Master of Shadows

by Mark Lamster

  Inside, the house was furnished and fitted in the best taste, a necessity for entertaining distinguished guests. Royalty from across Europe came to the Rubens house to sit for the painter and to arrange for the purchase of works from his studio. A stop at the elegant home on the Wapper was all but obligatory for dignitaries visiting Antwerp, though travelers did not always arrive at its doors solely with art on their minds. The large formal garden in the back of the house was an excellent place for a private stroll, where delicate political affairs might be addressed away from prying eyes and ears. Moreover, Rubens himself was developing a reputation as a man of insight and discretion, and his proximity to the archdukes Albert and Isabella made him a useful conduit for those wishing to initiate back-channel negotiations with the sovereigns. The intimacy of his relationship with the archdukes during this time is plainly evident in a painting of a gathering at the Antwerp home of Cornelis van der Geest, one of the artist’s friends. In this picture, painted by Willem van Haecht in 1615, Albert and Isabella stand just below Rubens’s recently completed Battle of the Amazons, which hangs on a back wall. In the foreground is the painter himself, lecturing the royal couple on the merits of a Quentin Metsys Madonna and Child.

  Rubens kept a private office on the second floor of the workshop, and it was from there that he conducted most of his correspondence. Ever since his return from Rome, he had become an essential node in an informal network of like-minded thinkers—men such as Lipsius, Galileo, Isaac Casaubon, and Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc—who exchanged ideas on subjects ranging from ancient history to philosophy to the natural sciences. Political affairs figured prominently, especially for Rubens. A born scholar, he had supplemented his on-the-job political education with an academic investigation into the history, theory, and practice of diplomacy. (Espionage being the dark art naturally conjoined to statecraft, he studied that, too.) He was well versed in the ideas of the Renaissance theorist Niccolò Machiavelli, the best-known, if not most admired, authority on the subject. By the early 1620s, his own theories on the importance of negotiation during wartime were so advanced that he felt comfortable offering them to Frederik de Marselaer, a Brussels-based diplomat who was revising a book on the duties of an ambassador.

  Rubens did most of his writing behind closed doors, but his artistic invention was done primarily out in the open, in a large room on the first floor of his studio. This was a long gallery with four north-facing windows and high ceilings. Apprentices worked alongside him and also above on the second floor, in a domed room lit by an oculus window. There was plenty of space, but even still, Rubens couldn’t satisfy the demand for places in his studio. For Anthony Van Dyck, who would become his most famous pupil, he made room, but other talented students—even the children of friends and relatives—could wait a year or more before finding a position, if they got one at all.

  Rubens thrived on the commotion of the studio, and set about his work with a ferocious energy. Rapid brushstrokes augmented the sense of dynamism that was a hallmark of his style, and the sensuous tactility of the paint he applied enhanced the physical presence of his figures on canvas. “Abandon and audacity alone can produce such impressions,” the great Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix would later note. The more quickly Rubens worked, he discovered, the more profitable was his studio. Output increased, of course, but clients also enjoyed—and would pay a premium for—works in which his forceful stroke was readily discernible. Rubens actively promoted this fascination with his genius. It was good business, and it pleased his considerable ego. Painting, he felt, was both a discipline and a performance. Guests were encouraged to watch him at the easel. Otto Sperling, a Danish physician who saw Rubens in action, recalled that his talent was such that he could at once paint, dictate a letter, and listen to an assistant reading a classical text in Latin. “When we kept silent so as not to disturb him with our talk,” wrote Sperling, “he himself began to talk to us while still continuing to work, to listen to the reading and to dictate his letter, answering our questions and thus displaying his astonishing powers.”

  A Rubens painting often began with a few quick pen sketches known as crabbelingen, or “doodles.” He regularly drew from a live model and built up a “costume book” as a reference to ensure his figures were properly fashioned in period attire. Depending on the circumstance, initial studies were followed with larger conceptual drawings, usually on cream paper in a brown bistre ink made from oven soot or chalk, and then preliminary sketches in oil on wood board. As he matured, he would often skip drawing altogether and begin with an oil sketch. These were then handed off to his apprentices, who scaled his ideas to canvas and brought them to a predetermined level of execution. Some works Rubens completed entirely himself; others he simply finished with a few touches of the brush. Designs for the large tapestries that were a highly profitable Flemish specialty were sent off to local factories for execution. Contracts typically determined just how much of Rubens’s personal contribution was required in a particular work, but there was not always a contract, as he often worked on spec. The resulting confusion of authorship was a problem for some of his clients—it remains a problem for collectors and curators—but Rubens considered all of the work his own. Certainly it was lucrative. His prices were high, and he was not prone to negotiate. Indeed, he had so many buyers that he dealt with only the most distinguished connoisseurs. “He sends less competent judges to less competent painters,” wrote one client. Those who wanted his pictures had to accept his demands.

  The stereotype of the artist as a destitute genius supported only by charity is largely a product of the nineteenth century. The artists of Rubens’s era were craftsmen, and those who were masters ran efficient and profitable workshops. But even judged by the standards of his contemporaries, Rubens’s success as a capitalist was extraordinary. In its prime, the Rubens studio earned something on the order of 100 guilders per day, a figure that left the painter with an annual salary more than fifty times that of the average mason, and far in excess of the income requirement not just for a baron but also for a prince. Men of those ranks, however, were precluded from engaging in something so base as a trade—let alone one that required manual labor—for their incomes.

  Rubens, for his part, saw nothing ignoble in what he called his “dolcissima professione,” and was unashamed to show off the wealth he acquired through its practice. He could regularly be seen driving about Antwerp in a luxurious carriage, dressed impeccably and attended to by a flock of servants and assistants. He had few enemies, but even those who found his flights of theatricality self-indulgent or pretentious never dared to accuse him of laziness. He rose before dawn and began work with the first light. He ate a small vegetarian lunch around noon—he avoided meat, lest it upset his digestion and keep him from the easel. Following the meal, he worked through the afternoon until five, after which time he would exercise one of the several fine Spanish horses from his stable along the ramparts encircling the city—the routine of a gentleman, not a tradesman. Supper was taken with family and friends, but again Rubens was fairly abstemious. He didn’t drink to excess, and he never gambled.

  Evening hours were spent with his growing family and a close-knit circle of friends. Regulars at the Rubens house included his old schoolboy chum Balthasar Moretus, the scholars Jan van den Wouvere and Jan Caspar Gevaerts (known respectively in their Romanist circles as Woverius and Gevartius), and the still-life painter Jan “Velvet” Brueghel, son of the great Pieter Brueghel. (The nickname paid homage to his soft touch with a brush.) Rubens and Brueghel were so close that Rubens, more gifted with words, often handled his friend’s correspondence. Brueghel affectionately referred to him as “my secretary.” The two masters were also occasional collaborators, a highly unusual practice for artists of their stature. In these innovative works, Rubens painted the human figures, and Brueghel the surrounding floral arrangements (flowers being his specialty). Frans Snyders, another friend and an expert animal painter, was also a frequent collabora
tor. The benefit of these joint works, beyond their aesthetic pleasures, was that they could be sold at especially high rates, as they combined the skills of multiple masters, thereby providing “added value.”

  In Rubens’s era, genre specialists like Brueghel and Snyders were esteemed somewhat less than painters of grand subjects from history, but Rubens was never snobbish about such distinctions—though he was sure to place himself in the latter, more exalted group. Indeed, his friends routinely praised his generosity and humility, traits cultivated by his mother and his Jesuit education. Early in his career, the artist neatly summed up his personal philosophy with a simple diagram that he sketched into an Antwerp guest book. Above a small circle with a dot at its center, he wrote the Latin phrase “Medio Deus omnia campo.” “God is all things in the middle of the field.” Art history’s most celebrated exemplar of carnality was, at least intellectually, a man of quiet moderation. His passions were released in his work.

  Of course, the Baroque is not remembered as a time of self-effacement, and neither is its archetypal painter, who compensated for all that self-abnegation with an unprecedented excess of splendor in his work. If Rubens was aware of the ironic disconnect between his personal appetites and the essential nature of his art, he never felt cause to justify it. An enormous, controlling intelligence filtered his hedonistic impulses and provided the discipline that allowed him to create canvases that were larger, with more figures, more color, more drama, and more beauty than anything that had come before. And of course there were more of these pictures, thanks to his expertly staffed workshop and his own personal industry. Rubens made no secret that he reviled nothing so much as the sin of sloth. In a plague-ridden era, the ever-present specter of disease bred an expectation that precious time should be capitalized upon with full energy. When Rubens received a letter from Rome informing him of the death of Adam Elsheimer, a specialist in miniature landscapes painted on copper, he lamented his friend’s creative struggles, which resulted in “despair” and “deprived the world of the most beautiful things.” Rubens would never be the victim of his own diffidence, but he was generous enough to act as a dealer for Elsheimer’s widow. Using his contacts, he helped her sell off the artist’s remaining works at good prices, and without commission.

  Rubens was forced to confront an even more painful death in 1611, with the passing of his beloved older brother Philip, then just thirty-seven years old. It was a crushing loss. Philip had always been his closest confidant, and his death left Peter Paul as the lone survivor of the seven children born of Jan and Maria. In his brother’s honor, he created one of his most heartfelt works: a group portrait with Philip seated next to his late mentor, Justus Lipsius, and beneath a bust of Seneca, their intellectual hero. Rubens placed himself in that painting, looking out solemnly over his brother’s shoulder. His is not a comforting expression, but it does at least signal an adherence to the brand of neo-stoicism championed by Lipsius. “Constancy” was the word with which the philosopher was most commonly identified, and the title of his two-volume meditation on Senecan values, a kind of self-help guide to moral living in a turbulent world. A sense of stoicism was essential to Lipsius; the philosopher defined it as “a voluntarie sufferance without grudging of all things whatever can happen to, or in a man.” In difficult times, constancy was the “fair oak” upon which a man might lean his troubled body, and it was the intellectual crutch Rubens looked to when he found himself mourning the brother who years earlier had himself proclaimed a heart “torn apart by anxiety” for his seafaring younger sibling.

  Lipsius, a severe man with a sunken face, small eyes, and an aquiline nose, cast an enormous intellectual shadow over the Low Countries during the early seventeenth century, surpassing even that of his forebear Erasmus. His erudition was legendary. (He famously offered to read passages by Tacitus, one of his favorites, from memory with a dagger held at his gut, waiting for a slip that would never arrive.) The impact of his thinking on Rubens was especially acute. The philosopher’s story must have been particularly resonant for the Rubens siblings, as it mirrored the experience of their own family. Lipsius, like Jan and Maria Rubens, had fled the Spanish Netherlands before returning, in mind and body, to the Catholic fold. His theological philosophy was a pragmatic fusion of classical erudition and contemporary Christian orthodoxy that skirted the rifts between the most virulent Catholics and Protestants. That suited Rubens’s scholarly nature and his essential sense of temperance. The artist was never ostentatious about his faith, though he dutifully attended an early Catholic mass before beginning his workday. His parents’ Calvinist experimentation had bred in him a fairly tolerant worldview, and the religious warring of the Low Countries had impressed him as needlessly destructive. Certainly, his own family had suffered the consequences of sectarian division.

  Lipsian political philosophy was similarly modeled on classical precedent, in particular the systems of imperial Rome, on which he was an expert. Lipsius echoed Seneca’s injunction that individuals of capacity were obliged to serve the needs of the state. This was something of a truism of the period, shared by humanists across Europe. Michel de Montaigne, the great essayist of the previous century, acted as a mayor, a parliamentarian, and a secret mediator during the French Wars of Religion. In his own essay on the nature of constancy, Montaigne wrote, “The Peripatetic sage does not exempt himself from perturbations, but he moderates them.” It is no coincidence that Rubens, who always understood painting to be his primary vocation, would also develop a career as a pragmatic statesman.

  THE DISTINGUISHED SET of citizen-scholars who were Rubens’s confreres and clients gathered regularly in the private art galleries, or Kunstkammers, they built in their homes. These rooms were packed from their polished floors to their coffered ceilings with paintings, sculptures, and other wonders, rooms that reflected the worldliness and intellectual ambition of their owners. Nicolaas Rockox, the Antwerp burgomeester, commissioned a Samson and Delilah from Rubens and installed it over his fireplace, not far from a bust of Marcus Aurelius and a heartwood chest filled with shells and coins. Rubens himself collected shells, globes, books by the score, a sarcophagus, an Egyptian mummy, even plans for a “perpetual motion” machine. A Byzantine agate vase was a particular favorite.

  In 1619, Rubens initiated a weekly correspondence with the Parisian politician and fellow antiquarian Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc. Rubens wrote that first letter to enlist Peiresc’s support in his mission to secure French copyright privileges for a series of printed engravings. In the years following, their epistolary friendship would grow to one of unusual devotion, and it would continue throughout their lives. For Rubens, Peiresc became an invaluable source of intelligence on political affairs in Paris. In addition to his own highly informed commentary on that subject, Peiresc routinely sent along newspapers, pamphlets, and books that were noteworthy or controversial. He also sent fawning compliments. “You surpass all the painters of this century,” wrote the Frenchman. “I am convinced that you are the equal of the most excellent masters.” Beyond flattery, the subject they engaged in most happily was antiquarian scholarship, and their letters sometimes veered toward academic absurdity. “The reason for comparing the vulva to a snail I cannot imagine,” Rubens wrote in a letter analyzing a pornographic cameo. This, however, did not keep him from comparing the snail’s antennae to an engorged labia, though he switched languages from Italian to the more scholarly Latin to maintain propriety.

  Such displays of erudition were occasionally disparaged, even then, as the ostentatious vanities of dilettantes, an accusation not without some merit. But they were also markers of an obsessive quest for intellectual enrichment, a project antiquarians considered essential for self-improvement and for understanding the world around them. The realm of scholarship, Seneca argued, was an appropriate place of retreat for men of learning in a troubled age. But men like Peiresc and Rubens also shared a Lipsian worldview in which the historical past was understood to be contiguous with th
e political present. Theirs was very much a practical brand of humanism, and they believed a strong academic background critical for those in positions of national authority.