by Will Durant
On August 9, 1621, the war with Spain was resumed. The Archduke Albert having died childless, the southern Netherlands reverted to Spain. Spinola attacked the Dutch border towns. Maurice marched against him, but years of strife had worn him out, and suddenly, aged fifty-seven, he was dead (1625). Spinola captured Breda, so opening the road to Amsterdam and giving a theme to Velázquez.
The Dutch recovered obstinately. Frederick Henry, who succeeded his brother as stadholder, surprised enemies and friends by his hitherto hidden talents as statesman and general. Through the diplomacy of Francis Aerssens, he secured an annual subsidy of a million livres from Richelieu; he raised a new army; after long sieges he took’s Hertogenbosch, Maastricht, Breda; fortunately, Spinola had been recalled to Lombardy.
Meanwhile the Dutch merchants turned money into ships, for every victory on the sea expanded trade. In 1628 a Dutch flotilla under Piet Hein captured a Spanish squadron carrying gold from Mexico. Another Dutch fleet attacked a Spanish force of thirteen vessels on the River Slaak, destroyed it, and took 5,000 prisoners (1631). The most brilliant of these naval victories was won by Lieutenant Admiral Maarten Harpertszoon Tromp in the Downs—the English Channel between Dover and Deal. The Spaniards, resolved to regain control of the Netherlands ports from the Dutch, had assembled a new armada of seventy-seven ships, manned by 24,000 men. Sighting it in the Channel, Tromp sent for reinforcements; on October 21, 1639, with seventy-five vessels, he sailed in to close quarters with the enemy and sank, disabled, or captured all but seven of the Spanish ships; 15,200 of the Spanish crews were killed in battle or were drowned. This Battle of the Downs ranks in Dutch history as the defeat of the Armada does in the history of England; it ended all claim of Spain to control the seas, cut the lifeline between Spain and her colonies, and shared with the French victory over the Spanish army at Rocroi (1643) in closing the era of Spanish ascendancy in Europe.
Deeply involved in the Thirty Years’ War, Spain decided to yield everything to the Dutch in order to be free to fight the French. At Münster, January 30, 1648, the Spanish plenipotentiaries signed the Treaty of Westphalia, ending the “Eighty Years’ War” in the Netherlands. The United Provinces were declared free of all bond to Spain; their conquests were recognized; Rhine commerce was to reach the North Sea through Dutch ports alone; and freedom of trade was conceded to Dutch merchantmen in the Indies East and West. So triumphantly ended the longest, bravest, and most cruel struggle for freedom in all history.
* * *
I. “The princes who have established, protected, or changed religions have very rarely had any of their own.”—Voltaire.6
II. For these cases we have only Protestant authorities, as quoted in Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, I, 283–90.
III. That Gérard was encouraged by a Jesuit is affirmed by Ranke (History of the Popes, I, 472) and by Motley (Rise of the Dutch Republic); it is denied by Pastor (History of the Popes, XX, 19–20).
CHAPTER XVIII
From Rubens to Rembrandt
1555–1660
I. THE FLEMINGS
IT IS surprising that in so small a segment of Europe as the Netherlands two such diverse cultures developed as the Flemish and the Dutch, two faiths so uncongenial as Catholicism and Calvinism, two artists so opposed in mood and method as Rubens and Rembrandt, as Vandyck and Hals.
We cannot explain the contrast through language, for half of Flanders,I like all the United Provinces, spoke Dutch. Some of the difference may have derived from the proximity of Holland to Protestant Germany, of Flanders to Catholic France. Part of it came from the closer association of Catholic, royalist, aristocratic Spain with Brussels and Antwerp. Flanders inherited medieval religion, art, and ways, while Holland was yet too poor to have a culture of its own. Possibly the greater sunshine in the southern provinces inclined their population to a sensual, morally easy life and an indulgent Catholicism, while the mists and hardships of the north may have encouraged a stern and stoic faith. Or was it, rather, that the Spanish armies won in the south and, harassed by intervening rivers and Dutch money, lost in the north?
Antwerp must have been beautiful when its cathedral was complete in all its spires, façade, and decorative art, while nearby the Bourse throbbed with all the vitality and chicanery of commerce, and the waters danced with the shipping of the world. But then war came: Alva’s fury and the Inquisition drove Protestant artisans and merchants into Holland, Germany, and England, the Calvinist Fury gutted the churches, the Spanish Fury rifled the homes and burned the palaces, the French Fury drowned its failure in blood, and the fourteen months’ siege by Farnese starved Catholics and Protestants impartially. At last the Catholics joined the Protestants in exodus, and Antwerp’s trade passed to Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Haarlem, Hamburg, London, and Rouen.
But man’s ferocity is intermittent, his resilience endures. It is a consolation to note how quickly some nations and cities have recovered from the destructiveness of war. So it was with Flanders after 1579. The textile industry survived, Flemish lace was still in demand, the rains still nourished the land, and the toil of the people supplied the splendor of the court. Under the archdukes, luxury-loving but humane, Antwerp and Brussels enjoyed a remarkable resurrection. Flanders returned to its cathedrals, its religious festivals, its pagan kermis. Perhaps Rubens exaggerated this in the wild Kermis of the Louvre, but hear the report of the Cardinal Infante Ferdinand from Antwerp to Philip IV in 1639: “Yesterday they held their great festival … a long procession moved out to the countryside with many triumphal cars. After the parade they all went to eat and drink, and in the end they were all drunk; for without that they do not think it a festival.”1 The Cardinal himself, when he came from Spain to Brussels (1635), had been received with several days of pageantry, amid gorgeous decorations designed by Rubens himself. The Flemish towns, before the revolt, had been described by an Italian visitor as having “a constant succession of gay assemblies, nuptials, and dances, while music, singing, and cheerful sounds prevailed in every street”;2 and not all of that spirit had yielded to the war. The games that Brueghel had pictured were still played in the streets, and the churches heard again such polyphonic Masses as had once made Flemish singers the desired of every court. Flanders entered its most brilliant age.
II. FLEMISH ART
The court and the Church, the nobles and the burghers, co-operated to finance the revival of Flemish art. Albert and Isabel supported many artists besides Rubens; for a time Antwerp was the art center of Europe. Brussels tapestries regained their excellence, aided by Rubens’ heroic designs. Venetian glassmakers had brought their art to the Netherlands in 1541; now native artisans reproduced the fragile miracles, some so cherished that they have survived centuries of turbulence. Workers in metal fashioned marvels of their own, like the magnificent reliquaries that may still be found in the Catholic churches of Belgium. The merchant aristocracy ordered objects of art, sat for pictures, and built princely palaces and town halls—such as that which Cornells de Vriendt raised to the glory of Antwerp (1561–65) before the storm. When fanaticism had denuded the churches of their art, they became eager patrons of the studios, demanding statues and pictures to visualize the creed for the people.
Sculpture struck no spark here, for François Duquesnoy of Brussels did most of his work in Rome, where he carved a mighty St. Andrew for the interior of St. Peter’s. Very few tourists who make it a point to see “the oldest citizen of Brussels,” the fountain of the Manneken-Pis (1619)—the bronze boy who adds to the city’s water out of his own resources—know that this is the most enduring of Duquesnoy’s creations.
But of Flemish painters there is no count. Apparently every house in the Netherlands had to have some original picture; a thousand artists were kept busy in a hundred studios painting portraits, landscapes, animals, victuals, mythologies, Holy Families, Crucifixions, and, as their distinctive contributions to the history of art, group pictures of municipal bodies and genre pictures of domestic or village life. At firs
t these painters submitted to the prestige of Italian modes. Italian ships sailed every day into Antwerp, Italian traders set up shops there, Italian artists came to scoff and remained to paint. Many Flemish painters went to study in Italy; some settled there; so Justus Sustermans of Antwerp became a favorite portrait painter for the grand dukes of Tuscany; some of the finest portraits in the Pitti Palace are by this lusty Fleming. Frans Floris, returning from his studies with Michelangelo in Rome, called himself frankly a “Romanist,” relished anatomy, and subordinated color to line. For a generation (1547–70) his studio at Antwerp was the center and summit of Flemish painting. It is almost worth going to Caen to see in its museum his jolly mountainous Wife of the Falcon Hunter. Frans lived in wealth, built himself a palace, gave and drank freely, and died in poverty. Cornells de Vos was the ablest in a large family of painters; when too many notables begged to sit for Rubens he sent some of them to Vos, assuring them that they would fare just as well. We can still see Cornells, his wife, and two pretty daughters, hanging comfortably in the Brussels Museum.
Toward the end of the sixteenth century the Italian infatuation faded, and Flemish artists resumed native themes and ways. David Teniers the Elder, though he studied in Rome, returned to Antwerp to paint a Dutch Kitchen and a Village Kermis,3 and then taught his son to surpass him. The descendants of Old Droll Peasant Pieter Brueghel formed a dynasty of painters devoted to local landscapes and village scenes: his sons Pieter “Hell” Brueghel and Jan “Velvet” Brueghel, his grandsons Jan II and Ambrose, his great-grandson Abraham, his great-great-grandson Jan Baptist Brueghel—they run over two centuries (1525–1719), but let us clear the slate of them here. They took from their powerful ancestor a flair for rural prospects and village festivities, and some of them painted landscape backgrounds for busy Rubens.
The artists of the Netherlands brought art out of the church and the monastery into the home, the fields, and the woods. Daniel Seghers painted flowers and fruit in loving detail, devoted his pictured wreaths to the Virgin, and joined the Jesuits. Frans Snyders gave life and fragrance to a score of museums with exciting, sometimes gory, hunting scenes, and many a dish of venison and fruit; he still remains, as Rubens ranked him, the greatest painter of animals; no one has rivaled him in catching the play of light upon the fur of beasts or the plumage of birds.
Adriaen Brouwer returned to Brueghel’s peasants and pinned them on his brush as they dined, drank, sang, danced, played cards, cast dice, fought, caroused, and slept. Adriaen himself, in his thirty-two years, sampled many lives: studying for a while with Hals in Haarlem; then, aged twenty-one, already a registered master in the painters’ guild at Antwerp; spending beyond his income, and soon entangled in debt; imprisoned by the Spaniards for causes now unknown, but living sumptuously in jail; achieving freedom and paying his debts with little pictures so full of life, so technically excellent in sensitive drawing and subtle play of light, that Rubens bought seventeen of them and Rembrandt eight. His peasants seem never happy except when stupefied with strong tobacco or cheap drink, but Brouwer preferred a peasant singing in his cups to a silken hypocrite flattering a prince. In 1638, aged thirty-two, he was found dead outside a tavern door.
Jacob Jordaens was a soberer man, who inscribed upon one of his pictures a warning to his thirst: Nihil similius insano quam ebrius—”Nothing is liker to a lunatic than a drunkard.” He chose to picture people who could drink without drooling and women who could rustle silk majestically. Born in 1593, he lived to the sensible old age of eighty-five. He pictured himself for us in The Artist and His Family:4 a man erect, self-confident, handsome, prosperous, holding a lute; a wife at ease in her choking ruff; a pretty daughter just beginning to bloom Flemishly; and a little girl happy in a comforting home and creed—see her pendant cross. Jordaens was converted to Protestantism, but only at sixty-two. He painted several religious pictures, but he preferred genre and mythologies, where he could bring out the powerful heads and effulgent breasts of the men and women he had seen in Antwerp homes, as in The King Drinks5 or, better, in The Allegory of Fertility;6 here, amid fruit (painted by Jacob’s friend Snyders) and satyrs, we are startled by a magnificent nude, seen only in rear elevation but in all the grace of youth; where in Rubens’ Flanders did Jordaens find so slender a model?
III. RUBENS: 1577–1640
The greatest of the Flemings was born in 1577 of a long line of successful businessmen; he continued the line. His father, Jan Rubens, studied law at Padua, married Maria Pypelinckx, and was elected an alderman at Antwerp at thirty-one. Accused of Protestantism and excluded by name from the amnesty of 1574, he fled with his wife and four children to Cologne. Chosen as legal adviser by Anne of Saxony (the separated wife of William of Orange), he committed adultery with her and was imprisoned by the Prince at Dillenburg. Maria forgave her husband, wrote him tender and touching letters,II pleaded and labored for his liberation, and obtained it after two trying years, on condition that Jan live under surveillance at Siegen in Westphalia. She joined him in 1573, and it was probably there that Peter Paul was born. He was baptized by Lutheran rites, but while he was still a child the family was converted to Catholicism. In 1578 Jan moved with his family to Cologne, where he practiced law and prospered. When he died (1587) Maria and the children went to live in Antwerp.
Rubens received formal education only till fifteen, but he added to it much reading and experience. For two years (1590–91) he served as page to the Countess of Lalaing at Audenaarde; there, presumably, he learned French and the fine manners that distinguished him from most artists of his time. His mother, perceiving his flair for drawing, apprenticed him to Tobias Verhaecht, then to Adam van Noort, then to Otho Vaenius, a man of wide culture and courtly speech. After eight years with this admirable teacher, Rubens, now twenty-three, went to Italy to study the masterpieces whose fame agitated all pictorial souls. At Venice he showed his own work to a gentleman in the retinue of Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua; soon Rubens was living in the ducal palace of Mantua as court painter. Two pictures that he made there already touched mastery: Justus Lipsius and His Pupils,8 in which the pupils of the famous scholar include Peter and his brother Philip; and a Self-Portrait,9 showing Rubens half bald at twenty-five, but bearded, bold, and alert. He made trips to Rome to copy pictures for the Duke, and to Florence, where he saw (and later idealistically painted) the marriage of Maria de’ Medici to the absent Henry IV. In 1603 the Duke sent him with a diplomatic mission to Spain, bearing gifts to the Duke of Lerma; the minister accepted as originals the copies that Rubens had made, and the artist returned to Mantua as a successful diplomat. On a second trip to Rome he settled there permanently with his brother, who was librarian to a cardinal. Pieter now painted a multitude of saints; one of these pictures, St. Gregory Worshiping the Madonna,10 he rated as his first great picture. In 1608, hearing that his mother was ill, he rushed north to Antwerp and was deeply moved to find her dead. Her wise and patient love had helped to give him the cheerful disposition that blessed his life. Meanwhile he had learned much in Italy. The luscious color of the Venetians, the sensualism of Giulio Romano’s frescoes at Mantua, the pliant grace of Correggio’s female figures at Parma, the pagan art of pagan and Christian Rome, the reconciliation of Christianity with the enjoyment of wine, women, and song—all these passed into his blood and art. When Archduke Albert made him court painter at Antwerp (1609), Gothic remnants disappeared from Flemish painting, and the fusion of Flemish with Italian art was complete.
It was part of his unconscious wisdom that he had been away from the Netherlands during eight years of war, and that he received his appointment in the first year of the truce. It was precisely in the next twelve years that Antwerp and Brussels restored their cultural life. Rubens was no small part of that revival; his biographer lists 1,204 paintings and 380 drawings,11 and probably many others escaped history. This fertility is unparalleled in the history of art; and almost as remarkable were the diversity of subjects and the rapidity of execution. “My
talent is of such a kind,” Rubens wrote, “that no commission, however great in size or varied in subject matter, ever daunted me.”12 He finished in twenty-five days the three panels of The Descent from the Cross for the Antwerp cathedral, and in thirteen days the immense Adoration of the Kings now in the Louvre. In addition to his court salary of five hundred florins a year, he received payment for each individual product, and he charged at a lordly rate; e.g., 3,800 florins ($47,500?) for the two masterpieces just named—i.e., one hundred florins ($1,250?) per day.13 Part of this, of course, went to his numerous assistants, several of whom were themselves registered as masters in the artists’ guild. Jan “Velvet” Brueghel painted flowers in Rubens’ pictures, Jan Wildens painted landscapes and accessories, Paul de Vos painted minerals and fruit, Frans Snyders evoked the fine-pointed head of a dog in Diana Returning from the Chase,14 and we do not know how much is Snyders and how much is Rubens in the powerful hunting scenes in the Dresden and Munich galleries and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. In some cases Rubens drew the figures and left the painting to his aides. To his clients he gave a conscientious account of the degree in which the pictures he sold them were by his own hand.15 Only in this way could he meet the demands made upon him. His studio became a factory, reflecting the business methods of the Netherlands economy. His fertility and celerity sometimes lowered the quality of his product, but he neared perfection often enough to become the god of Flemish art.
Now he felt secure enough to marry (1609). Isabella Brant was the daughter of an Antwerp lawyer and alderman, and therefore a fit mate for the son of an Antwerp lawyer and alderman. Rubens went to live in her father’s house till his own palatial home on the Wappens Canal was finished. In one of his finest paintings16 Peter and Isabella are pictured in the happiness of early marriage: she hidden in overflowing robes and laced in flowered bodice, her hand laid trustfully and possessively upon his, her proud face rising out of an enormous blue ruff, her head crowned with a cavalier hat; he in ripe manhood and success, with sturdy legs, blond beard, handsome features, and ribboned hat. Isabella was allowed only seventeen more years of life; but she gave him children whom he raised and portrayed lovingly; see the curlyheaded boy in the Berlin Kaiser-Friedrich Museum, plump and happy, playing with a dove, and see him again, sobered by full seven years, in The Sons of the Artist.17 Only a good man could have painted these portraits.