by Mark Lamster
There seemed to be no brooking a tide of sectarian violence that was sweeping across Europe. Lerma himself had contributed to this deplorable situation, ordering the mass deportation of more than 300,000 Moriscos (Islamic converts to Catholicism) from Spain between 1609 and 1614, over fears about their loyalty. Religious intolerance was also at issue in May 1618, when a pair of Catholic governors in Bohemia were summarily thrown from a castle window; the so-called Defenestration of Prague was ineffective as a killing—the men survived their fall—but marked the beginning of a war in central Europe between Catholics and Protestants that would drag on for thirty years, metastasizing outward as it ensnared every major power on the Continent.
Neither Lerma nor his Dutch counterpart, Oldenbarnevelt, was anxious to be further drawn into the wars of religion. If anything, the two wanted to remove themselves from these sectarian conflicts, which drained finances and threatened internal stability. Both men, however, would be the victims of their essentially pragmatic agendas, and their downfalls would come in quick and ugly succession. In August 1618, Oldenbarnevelt was arrested after a confrontation with Maurice, the Prince of Orange, who was opposed to his policy of détente. Ten months later, he was beheaded for treason. Lerma was also forced from his office in 1618, and the greater indignity was that he was the victim of a plot masterminded by his own son, the Duke of Uceda. At least he could retire in comfort to his Ventosilla retreat. Calderón was not so lucky. He was thrown from court, tortured into the confession of a murder, and executed. Rubens’s Adoration, which he brought home from Antwerp, found its way to the Spanish royal collection.
The peregrinations of that painting were indicative of an ever-growing preference for Rubens’s work among European royalty during these years, in particular among those hoping to burnish their reputations on the world stage. His singular brand of exultant grandiosity was especially appealing to those who ruled by divine right. To the extent that he compromised his bourgeois ideals in the service of these clients, he was able to prosper by them—enormously. Rubens was hardly naive as to the nature of his position, and refused to turn a blind eye to the worst excesses, political and otherwise, of those for whom he worked. He nevertheless remained a good burgher, loyal to the Spanish monarchy despite its long history of disdain and neglect for the Flemish population; his own family had been forced into exile by the terror of the Duke of Alva. Of course, the Rubens family’s experience in the orbit of William of Orange, champion of the Dutch rebellion, had proven equally devastating—the ruination of his father. Given that personal history, it is no wonder that Rubens would always harbor a certain wariness of authority and profess a distaste for court life. Nor should it be any surprise that conciliation was a value he placed above all others.
Conciliation, however, did not always come so easily, an unhappy fact that often found its way into Rubens’s canvases, even those putatively devoted to the theme of love. In his Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, painted around 1617, two warrior brothers abduct a pair of pulchritudinous nude blondes, who seem caught in a state somewhere between terror and ecstasy. This was not a standard scene from the classical repertoire; Rubens plucked it from Ovid, who wrote of the sisters, “The thing they enjoy, they often like to think they give unwillingly.” Around the same time, Rubens also painted the hero Perseus rescuing a naked Andromeda shackled to a rocky escarpment. Rubens, during this period, had begun to fully realize his vision of the female body as a medium for conveying visual pleasure and symbolic meaning. Indeed, both pictures might be read as allegories for the plight of Flanders, with the helpless maidens in each case representing his careworn homeland, and their armor-clad heroes the forces of Spain.
Nowhere was Rubens’s genius better appreciated—or desired—than England, where eager collectors were anxious to assert their status as connoisseurs on a level equal to their Continental counterparts. One of the most aggressive English aesthetes was Thomas Howard, the Earl of Arundel, also a Rubens acolyte. They had first met in Brussels in 1612, when Howard commissioned a portrait from the painter, now lost. Two years later, Howard toured Italy on a buying spree with his wife, Aletheia Talbot, and the architect Inigo Jones, who came along for his own inspiration and as a consultant. In Venice, the group was given special treatment by the English ambassador, Dudley Carleton. The world of English aesthetes was indeed small. When Aletheia visited the Rubens workshop in 1620, she sat for a large group portrait that included her jester, her midget, her dog, and Carleton, who appears somewhat less than thrilled with the company in the picture.
Aletheia came at a busy time for Rubens, and if not for political circumstances, she might well have been turned away at the studio door. That her husband was a Catholic in the English court made him an especially useful contact for Rubens, then coming into his own as a diplomatic operator in the service of the archdukes Albert and Isabella. Having a friendly ear in London would always be to Rubens’s advantage. As it was, Carleton, who was still stationed in The Hague, had proven to be a friend on whom the artist could depend. A few months earlier, the ambassador had been particularly helpful in Rubens’s efforts to secure the copyright for engraved prints of his works in Holland. In this project, Rubens had already enlisted the support of Pieter van Veen, a distinguished lawyer in The Hague and the brother of the artist’s former master, Otto van Veen. Even with Van Veen’s assistance, however, antagonism between the Dutch and the Spanish was such that Rubens, given his ties to the Spanish-controlled Flemish government, found it difficult to secure the proper license, a fact he considered especially disconcerting. He nevertheless hoped that Carleton might be able to grease the wheels, if not the palms, of the Dutch bureaucracy.
Rubens wanted his copyright privileges, but he wanted Carleton to press his case with delicacy. If the ambassador felt the request would become a public nuisance, Rubens instructed him to “break off negotiations at once, without making any further advances.” Rubens was ordinarily aggressive about making his claims, but in this case he did not want to be seen as “importunate.” He refused to specify precisely why he wanted Carleton to restrain himself, citing only “other important reasons.” The ambassador may well have surmised what these were: Rubens, long a political agent of the archdukes Albert and Isabella, had now become actively involved in political negotiations with the Dutch on behalf of his sovereigns, and he did not want his personal affairs jeopardizing more important public matters. In any case, this turned out to be a nonissue. Through Carleton’s careful intervention, Rubens got the privileges he wanted without controversy.
In the meantime, Carleton once again found himself uncomfortably dealing in art. He and Rubens had become enmeshed in another negotiation in 1619, this time with Carleton serving as middleman for Henry, Lord Danvers. Like his countryman Thomas Howard, Danvers was a great connoisseur of art, and not coincidentally the purchaser (at cut rates) of several of the paintings Carleton had imported in his ill-fated arrangement with Robert Carr, the Earl of Somerset. Now Danvers was unhappy with one of those pictures, a Bassano in markedly poor condition, and had an idea to replace it with a Rubens. Specifically, he wanted to replace it with something akin to the Daniel in the Lions’ Den that Carleton had received as part of the exchange with Rubens for his antique marbles. “Thoes bewtiful lions in the den would well satisfye my desire,” Danvers told Carleton. He suggested a straight-up trade with the painter—the cracked and flaking Bassano for a new picture by Rubens—and arranged for the Bassano to be sent to Antwerp for inspection.
Rubens, predictably, was less than enthusiastic about the proposed bargain. “Ruined” was his assessment of the Bassano, useful only as a model for student drawing and worth no more than 60 guilders. The Daniel he sent Carleton in the deal for the marbles had been valued at ten times that much. If Danvers wanted another painting on that scale, he’d have to pay accordingly. As an alternative, Rubens proposed to send Danvers a Lion Hunt produced by his studio, but “touched and retouched everywhere alike by my own hand.�
�� Given Carleton’s historical aversion to studio work, Rubens might have anticipated trouble, and indeed there were premonitions that this arrangement might not be successful when Carleton’s agent reported from Antwerp that the picture “scarce doth look like a thing that is finished.” Rubens, however, sent it along anyway.
When it arrived in London, there was no hiding Danvers’s dissatisfaction. What’s more, it was revealed that Danvers was acquiring the painting not for himself but on behalf of Charles, the Prince of Wales, who admired Rubens to no end and who already owned a small Judith and Holofernes the artist had painted during his years in Italy. Danvers delivered a brutal assessment to Carleton: “In every painters [sic] opinion he hath sent hither a peece scarse touched by his own hand, as the Prince will not admit the picture into his galerye. I could wish thearfore that the famus man would [do something] to register or redeem his reputation in this howse.” In conclusion, he wrote that the lions should be sent back to Rubens “for tamer beastes better made.”
The rejection was an affront, but the unexpected news that the painting was intended for the future king of England was most welcome (if shocking), and motivation enough for Rubens to swallow his pride. He humbly offered to paint a new picture, one “less terrible,” and even agreed to a rebate on the price. “I shall be very glad to have this picture located in a place as eminent as the gallery of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales,” he wrote to William Trumbull, an English diplomatic agent in Brussels.
The timing was propitious, and for several reasons. Charles, like his late older brother, Henry, saw artistic patronage as a path to international credibility, and he was in position to award a commission of considerable importance—something far greater than the hunt scene under discussion. Work had recently commenced on a new banqueting house for the royal palace at Whitehall, in London. In the future, it would serve as the king’s formal reception hall, but its more immediate function was to host the celebration following Charles’s pending marriage to Maria Anna, the Spanish infanta. That proposed union would finally heal one of Europe’s great rifts. For such a momentous occasion a building of splendor was required, and design was left to the architect Inigo Jones. Inside, a decorative program in paint would complete this project, and only an artist capable of producing a corresponding sense of majesty would do. Rubens, of course, was happy to volunteer his services, never mind the present dissatisfaction with his work. “Regarding the hall in the New Palace,” he wrote in that same letter to Trumbull, “I confess that I am, by natural instinct, better fitted to execute very large works than small curiosities. Everyone according to his gifts; my talent is such that no undertaking, however vast in size or diversified in subject, has ever surpassed my courage.”
CHAPTER IV
A GOOD PATRIOT
Surely it would be better if these young men who govern the world today were willing to maintain friendly relations with one another instead of throwing all Christendom into unrest by their caprices.
—PETER PAUL RUBENS
Whitehall would have to wait, but Rubens found his ambition for works vast in size and diversified in subject amply satisfied when he arrived at the doors of the Luxembourg Palace early in the winter of 1622. He was there at the invitation of Marie de’ Medici, the Queen Mother of France, who had reached out to him at some time during the previous fall. Marie was in the market for a cycle of paintings to decorate her new palace on the Left Bank of the Seine, and she was hoping Rubens might accept the commission. Of all the monarchs in Europe, none had greater want of his services, for there was no other royal whose reputation was in so desperate a need of rehabilitation.
Back in 1600, as a member of Vincenzo Gonzaga’s court, Rubens had been a witness to Marie’s proxy marriage to the French king, Henry IV, at the Duomo of Florence. There were endless encomiums to her during the celebrations of that event, a litany of tributes to her bright future. But her career ever since had been a prolonged study in unchecked ambition, scandal, and humiliation. Her marriage, launched so auspiciously, was an unhappy one: Henry was a notorious philanderer and a divorcé who had cast off his first wife after she failed to provide him with a male heir. Established on shaky ground, the relationship between Marie and Henry degenerated over time. Marie wasn’t one to be spurned, and her considerable lust for power was stoked by a retinue of imported Italian advisers. She did provide for the succession of Henry’s Bourbon line—the dauphin, Louis, was born in 1601—but when the king was assassinated in 1610, Marie usurped authority as the head of state. (It was widely, if inaccurately, believed that she had a hand in her husband’s murder.) Years later, when young Louis XIII, no longer a minor, reclaimed the authority that was rightfully his, mother and son engaged in an unseemly struggle that resulted first in her banishment from Paris into the French hinterlands and then in a battle between armies under their respective flags. The sad affair was brought to a conclusion only through the intervention of the bishop of Luçon—the future Cardinal Richelieu—Marie’s former chief minister, who returned from his own exile to broker an uneasy peace. That agreement, the Treaty of Angers, brought Marie back to Paris and restored some of her influence. To celebrate that homecoming, Marie felt something magnificent was in order, a project grand enough to reaffirm her status as a starring player on the world stage. It was just the kind of politically loaded project for which Rubens seemed destined.
Rubens considered himself eminently suited to the commission, but as a Flemish national who pledged allegiance to Spain, he was a controversial choice for a French queen of Italian descent. French artists were particularly displeased by the snub, even if there was no local candidate with a comparable reputation. Rubens, however, could count on a series of glowing references. He no doubt received a solid recommendation from Marie’s sister, Eleonora Gonzaga, the Duchess of Mantua, whom he had ably served for so many years. In Paris, the Flemish ambassador Henri de Vicq supported his candidacy, as did his superior in Brussels, the archduchess Isabella, who was on good terms with the Queen Mother. Indeed, Isabella was likely the intermediary when Marie first approached the painter. As a token of the women’s mutual admiration, Rubens was instructed to pick up a few gifts for Marie at Isabella’s Coudenberg Palace on the trip south from Antwerp, including a small female dog wearing a necklace of twenty-four enamel plaques. He also received an informal directive of his own: he was to pay careful attention to the activities of the royal court in Paris, and report back all that he learned. Isabella and Marie were friendly, but Spain and France were traditional foes in a volatile world, and the opportunity for the archduchess to place an agent so close to the French throne was too valuable to pass up.
Rubens’s sharp mind and special knack for endearing himself to figures of authority had prepared him well for this clandestine service. Indeed, he had gradually developed into one of Isabella’s trusted advisers, a man whose judgment she could rely on without fear of compromise. As a painter doing business across Europe, he was in communication with influential figures in nearly every capital. His network of antiquarian contacts, meanwhile, kept him apprised of political developments major and minor. For Rubens, this was only good business. He needed information on potential clients: Whose fortunes were bright? What kind of subject matter might be appealing or taboo? Who might welsh on one of his very large bills? What he learned he dutifully passed along to his sovereign.
Leaving Brussels for Paris, Rubens might well have thought back to his first diplomatic mission years earlier, when he had departed Mantua for Spain without having so much as consulted an atlas. That neophyte must have seemed like an entirely different person. He was now a capable diplomatic operator at ease in the most rarefied precincts of European power. His artistic skill had given him entrée into this exalted world, but his success in navigating its darkened corridors was a product of his own shrewd intelligence and personal charm. He was, indeed, the perfect spy.
MARIE’S EXPANSIVE NEW RESIDENCE, the Luxembourg Palace, made a strong impre
ssion on Rubens when he first set eyes on it. The location, a short ride from the Seine in suburban St.-Germain, was excellent: comfortably removed from the squalid and overcrowded confines of central Paris, but still connected to the Right Bank and the Louvre by the recently completed Pont Neuf. Marie had purchased the grounds from the duc de Piney-Luxembourg in the spring of 1612, and at once had it cleared for something new. Being a Medici, her natural inspiration was the Pitti Palace in Florence, seat of the family dynasty, and she went so far as to dispatch a draftsman to make measured drawings of it for her French architect, Salomon de Brosse. The first stone of his design was laid in 1615, and though it made allusions to its Florentine predecessor in its rusticated walls and enclosed court, what Rubens found on his arrival was something decidedly French in character and plan, a château more naturally suited to the fields of the Loire than to the hills of Tuscany.
Rubens liked what he saw, and was particularly satisfied with the ceremonial gallery on the first floor of the palace’s west wing that would be the site for his work. It was a grand setting, with gilded ceilings and velvet-covered walls. Tall windows ran down either side of the room toward a massive stone fireplace flanked by doors leading into Marie’s private apartments. Rubens’s charge was to fill the spaces between those windows, and above the fireplace and doors, with a cycle of paintings celebrating the life and achievements of the Queen Mother. With that job completed, he was to begin on a corresponding series devoted to the life of Marie’s deceased husband, Henry IV, to be placed in corresponding position in the opposite gallery on the eastern side of the palace. It was an immense task that would require an efficient and well-honed studio operation. Indeed, Rubens’s reputation for organization and alacrity was a significant factor in his selection for the job. With the enormous ceiling program for the Jesuit Church of St. Charles Borromeo, the workshop had proven itself capable of tackling projects of great size. “Italian painters could not do in ten years what Rubens promised to do in four,” noted Marie’s adviser Claude Magis, the abbé of St. Ambrose.