Master of Shadows

by Mark Lamster

  The scale of work was the least of Rubens’s problems. The real challenge, one that would demand every bit of his artistic and political savvy, lay in arriving at a program for the paintings that would celebrate the less-than-salutary life story of his client without causing ridicule, offense, or some combination of the two. There was hardly even an artistic tradition on which he could readily call as precedent. Women were not typically the subjects of painting cycles of a heroic nature.

  Rubens stayed in Paris for two months hashing out the subject matter of the cycle, with St. Ambrose negotiating on behalf of Marie. The painter relied on the advice of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, the French antiquarian with whom he had been engaged in a weekly correspondence for several years. Their friendship, formed with the pen, only grew once they met in person. “There is no more lovable soul in the world than that of M. Rubens,” Peiresc would write. Admittedly, they made for an unlikely couple when they stood side by side. Rubens, tall and handsome, was the charismatic center of any room he entered. Peiresc was short with a beaky nose and the slightly disheveled air of a man who spent an inordinate amount of time with his head buried in ancient manuscripts. For all their physical disparity, though, they had much that drew them together, beginning with their shared interest in the classical world. Both had received an intensive Jesuit education as boys (Rubens was older by just three years); and both had traveled to Italy to expand the breadth of their knowledge as young men. Most pertinently, both had been drawn into political affairs when their primary interests lay elsewhere. Peiresc, a parliamentary representative of his native Provence, proved especially useful to Rubens as a guide to the subtleties of Marie’s political position—critical for the artist as he developed a plan for decorating her palace.

  With Peiresc’s assistance, Rubens did his best to monitor the intrigues of the French court, though with mixed results. In particular, he was appalled by the tendency to resolve disputes via the duel, which he described as an “incorrigible mania.” The Parisian taste for dramatics offended his sense of moderation and reason, and made for an unfavorable contrast with Isabella’s admittedly sterile court in Brussels. “We fight a foreign foe,” he wrote, “and the bravest is he who conducts himself most valiantly in the service of his King. Otherwise we live in peace, and if anyone oversteps the bounds of moderation, he is banished from the Court and shunned by everyone … All these exaggerated passions are caused by mere ambition and a false love of glory.” The philosopher in Rubens disdained the most decadent indulgences of Parisian society, but as a painter he would celebrate the sophistication of the French court, conferring a sense of dignity on the insouciant modishness that disgusted his more scholarly friends. It helped that he was just a visitor on the scene. As Peiresc told him, the French court is “a comedy much more agreeable to watch from afar than when one finds oneself caught up in it.” This fact, however, did not prevent Peiresc from attempting to keep Rubens in Paris. He even suggested that Marie take measures to liberate the painter from his Antwerp home and keep him in the French capital on a permanent basis.

  Peiresc underestimated Rubens’s dedication to his homeland. Indeed, the painter was dutifully gathering intelligence for the archduchess Isabella throughout his time in France. If he had anything to report back to her, it was Richelieu’s increasing consolidation of power within the French monarchy, and a sense of the cardinal’s rather icy and calculating manner. This Rubens had the chance to experience firsthand at a meeting with Richelieu, who was impressed enough with the painter to commission several works. When Rubens finally left for home at the end of February, he had those commissions and, more important, a contract that would pay him a queen’s ransom—20,000 crowns, the equivalent of 60,000 guilders—for his work on the Luxembourg Palace pictures. Still, the conceptual program for that cycle remained unsettled.

  Consultations continued through the summer, when the parties finally agreed on a twenty-four-panel series culminating with The Triumph of Truth—an ironic final flourish considering the pains that would be taken to whitewash Marie’s history and sweep aside unflattering and inconvenient facts. The language of the series was to be allegorical, a system of representation that allowed the painter to associate Marie with heroic figures from ancient and Christian history, and to depict her as an object of ethereal beauty. (That was absolutely a fabrication; Marie was notoriously homely.) Uncontroversial moments from her life, like her wedding to Henry, could be pitched as straight narrative, with little obfuscation. But the scope of the program required several more creative productions. The rift with her son Louis XIII was presented largely in the context of their reconciliation. On this front, satisfying Marie was no more critical than appeasing Louis, the combustible head of state.

  In late August, for a brief moment, it seemed as if the whole project might be dead—though not as a result of any disagreement about the subject matter. The cause was even more dire: Rubens was rumored to have been murdered, killed by a deranged member of his own studio. The false news spread like a contagion across France, right to the ear of Marie herself. Peiresc had heard tell of it a few weeks earlier, and he claimed the news had left him completely beside himself. There was a core of truth in the tale. Rubens had been assaulted by one of his printmakers, a young man of extraordinary skill, grand ambition, and fragile temperament. The master, however, had survived the attack, and was alive and well, though aggravated beyond measure.

  The printmaker in question, Lucas Vorsterman, had first walked through the big wooden doors of the Rubens studio back in 1619, and he came bearing credentials that advertised an unimpeachable pedigree. Before moving to Antwerp, Vorsterman had honed his craft under the tutelage of the revered Dutch printmaker Hendrik Goltzius, whose work was universally admired for its exquisite detail. In Rubens, he found a master of even greater stature, an artist whose genius Vorsterman understood to be commensurate with his own. Not shy about his own talent, Vorsterman fashioned himself after Rubens, the model gentleman artist. When Vorsterman’s first child was born, in January 1620, he enlisted Rubens as the godfather. He emulated everything from the cut of the great artist’s whiskers to the rake of his broad-brimmed hat. By profession and inclination, Vorsterman was a copyist, and his work was indisputably excellent.

  Even under normal circumstances, the engraver’s job is a difficult one, a painstaking translation of color and shadow onto a metal surface using only scratched lines. Retaining the sense of an original work from a different medium is a challenge even with a simple composition; the dynamic rushes of a Rubens were practically impossible to reproduce on an unforgiving plate. Vorsterman, however, was a magician with the sharp end of a burin, the engraver’s pointed tool, and his native ability was magnified by a fanatical perfectionism. Vorsterman worried over and scrutinized his every etched mark, an obsessive attention to detail that eventually so compromised his vision that he would be forced to give up his profession and live off the charity of his daughter. But for the moment, his mania and his ego put him on a collision course with Rubens. Vorsterman felt strongly enough about his own genius that he considered his prints for Rubens to be original works, and he went about acquiring his own copyrights for them. Rubens, of course, expressly considered the works to be his. The prints were copies of works he created himself, for profit, under his own imprimatur, and he had made great efforts to have them copyrighted. Indeed, his entire studio operation was run on the premise that what issued from his mind was his own intellectual property. Vorsterman, meanwhile, with his lateness and his desire for recognition, had derailed the entire engine. “I can no longer deal with him or come to an understanding with him,” wrote a frustrated Rubens. In fact, Rubens was more than willing to trade quality for speed of production, and it was for this very reason that he had hired the relatively unknown Vorsterman in the first place, an irony that was not lost on the painter. Somehow, he had found himself burdened with a toxic combination of youth and hubris.

  When Rubens had received a com
mission, in 1621, for a memorial engraving of Charles de Longueval, a Habsburg military commander killed in Germany, he understood that a quick production was imperative. In essence, this was a work of propaganda, and its relevance stood in direct relation to its timeliness. But the disgruntled engraver either would not or could not respond to Rubens’s demand for a quickly executed print. “We have made almost nothing for a couple of years due to the caprices of my engraver,” Rubens complained to his Dutch lawyer, Pieter van Veen. He complained as well to Vorsterman, who was emotionally unprepared for an upbraiding from the man he revered above all others, but somehow considered an equal.

  There is no record of exactly what transpired between the two men. Blows were exchanged. Weapons may have been involved. It was serious enough for Rubens’s advocates to petition Isabella for a writ of protection. The infanta provided that order, affirming that her agent was indeed “endangered by the attacks of an evil-intentioned one of his men, said to have sworn his death.” Rubens, for his part, never mentioned the embarrassing episode, and his continued correspondence allayed the fears of his Parisian clients and admirers. Sadly, if predictably, it was the end of Vorsterman’s work for Rubens. The painter would henceforth use many a printmaker, but none quite so skillful as the troubled man who was also one of his greatest admirers.

  Isabella, meanwhile, had good reason to be concerned for Rubens’s welfare. Apart from her interest in his artistic career and his utility as a source of foreign intelligence, a certain concentration of her retinue had become a necessity in the preceding year. In April 1621, the Twelve Years’ Truce had fizzled to an uncertain conclusion, leaving the Low Countries in a nebulous state of war that neither side seemed especially interested in pursuing. Three months later, Isabella lost something more personal: her husband and co-sovereign, the archduke Albert. Theirs had been an arranged marriage born of political convenience, but it had produced a devoted and like-minded couple of great mutual affection. The widowed Isabella, heretofore extravagant in her choice of attire, renounced her silks and laces, brocades and jewels, and replaced them with the dour vestments of a Franciscan matron. The public was naturally sympathetic with her, but what she gained in moral authority she lost in political standing. Because she had produced no heir, sovereignty over the Spanish Netherlands reverted to Madrid, and her status was reduced to that of governor. Her independence, already constrained, was now more firmly in the hands of the Brussels-based military junta that answered directly to the Spanish king.

  In his final years, Albert had been an aggressive proponent of peace in the Low Countries. In 1620, with the truce nearing an end and with the sectarian hostilities in neighboring Germany leading to mobilization on both sides of the border, he aggressively pressed Isabella’s brother, Philip III, to pursue a course of reconciliation with the Dutch. For this minor hubris, he was upbraided by the king and specifically enjoined from making direct overtures on his own initiative. For the moment, Madrid was satisfied to let war resume. Prospects for victory were marginal, but at least it was a drain on Dutch coffers and a distraction from Dutch colonial ambitions in the Americas and East Asia.

  Albert ignored Philip’s order to refrain from engaging the Dutch in negotiations. In diplomatic circles, rumors circulated that Maurice, the Prince of Orange and leader of the Dutch cause, might be interested in some kind of accommodation. With the lapse of the truce imminent, Albert arranged for a meeting in early 1621 between his closest adviser and one of Maurice’s confidants, the widow Bartholde van T’Serclaes. She had informed Albert that the prince would in fact be amenable to a peace offer, and on terms favorable to Spain—provided there be a sweetener in it for Maurice personally. (Specifically, he expected sovereignty over Holland and Zeeland.) If there was reciprocal interest, Albert was to send a representative to The Hague with a formal proposal.

  With this intelligence in hand, and having informed Philip that the Dutch might be amenable to a deal (never mind his bit of insubordination), Albert dispatched an emissary to make the overture. The mission, however, was an abject failure. The Flemish ambassador’s arrival in Holland was accompanied by virulent demonstrations, and he left without the peace he had come to transact. Worse, there was a strong suspicion that the whole sorry episode—the “T’Serclaes affair”—had been engineered by Maurice, who could point to Spain’s putatively insulting terms (most egregiously, a renunciation of the claim of independence) as a means to unify the Dutch provinces and consolidate his own power.

  By the time Rubens left for Paris to negotiate the Medici commission, in January 1622, the truce was a thing of the past, and hostilities between Spain and Holland had resumed, though at a halfhearted pace. In Madrid there was a new king, Philip IV, who had assumed the Spanish throne after his father’s death a year earlier. Rather than continue the fruitless ground war in the Low Countries, at the suggestion of Don Diego Messia, one of his military counselors, he opted for an economic offensive against the Dutch. Following that course, Spain used its considerable diplomatic leverage, and also its armada, to curtail Dutch trade in the Mediterranean. In one raid off the coast of France, the Spanish navy seized a Dutch freighter carrying linen, herring, and two thousand cheeses. The Dutch retaliated in kind. The river Scheldt had remained closed during the twelve years of peace, but the Spanish Netherlands had prospered by shifting trading through other ports on the North Sea, which remained open. Now the Dutch reinstated their blockade of the entire Flemish coast. Taxes on goods traveling between Flanders and Holland were increased to punitive levels. (Even war could not halt the flow of beer across the border, though the price went up.) In the far reaches of empire, in the Americas and East Asia, the fighting never stopped.

  Predictably, economic war escalated into armed conflict. In the fall of 1621, Spanish forces under the direction of Ambrogio Spinola began to make some headway in the eastern districts of the Low Countries, along the contested German frontier. Buoyed by his modest successes, Spinola set siege to the heavily fortified Dutch city of Bergen op Zoom, which sat on a Scheldt tributary along the border between Flanders and Holland. As a student of history, Spinola knew well that the previous attempt on that city, in 1587 by Alessandro Farnese, had been an abject failure. Farnese had tried to starve out the city, but couldn’t complete the job. Spinola instead planned to force it into submission by assault. Recent developments in military architecture, however, made such attacks exceedingly difficult to execute. Systems of wedged bastions and redoubts, like those at the Antwerp citadel, kept defenders safe while allowing them to cover all avenues of approach. Bergen op Zoom proved especially well protected. After six months of futile action, Spinola finally called off the attack. By then, casualties and desertions had cut his force of nearly twenty thousand in half. The whole fiasco was emblematic of the general state of relations in the region: a resource-draining stalemate that accrued to the benefit of neither side but made life impossibly difficult for those sorry Flemings and Hollanders who lived in the border zones where armies collided.

  WITH HIS HOMELAND AT WAR, Rubens was forced to balance the substantial professional burden of the Medici commission with Isabella’s demand for his services as a political operative. The deadline for Marie’s paintings drew ever near, but the artist found himself spending more and more time at the Brussels court, acting as an adviser and agent to his own sovereign. When he returned to Antwerp, he was forced to dodge the manic attacks of Lucas Vorsterman, his disgruntled engraver. In late April 1622, the same month the infanta issued her restraining order against Vorsterman, evidence suggests Rubens had been assigned a new mission by Isabella, one that would take him into enemy territory. It was in that month that he used his Dutch lawyer, Pieter van Veen, to acquire a passport to travel in Holland, ostensibly to clear the copyright privileges for his engravings. But this was almost certainly a cover for a diplomatic mission. Rubens had received his copyright privileges two years earlier.

  Back in 1619, when Rubens had first instructed Carleton to adv
ance his copyright claims in The Hague with great delicacy, he had hinted at “important reasons” for not wanting to ruffle the feathers of the Dutch political hierarchy. He knew even then that the time would come when he would have to rely on the good graces of those same Dutch politicians. Now, three years later, that day had arrived. The T’Serclaes affair, damaging as it was, had not permanently closed backdoor negotiations with the Dutch. The debacle of Bergen op Zoom only reinforced the idea, on both sides of the border, that some kind of settlement was necessary. Future discussions, however, would have to take place with utmost secrecy, lest political opponents have a chance to sabotage them. Having long since placed himself within Isabella’s circle of trusted advisers, Rubens could now present himself as a credible diplomatic alternative to T’Serclaes. In fact, Maurice, the Prince of Orange, was his half brother once removed (through Christina von Dietz, the bastard daughter of Jan Rubens and Maurice’s mother, Anna of Saxony). For the sake of propriety, he probably didn’t mention that relationship. Maurice, anyway, was not Rubens’s only relation within the Dutch court. Jan Brant, a first cousin by marriage, also happened to be a familiar and well-situated presence in Maurice’s orbit.