by Mark Lamster
Despite his efforts to obtain the paperwork to travel, Rubens never made it to Holland in 1622. Perhaps his notoriety precluded an undisclosed meeting, even with a relative, or maybe the timing just wasn’t right. The Medici project alone was enough to keep him occupied through the winter. But he and the studio worked quickly, and by May 1623 the first installment of that commission was complete. Rubens delivered it in person, carrying a single valise and nine carefully rolled canvases for Marie’s inspection. To his great frustration, he was forced to cool his heels for three weeks before the Queen Mother found time to review his work. At least she was pleased with what she saw, and had the wisdom to lavish her painter with the compliments he so much liked to hear. By August he was happily back in Antwerp, and Paris was all but empty of polite society. A fit of plague had sent the nobility bustling off to their rural estates. “As far as contagion is concerned,” Rubens advised Peiresc from the safety of home, “the best antidote for that is flight.”
Rubens’s return allowed him to shift his attentions to political affairs. Just a week after recommending Peiresc quit Paris, he wrote again to his friend, informing him that Spinola was “negotiating secretly for a truce.” It was a testament to their relationship that Rubens trusted Peiresc’s discretion with that information, and perhaps foolish of him to reveal it so plainly, lest their letters be monitored. France remained adamantly opposed to any peace between Spain and the Dutch, a fact Rubens clearly understood. “With the French it is a state maxim to keep the war in Flanders ever alive, and to cause the King of Spain constant expense and trouble,” he wrote, noting the long-standing French financial and military support for the Dutch cause. Nevertheless, it appears Rubens considered the correspondence of two antiquarians above suspicion. His letter to Peiresc was composed in undisguised Italian, his language of choice.
Rubens’s knowledge of the secret negotiations undertaken by Spinola was a mark of his status within Isabella’s circle of advisers. Heretofore, that standing had been unofficial. But at the end of September 1623 it was formalized. On the last day of the month, Isabella placed him on the Spanish military payroll. Her order read: “Taken in consideration of the merits of Peter Paul Rubens and the services he has rendered His Majesty, and so that he can continue with convenience, we find it good to assign him a salary of ten ecus per month from the Citadel of Antwerp.” That the funds were drawn from the Spanish military budget, and not from her private accounts, indicates that his work was indeed more than “advisory” in nature. He was now officially a spy.
Nine months later, in June 1624, he became something more: a member of the nobility, a prerequisite for his continued diplomatic service. Peiresc’s persistent attempts to lure Rubens to Paris, begun on that first trip to Paris in 1622, may also have come to the attention of the infanta. The patent application sent to Philip IV on his behalf noted that “many sovereigns have tried to induce him to leave Antwerp by promises of great honors and large sums of money.” It continued, with somewhat less accuracy: “He comes of honorable parents, faithful subjects of His Majesty, and unites to his rare talent as a painter, literary gifts and a knowledge of history and languages; he has always lived in a great style and has the means of supporting his rank.” Whatever his family history, the statement attesting to his income was incontrovertibly true.
Rubens was a prideful man, and enjoyed the prestige of his new title. Even without it, he had made it a practice to wear a sword, a nobleman’s concession, and otherwise outfit his home and his person in the accoutrements of highest privilege. But even as he enjoyed making a public spectacle of himself—albeit in the most refined manner—he was living a secret life. On the same day that Isabella ordered that Rubens be placed on salary by the Antwerp military command, the artist himself dashed off a letter to Brussels, notifying his superiors that he had just met with “the Catholic,” as he was now calling his Dutch cousin Jan Brant. The on-again, off-again peace negotiations with the Dutch were on once again, and Rubens was acting as an agent for Isabella. Brant was his conduit to the Dutch leadership.
Brant was not an easy contact for Rubens to manage. At their most recent meeting, in Antwerp, Rubens found him suffering from a fever, a condition that only aggravated a constitution that was anxious by nature. Brant seemed paranoid—“suspicious of his own shadow,” according to Rubens—but he had legitimate reason to worry. Brant’s superior in The Hague was a corrupt official with whom Rubens had some previous experience, back when he was looking to secure copyright privileges for his prints. A man who was known to solicit bribes was not the ideal handler for an agent engaged in secret negotiations on enemy soil.
Brant had come to Rubens with a proposal for the painter to pass on to Isabella in Brussels, and from her on to Madrid: that proposal was peace in exchange for a return to the terms of the Twelve Years’ Truce. But this wasn’t so much an offer as an ultimatum—take it or leave it—and Brant had been instructed to return to The Hague with an unambiguous response, yes or no. Rubens scoffed when his nervous cousin informed him of this. The infanta was expecting something more in the bargain, at a minimum the reopening of the Scheldt, and in any case Rubens was not a man accustomed to caving in to demands, no matter who was making them. “I laughed and replied that these were threats to frighten children, but that [Brant] himself was surely not so naïve to believe them,” he wrote back to Brussels. Brant also accused members of Isabella’s court of leaking secret messages to the French as a means of intentionally sabotaging the negotiations. Rubens denied the allegation—he chalked those rumors up to the “tricks and frauds” of Spain’s enemies—and somehow convinced Brant to return to Holland without the unequivocal response he had been instructed to obtain.
Rubens was pleased with this outcome, but frustrated by Brant’s nervous disposition, which became a serious issue when Brant took his next communiqué straight to Isabella’s court in Brussels, bypassing Rubens and potentially exposing their entire negotiation. Relative or not, that was enough to convince Rubens that Brant should be punished with a stiff rebuke from Brussels for his impudence, the better to ensure his future compliance. In the meantime, as a precaution, Rubens suggested to his superiors that Brant be kept in Antwerp, where he could be more easily controlled, and away from Isabella’s court, lest his appearance there arouse suspicions among the forces opposed to peace.
The spitefulness with which Rubens treated his cousin was uncharacteristic for the normally even-keeled painter, but he had good reason to be in a foul temper. Just as Brant was causing him problems, in September 1623, Rubens’s eldest child, Clara Serena, had fallen gravely sick. She was a precocious adolescent of twelve, with her mother’s knowing eyes and her father’s sense of self-possession. That maturity—and Rubens’s growing prominence—allowed the artist to place her as a young lady-in-waiting to the infanta, a considerable honor. Rubens’s personal correspondence all but ceased during the weeks of her illness. She died at the end of October. Rubens turned to his stoicism in the face of the tragedy. If he pushed it from his mind, perhaps it would hurt less. He informed his friend Peiresc about the sad news in a postscript to a letter, after a prolonged lapse in their regular communications. At least he had his work, both as a refuge and as a memorial. Isabella, a somber mother in a black dress, sat for a painting by her husband in the aftermath, with a pained but somehow comforting smile on her face. The drawings and portraits Rubens had made of Clara Serena, pictures of a young girl staring out at a future of possibility, became cherished family heirlooms.
Rubens welcomed the distraction of his political work as fall turned to winter. The continued negotiations with Brant had a sense of urgency about them that kept him from dolorous thoughts and otherwise removed him from a house that must have seemed haunted by his daughter’s absence. The artist managed to keep his cousin in line while their deliberations progressed through the first half of 1624. But by the end of the summer, the French ambassador to Brussels, Nicolas de Baugy, caught wind that something was bre
wing, and in a series of letters he reported back to Paris what he learned snooping around the back rooms of Brussels. In his first missive, sent on August 30, he informed his superiors that Rubens was conferring daily with the infanta on a proposed truce deal, and that Rubens had even claimed the Dutch had assured him that they were willing to sign. Two weeks later, he reported that Rubens had come to Brussels to paint a portrait of the Polish prince Sigismund, “a matter in which I fancy he will fare better than in the negotiations for a truce, to which he can only give superficial color and shade, without foundation.” Finally, after discovering Brant’s identity as Rubens’s Dutch contact, de Baugy wrote—unfairly—that Rubens was acting purely out of self-interest, and that he was primarily concerned with placing himself in the good graces of the Brant family, from whom he stood to inherit a small fortune. That was certainly not true, as Rubens’s contentious relationship with Brant plainly illustrated.
De Baugy misrepresented Rubens’s motives, but he was correct in suggesting the painter had little chance of securing a truce deal. (Conversely, the English diplomat William Trumbull assumed that thanks to Rubens, peace was a fait accompli, and that the Dutch were now “contente to suspend their armes.”) While Rubens and Brant were engaged in their game of semisecret shuttle diplomacy during the spring of 1624, there was a steady escalation of hostilities on the ground. In May, Dutch forces captured one of the jewels of the Spanish Empire, the port of São Salvador in the Brazilian colony of Bahia. Spinola had exercised considerable restraint over the past year, when it appeared Rubens and others were making progress in their negotiations, but he was now obliged to undertake a major offensive. The security of Spain’s colonial possessions was essential to the stability of the empire and could not be jeopardized. The ground war in Flanders was specifically intended to divert Dutch resources from such attacks overseas. Spinola, forced to take action, again set siege to a fortified Dutch city, this time Breda.
Spinola had learned his lesson at Bergen op Zoom in 1621. When his troops descended on Breda, they came for the long haul, prepared to starve out the city. It was to be an ugly, lingering standoff, made all the more unpleasant by punishing rains that washed out roads and made it difficult for Spinola to provision his army. Supplies had to be ferried north through enemy territory, exposing caravans to sniping and assault. Escorts of as many as fifteen hundred horsemen and four thousand foot soldiers, supplemented by heavy artillery, were required to protect the convoys. The measures were effective; Spinola staved off attacks as well as the defections that doomed his efforts at Bergen op Zoom. By year’s end, it had become clear that Breda would be forced to surrender. “There is no power which can save the town, so well is it besieged,” wrote Rubens.
Breda finally opened its gates to Spinola’s army in May 1625, after nine months of privation. Maurice, the Dutch prince, never saw the capitulation; he died in April, passing on his title to his half brother, Frederick Henry. In Spain, the surrender of Breda was celebrated as a major victory for the Habsburg cause, a happy complement to the efforts of the Holy Roman Emperor in Germany. Diego Velázquez, the preeminent artist of Madrid, would later mark the event with a suitably grand painting in which Spinola, holding the baton of command, accepts the keys to a still-smoldering city. In Flanders, however, no one was fooled into believing this was a truly decisive victory for Spain, one that would fundamentally alter the course of war. Astute observers understood that it had come at immense cost and promised no great future of easy conquest into enemy territory. Instead, barring a political accommodation, there would be more of the status quo: continued hostility and painful deprivation.
IT WAS A BLEAK MOMENT in history, a time when even Rubens found himself overwhelmed by his political and artistic responsibilities. This was an unusual state for a man who took immense pride in his ability to juggle several tasks without apparent effort. “I am the busiest and most harassed man in the world,” he complained in January 1625. At that time, he had less than one month before he was due in Paris with the balance of paintings for the Medici gallery. Even after his arrival, considerable retouching would be required during their installation, and there was a strong possibility, given the delicacy of the subject matter, that certain pictures would demand major revision. Looming ahead was a fixed and unbreakable deadline: the wedding of Princess Henrietta Maria, Marie’s daughter. She was to marry Charles I, the newly crowned king of England, on May 11 at Notre Dame; afterward Richelieu would host a celebratory feast at Marie’s Luxembourg Palace. Naturally, that event would take place in the palace’s west gallery, beneath the new cycle of paintings advertising the achievements of the bride’s mother.
Rubens managed to install the paintings in time for that event, but not without the substitution of one of the major historical canvases. From the very outset of the negotiations over the cycle’s program, Rubens had been worried about The Departure of the Queen from Paris, the panel depicting the moment when Marie was thrown into exile by her son. That subject was now deemed too provocative to stand. Rubens replaced it, on the spot, with The Felicity of the Regency, a masterpiece of allegorical flummery in which a bare-breasted Marie, surrounded by a catalog of gods and symbolic personifications, balances the scales of justice. For the most part, Rubens’s compositions were so intentionally dense and obscure in their symbology as to make the practice of interpretation an exceedingly difficult intellectual game. Even experts were confounded. After reading over a laudatory booklet on the paintings written by Claude-Barthélemy Morisot, Rubens drily noted that “while the subjects of the pictures are in general well explained, in certain places he has not grasped the true meaning.” (Also, Morisot had somehow neglected to mention his name. That definitely did not sit well.) A few years later, commenting again on Morisot’s text, he openly admitted that the meanings of the paintings were all but impossible to determine “without some explanation by the artist himself.” And even the artist was less than reliable. He no longer had his written program for the series, on which even he was dependent. “Perhaps my memory will not serve me as accurately as I should like,” he wrote. What hope was there for anyone else?
The iconographic opacity of the paintings came in particularly handy when it was time to show them off to Marie’s son Louis XIII, a task left to the abbé of St. Ambrose, Marie’s adviser. “He served as the interpreter of the subjects,” wrote Rubens, “changing or concealing the true meaning with great skill.” The artist, unfortunately, only heard about the abbé’s suave presentation secondhand, as he was not there to witness it in person; a clumsy boot maker had injured his foot during a fitting, leaving him bedridden for ten days. No doubt the situation reminded him of his trip to Spain, years earlier, when Iberti had relegated him to the periphery during the presentation of his touched-up Mantuan pictures to Philip III. In any case, the result was the same. Louis “showed complete satisfaction” with the project, and Marie was similarly pleased with her gallery.
Rubens barely escaped another injury during the nuptial ceremony, which he attended with Peiresc’s brother, Palamède Fabri, the sieur de Valavez. The two arranged an excellent position for themselves on a grandstand with members of the English diplomatic contingent, just opposite the platform where the service was to be conducted. There they stood making casual conversation when the oversubscribed grandstand suddenly gave way. Rubens managed to skip away from danger, but Valavez wasn’t so lucky. He tumbled to the ground, taking a wound to the head. He recovered, though the bloodletting and injections administered as therapy probably didn’t help.
It was surely no accident that Rubens appeared on a grandstand with members of the English delegation. In the preceding years he had spent considerable energy cultivating patrons among the English nobility, and he esteemed Charles I to be “the greatest amateur of paintings among the princes of the world.” The term “amateur,” as Rubens used it in its original French, was not derogatory, but suggested the new king’s love and deep knowledge of art. The respect was mutual.
Charles had recently acquired a Rubens self-portrait, having done so after imploring the artist so insistently that he had no choice but to accept the honor. Rubens was uncomfortable with the idea of sending his own likeness to a king. It seemed an inappropriate breach of protocol, given his social station and Spanish allegiance; visitors who saw it in Charles’s cabinet might well deem the artist presumptuous. Also, and perhaps more seriously, he simply didn’t like to paint self-portraits. In the course of a career of extraordinary production, he made only a handful of them, and even those were generally painted on demand or for a special occasion. The enterprise seemed narcissistic to him, immodest. He was not a man prone to the exploration of his mind’s demons—if he had any at all—and he was certainly not one to advertise his innermost thoughts. That said, his pride was such that he was never one to reject an honor. If the king truly wanted his portrait, of course he would oblige.
Charles was actually not present for his own nuptials; it was to be yet another wedding by proxy. A marriage between two royal houses, and this one in particular, was more a political and commercial transaction than a love match, and it was imprudent for the groom to travel to meet his fiancée before the formalization of the marriage contract. To do so would place that entire arrangement in jeopardy: the groom might become ill, injured, or worse while en route; international travel at the time was inherently risky. Moreover, upon arrival he would be, in essence, a hostage in a foreign court.