greek history: Zeuxis, Timanthes, Protogenes, Apelles. Their works were known only from literary descriptions, and in his own writings Rubens himself suggested it was best they be kept “in imagination alone, like dreams.” Attempts to reproduce them, he wrote, would result only in “something insipid or inconsistent with the grandeur of the ancients… and fail to do justice to those great spirits whom I honor with the profoundest reverence, preferring indeed to admire the traces they have left than to venture to proclaim myself capable of matching them, even in thought alone.” Those words had an appealingly humble ring, but in practice he teasingly violated his own warning. The frieze running along the workshop facade was actually not a frieze but a trompe l’oeil depiction of a frieze painted in grisaille, a technique in which monochrome pigment can be used to mimic the effect of stone. This artifice was extended and expanded on the garden facade of the workshop, where a three-dimensional loggia was faked onto what was in fact a blank wall. Above this scene, a painting by Rubens was stretched out to dry, apparently hanging over the “frieze.” Only the drying canvas was not a real drying canvas but a painting of a drying canvas. The painter’s more erudite friends (and especially the artists who visited) almost certainly appreciated this elaborate inside joke. The ancient painters Rubens most admired were famous for their ability to fool the eye. The masterpiece of Apelles, the greatest of those artists, was his Calumny, an allegorical rumination on the dangers of bearing false witness. On that front, Rubens had surely proven himself capable of matching his illustrious predecessor. Unfortunately, that subtext was lost on the royal eye of the Infanta Isabella, who supposedly asked that Rubens take the drying work down for inspection during one of her visits to the studio—an awkward moment, to be sure.