Goltzius’s international eminence would be short-lived, since he would be followed by a golden age of Dutch painting that would feature such household names as Rubens and Rembrandt. Their fame would cause him to fade from public awareness until the second half of the twentieth century. A 1958 exhibition of his work organized by a Goltzius enthusiast named Emil Resnicek initiated a new interest in the artist. By January 2010 his stock had risen to new heights: a 1612 version of Jupiter and Antiope sold at auction for $6.8 million.
The two Hendricks’ periods of peak painting production happened to coincide with a rare peaceful interlude in the life of Northern Europe. From the mid-sixteenth century through the end of the seventeenth, some part of Europe was almost always at war — there were only a couple dozen years of peace over that entire span, and there were around a hundred when most of the major states were engaged in combat. The Dutch war of secession from the Spanish Habsburg empire was a particularly devastating and drawn-out conflict. The southern provinces of the Netherlands (roughly the current Belgium) remained loyal to Spain, while the northern provinces became an independent nation, the Dutch Republic, sometimes referred to as Holland after its most affluent province. The endless fighting took an extremely heavy toll on both sides, and from 1609 to 1621 a truce was called. Avercamp’s charming scenes of diversions on the ice reflected the fact that at last people could venture outside city walls without being attacked by armies of marauding mercenaries. The soldiers, often slow to be paid, were frequently disgruntled, or even in open revolt, and so they tended to forage and pillage as the opportunity presented itself. Now the conflict moved to the colonial realm (especially Southeast Asia, where Joris van Spilbergen and Juan de Silva were currently contending), while Northern Europe enjoyed what would turn out to be only a temporary cessation of hostilities.
A visitor in the Rubens House in Antwerp, now a museum. Rubens designed the house on the model of an Italian villa with an interior courtyard. He built up a significant collection of classical statuary through connections made over the course of his international diplomatic work.
The port city of Antwerp, located near the northern border of the Spanish Netherlands, had been hard hit by the war. Once the home of the great printer Plantin, it now boasted one of the most esteemed artists of the European baroque, Peter Paul Rubens. Rubens himself had produced a large Adoration of the Magi to celebrate the signing of the Twelve Years’ Truce; after the truce fell apart the painting would make its way into the royal collections of Spain. Commercial activity in the city, formally a major trade center, would now be brought to a halt. Fighting would again rage throughout the region. With neither side able to achieve victory the situation would drag on interminably. “Our city is going step by step to ruin and lives only on its savings,” Rubens would write in 1627. “There remains not the slightest bit of trade to support it.”
Rubens was not only a painter, one whose commercial success was as great as his artistic accomplishments. He was also a political agent, charged by his chief patron, the Infanta Isabella of the Spanish Netherlands, to conduct high-level negotiations with foreign powers in a desperate effort to resolve the stalemate. Isabella was the daughter of Philip II of Spain. With her husband, Albert of Austria, she ruled the Spanish Netherlands as part of the Habsburg empire until Albert’s death in 1621; thereafter she served as its de facto governor on behalf of Spain. Her territory was caught in the middle of the struggles in which Spain, France, England, the Dutch Republic, Denmark, the German republics, and other nations all played parts.
In 1616 (coincidentally the same year that he took into his workroom his most talented assistant, Anthony Van Dyck), Rubens was engaged in activities that would bear fruit in both the artistic and the political realms. In that year he began negotiations with Dudley Carleton, the English ambassador to the Dutch Republic, concerning a collection of antiquities in the ambassador’s possession. The contact with Carleton would subsequently open doors for Rubens to attempt to arrange terms of peace between Spain and England; by supporting (first tacitly and later, under Charles II, more actively) the Dutch rebels, England, made a peaceful solution to the conflict more difficult, Rubens felt. Peace between England and Spain would help to relieve the pressure on Antwerp in particular, and the Spanish Netherlands in general.
Carleton, who had recently arrived in the Netherlands, wanted to purchase one of Rubens’s hunting scenes, but he was short of cash and ended up trading a diamond necklace for a smaller painting than he had hoped for. The necklace was one of many decorative and art objects in his possession. Thanks to his previous position as England’s ambassador to Venice (where he had hosted a visiting Inigo Jones), Carleton had been charged by King James’s favorite Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, with putting together a substantial collection of Italian antiquities. James had given his favorite the sizeable country estate of Walter Raleigh. It was not really his to give, but James felt that Raleigh would not have need of it since he had been keeping the aging adventurer imprisoned in the Tower of London since assuming the throne in 1603. Carr intended to transform the estate into a grand villa in the Italian style — a plan that fell apart when he was himself transported to the Tower after his role in the poisoning of Thomas Overbury was exposed.
Carleton was left holding the goods, which were hard to move, literally and figuratively. Over the next two years he negotiated an exchange with Rubens, who finally purchased the lot at the price of eight of his paintings along with a collection of tapestries. Thanks to the rage for his work among the royalty and aristocracy of Europe, Rubens had grown wealthy. He had established himself in a property in Antwerp that he had converted to resemble the fine Italian homes he had known during his residence as a young man in Mantua, with a courtyard in the interior. The property also housed his sizeable workshop, where a crew of assistants helped Rubens crank out work at a high volume. Carleton’s collection of sculptures would help to give the property a suitably classical flavor. (Ever the capable businessman, Rubens would pay Carleton the equivalent of about 6,000 florins and later resell the collection to James’s subsequent favorite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, for 100,000 florins, an astonishing sum.) The reconstructed Rubens House is now a public museum.
Rubens was working at the time on a large cycle of paintings on the subject of the Roman consul Decius Mus. The paintings would serve as tapestry designs for a wealthy Genoese patron. (Rubens was the descendant of a tapestry manufacturer, and his second wife was the daughter of a tapestry dealer.) In the fourth century BCE Decius Mus fought to put down a Southern Italian revolt against Rome. During the fighting he was visited near Naples by an apparition who prophesied that one of the armies would lose its commander but emerge victorious. Based on that prophesy, Decius Mus decided to place himself in a position where he would be killed in battle, in order to ensure victory.
The Decius Mus series was the first of several epic cycles of images that Rubens would undertake in his career. He liked to work on a large scale. “I confess that an inborn gift has called me to execute large works rather than little curios,” he said. “To each his own way. My talent is of a kind that no undertaking, however great and multiform the object, can overcome my self-confidence.” The series was unusual in that Rubens worked in oil on canvas rather than the more traditional medium of tempera on paper that was commonly used for such cartoons, or designs for transfer to other mediums: the tapestry workers must have scratched their heads trying to reproduce the colors of Rubens’s oils.
Decius Mus represented the height of heroism, and Rubens expressed this in a series of dynamic compositions that exalt the world of the warrior. He had begun his career in this very tone. His first great work was a portrait commissioned by the Duke of Lerma, Philip III’s valido, or favorite. His roughly nine-by-seven-foot painting unabashedly glorified martial accomplishment. The duke, impeccably groomed and finely dressed, is pictured astride a magnificent steed while vast armies clash in the background and smoke rises to f
ill the sky. Framed by tree branches and windswept clouds, the duke is the very image of the noble warrior.
By 1616, however, though still glorifying heroism for his high-class patrons, Rubens was starting to show the violence of battle more graphically. In the painting depicting the death of Decius Mus, the consul’s horse rears up majestically. As Decius Mus falls from his horse while receiving the fatal blow he gazes heavenward like the Christian martyrs of Renaissance paintings. But the gore of the battle is brought forward — beneath the consul bright blood flows from the heads and chests of the fallen.
Rubens’s international clientele provided a perfect cover for his state-work on behalf of the Infanta Isabella. Many of his negotiations were done in secret, using a variety of ciphers and codes. But over the course of his diplomatic endeavors Rubens grew increasingly frustrated with the European powers. On one occasion he gathered together, at some personal risk, representatives from Savoy, England, and, indirectly, the Dutch Republic in the person of Carleton, the English ambassador. The group assembled in Dutch territory and awaited an envoy from Spain, who was delayed, it was said, due to illness. It later emerged that he was in France, having arranged a secret alliance against England between the two traditional enemies. As, in effect, a representative of Spain, Rubens was embarrassed by the secret double game, and the peace party fell apart in recriminations.
The Spaniards were never comfortable with Rubens as a political representative. Philip IV wrote to his aunt, the infanta, “I am displeased at your mixing up a painter in affairs of such importance. You can easily understand how gravely it compromises the dignity of my kingdom, for our prestige must necessarily be lessened if we make so insignificant a person the representative with whom foreign envoys are to discuss affairs of such great importance.” Beyond the slight to the painter, the comment suggests that the king was more concerned with keeping up appearances than with finding a remedy for the vast suffering that was engulfing nearly all of Europe. (Ironically, England’s representative in the peace talks was also a Netherlander painter, Buckingham’s aide-de-camp Balthasar Gerbier.)
Rubens grew increasingly disenchanted with the old values of martial heroism. He was part of a new antiwar attitude that had until recently been largely unthinkable among Europe’s educated elite. For historian Theodore K. Rabb, “the decisive turn, the pivot around which all else resolves, was the long moment … when the Renaissance came to an end.” For Rabb one of the “most profound indicators” of this transformation was a revolution in attitudes to warfare, exemplified by Rubens. “It has been argued,” Rabb notes, “that Rubens’s thoughts turned to peace partly because he had served as a diplomat for the Habsburgs, and also because peace in his eyes meant the achievement of hegemony by his Spanish masters. Neither influence, however, can have generated the real antipathy to armed conflict that now surfaced in his work; it cannot be interpreted as just another means of advancing his patrons’ interests. Far more plausible as a motive was his abhorrence for the violence, intensifying all around him.”
Equestrian Portrait of the Duke of Lerma, 1603, by Peter Paul Rubens. Oil on canvas, 283 × 201 cm. Museo del Prado, Madrid.
Victory and Death of Decius Mus, 1616–1617, by Peter Paul Rubens. Oil on canvas, 510 × 288 cm. Collection of the Prince of Liechtenstein.
Minerva Protects Pax from Mars (“Peace and War”), 1629–1630, by Peter Paul Rubens. Oil on canvas, 298 × 203 cm. National Gallery, Washington, presented by the Duke of Sutherland, 1828, NG46.
These paintings shows the artist’s progression from traditional glorification of militarism to an antiwar point of view.
The new attitude can be seen in Minerva Protects Pax from Mars, a painting currently in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Made for King Charles I and probably executed in England in 1629–1630, the painting is also known as “Peace and War” or “The Allegory of Peace.” The central figure is Peace (Pax) who is identified with Ceres, goddess of the earth. Above her head a winged child holds an olive wreath and a caduceus, symbols of peace. The composition is on a diagonal, with the brightly lit fruits of peace in the left foreground and the dark landscape of war in the upper right. Pax expresses milk into the mouth of an infant Plutus, the god of wealth. A cupid and the young god of marriage, Hymen, welcome children (portraits of Gerbier’s family) to a cornucopia of delightful fruits held up by a satyr; a leopard lolls on its back, stretching like a kitten. The satyr and the leopard are associated with Dionysus, and represent earthly pleasures. At the left a bacchante dances while another bears riches. Mars, the god of war, looks wistfully at the idyllic scene as he is driven away from it by a helmeted Minerva and is led on by a wrathful fury.
While some of the symbolism of the allegory may be obscure to modern viewers (Rubens himself reported that he could not always remember the meanings of some of his symbols when viewing his allegorical paintings in later years), the central message could not be clearer: happiness, wealth, prosperity, pleasure, and family life are all the gifts of peace. For Rubens, who had begun his career exalting martial virtues, war was now nothing but a horror.
Hotei, 1616, by Kano Takanobu (Japanese, 1571–1618). Japan, Edo period (1615–1868). Hanging scroll; ink and light color on paper, 38 × 70 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, funds from various donors, 2006, 2006.115.
Kano Takanobu was the brother of Kano Mitsunobu (p. 164), the leader of the dominant school of Japanese painting. This depiction of the “laughing Buddha” Hotei (Chinese: Budai) reflects the school’s interest in Chinese and Buddhist subjects.
The kinds of martial images that Rubens lost enthusiasm for were carried to East Asia by merchants and missionaries, usually in the form of engravings but sometimes as colored artworks. Some Japanese artists embraced the Western sculptural approach to form and use of perspective in composition. A large folding screen depicting foreign emperors and kings on horseback is firmly in the European style (the huge figures — the screen is six feet tall — were based on illustrations on a Dutch map). The screen appears to be an oil painting, but testing has revealed that it was made using traditional Japanese pigments. With the persecution of Christian missionaries, expulsion of foreigners, and closing of Japan to most outside contact, such overt adoption of Western styles lost favor, but more subtle influences would continue to play a role in the evolution of Japanese visual art.
During the seemingly tenuous period of peace of the early seventeenth century, many Japanese were drawn in a different direction. They welcomed the security of understated, cautious works like those by Kano Mitsunobu, the current head of the Kano school of painting.
Foreign emperors and kings on horseback, 1610–1620. Artist unknown. Four-panel screen, ink, colors, and gold on paper, 462 × 166 cm. Kobe City Museum.
Although the gold foil background of this folding screen derives from the Japanese tradition, the emperors and kings are in a Western artistic style and were more or less copied from a European engraving. From left to right the figures are traditionally identified as Rudolf II of the Holy Roman Empire; an Ottoman sultan, probably Ahmed I; a Muscovite leader; and a Mongolian Tatar.
The large screen was originally part of a set owned by the Tokugawa shogun family. It may have been intended as a primer in world politics: the Habsburgs and Ottomans were warring, and the Muscovites and Tartars also frequently engaged in skirmishes.
A similar screen (discussed on p. 4) is reproduced on this book’s endsheets.
Painting in Japan as elsewhere required long years of training. Such training usually took the form of lengthy apprenticeship with established masters. Over many years the apprentice would slowly learn the secret methods and techniques of the master’s art. These apprenticeships formed patterns of lineage that could be traced back many generations. Some schools of painting, such as the Rimpa school, were nonhereditary, but others were family based. The Kano school was one of these. It traced its painting lineage back for centuries. The earliest Kano painters were influenced by Chine
se styles, and particularly by the ink paintings brought to Japan by Zen Buddhist monks. The Kano painters, whose primary patrons were members of the samurai class, gradually began to use more color and stylized effects than their Chinese models.
In the sixteenth century a brilliant Kano master exploded on the scene. Kano Eitoku, who died in 1590, produced bold, dynamic paintings appropriate for the tumultuous, violent time in which he lived. His large, colorful works featured strong, sure lines. At the turn of the seventeenth century, if you thought of Kano painting you thought of Eitoku.
Most family-based schools of art died out within a few generations, since it is difficult to sustain a high artistic level through a single family over a long period of time. For a while it seemed this could be the case with the Kano school, since Eitoku’s sons did not rise to his level. Instead, just as the Tokugawa shogunate would establish itself and endure, so the Kano school would turn out to be the most influential and enduring school of painting in Japanese history. It was the closest thing to an official academy of art during Japan’s years of warrior rule.
When Eitoku died unexpectedly at the age of forty-eight the school’s prospects did not look promising. Leadership of the family workshop passed to his eldest son, Kano Mitsunobu, who had been designated his father’s successor when he was around ten years old. In his twenties at the time of Eitoku’s death, he was not yet fully prepared for the responsibility that now fell on him. He is said to have had to do a crash course on Kano techniques, relying on relatives and pupils of the master. He did not have a reputation as a top-level painter. In his youth he was one of several painters who took the name Ukyo. Tradition has it that he was distinguished from the others by being called heta Ukyo: “unskilled Ukyo.”
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