by Will Durant
At the same time he was basically a pagan, unabashedly in love with the human body, male as well as female, in all the intoxication of athletic strength or easeful curves. It is a symbol of his Flanders that it enjoyed his profane mythologies—riots of unimpeded flesh—while the churches welcomed his interpretations of religious themes. He could not quite make up his mind between Mary and Venus; probably he felt no contradiction between them, for both of them brought money. In The Worship of Venus18 the pagan element is unrestrained—a parkful of bacchantes modestly hiding an elbow or a knee and embraced by goaty satyrs, while a dozen infants dance around a statue of the goddess of love. Though these pagan subjects echo his stay in Italy, his Venuses lack all classic line; they cannot live in the north on sun and air and wine, as in the south; they must eat and drink to cushion themselves from rain and mists and cold; Teutonic flesh, like British whiskey—English or Scotch—is a climatic defense. One of Rubens’ pictures—three bulging nudes—is entitled Without Wine and Bread Venus Is Cold;19 he was too courtly to say “without meat and beer.” So he saw nothing out of scale in a Shepherd Making Love,20 which shows a shepherd trying to seduce three hundred pounds; there’s nothing good or bad, beautiful or ugly, but environment makes it so. In The Rape of the Sabines21 it is all that two mighty Romans can do to lift one of their ravishing ravished captives upon a horse. Even in The Consequences of War22 there is no emaciation. Diana Returning from the Chase23 is no Greek goddess trim and chaste, but a Flemish housewife, broad-shouldered, muscular, matronly; in all that massive picture only the dog is slim. The Rubensian woods are full of satyrs squeezing avoirdupois, as in Ixion and Hera24 and The Four Corners of the World;25 and, as we might have expected, The Origin of the Milky Way26 is no nebular hypothesis, but a fat Hausfrau squirting streams of milk from a congested breast. The Three Graces,27 however, are relatively svelte, and in The Judgment of Paris28 two of the ladies conform to later fashions; one is among the fairest female figures in art. Usually, in these pagan pictures, there is far more than flesh; Rubens poured into them the rich abandon of his fancy, a hundred accessories filling out the scene, delineated with careless care, and leaping to the eye with color, warmth, and life. Nor is there any prurience in the billowy display; it is merely animal vitality, mens plena in corpore pleno; not one of these pictures offers erotic stimulus. Rubens himself was anomalously well-behaved for an artist necessarily high-strung and sensitive to color and form; he was known as a good husband, a “solid family man,” untouched with any scandal of gallantry or intrigue.29
The ecclesiastics of Flanders, Italy, and Spain recognized the innocence of his sensuality, and had no qualms in asking him to illustrate again the story of Mary, Christ, and the saints. He accommodated them, but in his own unhackneyed way. Which of his countless predecessors visualized with fuller imagination, or painted with subtler skill, the ancient theme of The Adoration of the Kings?III30 Who would have dared to center the composition upon the fat belly of a bronzed and turbaned Ethiopian looking in colorful disdain upon the pale faces around him? Who would have dreamed that this pagan peering with eye and brush into every nook and cranny of the female form would love the Jesuits, would join their Marian Congregation, and would perform the exercises prescribed by Ignatius Loyola to cleanse the soul with visions of hell?31 In March 1620 he contracted with the Jesuits to design, before the end of the year, thirty-nine pictures to cover the ceilings of the splendid baroque church that they had begun to build in Antwerp in 1614. He made the drawings, Vandyck and others turned these into paintings, nearly all of which were destroyed in 1718. For the high altar Rubens himself painted two major works, Ignatius Healing the Possessed and The Miracles of St. Francis, both now in the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum.
Nevertheless, Rubens was a Catholic only in the Renaissance sense, and a Christian only by location. His paganism survived within his piety. He was not quite comfortable with Virgins and saints; his Madonnas are robust women clearly fitter to manage a man than to beget a god. In The Madonna in a Garland of Flowers32 Mary holds up not a divinity but a handsome boy displaying his equipment to the world; and The Return from Egypt33 shows Christ as a curlyheaded lad, and Mary dressed like a Flemish matron wearing her new hat on a Sunday walk in the park. Even in The Elevation of the Cross (in the Antwerp cathedral) Rubens’ interest in anatomy dominates the religious motif: Christ is a virile athlete, not a dying god. In The Blow of the Lance34 everything again is anatomy: Christ and the thieves are massive figures, every straining muscle shown; the women at the foot of the Cross are posing for the artist rather than fainting with grief; Rubens has not felt the scene.
At least five times Rubens challenged Titian with an Assumption of the Virgin; in the most famous of these efforts35 the Madonna seems lifeless, and the living creatures are the Magdalen and the startled Apostles at the empty tomb. Finer is the great triptych36 commissioned by the Archduchess Isabel for the Confraternity of St. Ildefonso in Brussels. In the central panel the Virgin, descended from heaven, presents to the Archbishop of Toledo a chasuble direct from Paradise; the saint is all humility, “breathless with adoration”; while in the side panels Isabel and Albert lay aside their crowns and kneel in prayer; here for a time Rubens gave life to piety. And in St. Ambrose and the Emperor Theodosius37 he caught and conveyed the mysterious power and authority of the Church: the Archbishop of Milan, armed only with priests and an acolyte, but with a head of majesty, drives from the cathedral the Emperor backed with awesome guards but burdened with unshriven cruelty. Rubens rarely failed with old men, for in them, especially, the face is an autobiography, and offers visible character to perceiving art. See the patriarch’s head in Lot and His Family Leaving Sodom38—one of the finest Rubens pictures in America.
He returned with gusto to secular subjects, mixed with mythology, when Marie de Médicis offered him the most tempting contract of his career. On February 16, 1622, he signed an agreement to paint, within four years, twenty-one large pictures and three portraits commemorating events in the life of Marie and her husband, Henry IV. The Queen invited him to come and live at the French court; he had the good sense to stay home. In May 1623 he took the first nine panels to Paris. Marie liked them, Richelieu admired them. The series was completed in 1624; Rubens took the remainder to Paris and saw them set up in the Luxembourg Palace. In 1802 the pictures were transferred to the Louvre, where nineteen of them now enjoy a room all their own. Those who have seen and studied them will not grudge the twenty thousand crowns ($250,000?) paid to Rubens for his work, and doubtless shared by him with his aides. All in all, these paintings are his supreme achievement. If we allow for some marks of haste, and accept the incredible story as we do in Ovid, Shakespeare, and Verdi, we shall find all of Rubens here except his occasional piety. He loved the splendor of court ritual, the majesty of royal power; he never tired of plump women, rich raiment, and gorgeous drapery; he had lived half his days with the gods and goddesses of classical mythology; now he brought all these together in a flowing narrative, with an inventiveness of episode, an opulence of color, a mastery of composition and design, that made the series an epic and opera in the history of painting.
Only two more honors were wanting to Rubens’ apotheosis—to be made a diplomat and to receive a patent of nobility. In 1623 the Archduchess Isabel used him as negotiator in hopes to renew the truce with Holland; Rubens had his own reason for promoting peace, since his wife aspired to inherit a fortune from her Dutch uncle.39 These efforts failed; nevertheless Isabel persuaded Philip IV to ennoble him (1624), and made him “Gentleman of the Household of Her Most Serene Highness”—i.e., herself. Later the King protested against her employing “so mean [unpedigreed] a person” to receive foreign envoys and discuss “affairs of such great importance”;40 yet Isabel sent Rubens to Madrid a year later (1628) to help arrange a peace between Philip IV and Charles I. He took some of his paintings with him; the King revised his notion of pedigree and sat to Rubens for five portraits, as if Velázquez were not m
aking enough. The two artists became good friends, the Spaniard, then twenty-nine, modestly deferring to the genial Fleming, then fifty-one. Finally Philip appointed the “mean” Rubens as his envoy to England. In London the artist successfully concluded a treaty of peace, despite the emissaries and the bribes of Richelieu to the contrary. Rubens painted some English portraits—the Duke and Duchess of Buckingham,41 and the magnificent face, beard, and armor of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel.42 Having paved the way for Vandyck, he returned to Antwerp (March 1630) with a degree from Cambridge and a knighthood from Charles.
Meanwhile his first wife had died (1626), and, as Flemish custom required, the funeral was celebrated with a lavish banquet that cost the artist-diplomat 204 florins ($2,800?) “on food and drink and hired plate”;43 death in Flemish society was an almost prohibitive luxury. Rubens drowned his loneliness in diplomacy. In 1630, aged fifty-three, he married Helena Fourment, aged sixteen. He needed beauty about him, and she had already the warm coziness that filled his art and his dreams. He painted her again and again, in every garb and none: in her wedding costume,44 holding a glove,45 happy under a saucy hat,46 hiding only her hips in a fur coat,47 and, best of all, walking with Rubens in their garden48—this last is one of the peaks of Flemish painting. Then he showed her with their first-born,49 and later with their two children50—a presage of Renoir; not to speak of the pictures in which she posed voluptuously as Venus or demurely as the Mother of God.
He painted his beloved rulers, Albert and Isabel, without flattery; we see them in the Vienna and Pitti galleries probably as they were—governing a troubled land with all the good will compatible with Spanish ideals. He found fine types of manhood and womanhood in Flanders; he pictured them in his painting of Jean Charles de Cordes and his pretty pouting wife,51 and in the portrait of Michael Ophovius,52 Bishop of’s Hertogenbosch; and he left us a powerful image of the invincible Spinola.53 But portraiture was not Rubens’ forte; he gives us no subtle insights like Titian, no revelations from the depths as in Rembrandt. The greatest of his portraits is that which he painted of himself in 1624 for the future Charles I:54 immense gold-tasseled hat, revealing only the great forehead of the bald head; penetrating eyes in quizzical glance; the long sharp nose that seems to go with genius; the bristling mustache and fine red beard; this is a man well aware that he is at the top of his craft. Yet something of the physical vitality, sensuous enjoyment, and calm content that had shone in the picture of himself with Isabella Brant has gone with the years. Only failure wears out a man faster than success.
He was rich, and he lived in grand style; his costly home in Antwerp was one of the sights of the city. In 1635 he bought for 93,000 florins an extensive estate and feudal castle in the lordship of Steen, eighteen miles out, and took the title Lord of Steen. He spent his summers there, painted landscapes, and tried his polyphonic hand at genre. Amid his luxuries, with three maidservants, two grooms, and three horses, he continued to work hard, finding his happiness in his family and his work. His wives, children, patrons, aides loved him for his serenity of spirit, his generosity, his warmhearted sympathy.55
Others more competent must analyze the technical qualities of his art, but we may safely describe him as the chief exemplar of pictorial baroque—sensuous color, incalculable movement, rich imagination, luscious ornament, as against classic placidity and restraint of thought and line. But amid this confusion of beauty, the critics tell us, there is superb draftsmanship. Rubens’ drawings fed a brilliant school of engravers, who made the master’s paintings known to Christian Europe as Raimondi had done with Raphael’s designs. From Rubens’ hand or studio came famous cartoons for the tapestry weavers of Paris and Brussels; they made royal gifts or decoration for Louis XIII, Charles I, and the Archduchess Isabel.
His final decade was one of universal triumph darkened by physical decline. Only Bernini equaled him in artistic fame; in painting no one dreamed of questioning his supremacy. Pupils ran to him from all quarters; commissions came from half a dozen courts, even from Stadholder Frederick Henry across the lines of war. In 1636 Philip IV asked him to paint scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses for the Pardo hunting lodge; Rubens’ studio produced fifty pictures for the series, of which thirty-one are in the Prado; one of them, The Judgment of Paris, seemed to the Cardinal Infante Ferdinand “the best picture Rubens ever painted.”56 We may prefer the riotous Kermis57 that he painted in 1636—a Brueghel of mad pursuit, in which no woman is so old or ample but some man snatches her.
The self-portrait at sixty58 is the other side of these concluding years: a man still proud, hand on his sword of nobility, but face thinning, skin hanging, crow’s-feet under the eyes—a brave and honest picture. In 1635 gout put him to bed for a month; in 1637 it disabled his hand for a time; in 1639 it prevented him from signing his name; by 1640 both hands were paralyzed. On May 30, 1640, aged sixty-three, he died from arthritis and arteriosclerosis.
It was an astonishing career. He was not the uomo universale of the Renaissance ideal; yet he realized his ambition to play a role in the state as well as the studio. He was not a universal artist, like Leonardo and Michelangelo; he left no sculpture, designed no building except his home. But in painting he reached high excellence in every field. Religious pictures, pagan revels, gods and goddesses, nudity and raiment, kings and queens, children and old men, landscapes and battle scenes all poured from his brush as from a kaleidoscopic cornucopia of color and form. Rubens ended the subjection of Flemish to Italian painting, not by rebellion, but by absorption and union.
He was not as deep as Rembrandt, but wider; he shied away from the dark depths that Rembrandt revealed; he preferred the sun, the open air, the dance of light, the color and zest of life; he repaid his own good fortune by smiling upon the world. His art is the voice of health, as ours today sometimes suggests sickness in the individual or national soul. When our own vitality lags, let us open our Rubens book anywhere and be refreshed.
IV. VANDYCK: 1599–1641
It was just like Rubens to hail and encourage the precocious talent of the young Adonis who joined his studio about 1617. Anthony Vandyck (or Vandyke) had been apprenticed, at the age of eight, to Hendrik van Balen, the teacher of Snyders; at sixteen he had pupils of his own; at nineteen he was a registered master, not so much a pupil of Rubens as a highly valued aide. Rubens rated an early painting by Vandyck as equal in worth to his own Daniel of the same year; he kept for his own collection Vandyck’s Christ Crowned with Thorns and only later, reluctantly, surrendered it to Philip IV for the Escorial.59 In religious pictures Vandyck came too amiably under Rubens’ influence and, lacking the older artist’s vitality of movement and color, fell short of him in all but portraiture. In the early Self-Portrait of 1615 (?)60 he revealed the qualities that were to mark and limit his genius—grace, finesse, and a soft beauty almost unbecoming in a man. His fellow artists were happy to sit for him as an added hedge against oblivion; he made admirable portraits of Snyders,61 Duquesnoy,62 Jan Wildens,63 Jan de Wael,64 Gaspar de Crayer,65 and Marten Pepijn;66 it was one of the many lovable qualities of Vandyck that he liked his rivals. These portraits suggest in Rubens’ studio a pleasant spirit of comradeship not always present in the realm of art.
In 1620 the Earl of Arundel received from Antwerp a letter: “Vandyck lives with Rubens, and his works are being esteemed almost as highly as those of his master.”67 He invited the young artist to England. Vandyck went, received a piddling pension of £100 from James I, painted a few portraits, rebelled at the menial copying required of him by the King, asked for an eight months’ leave of absence, received it, and stretched it to twelve years. At Antwerp he made provision for his mistress and her baby; then he hurried down into Italy (1621).
There for the first time he struck his stride, and he left fine portraits at almost every stop. He pored over the great Venetians, not so much to study their color and massive scope, as Rubens had done, but to ferret out the secrets of poetic portraiture in Giorgione, Titian, and Veronese
. He went on to Bologna, Florence, Rome, even to Sicily. At Rome he stayed with Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio and repaid him with a portrait.68 His courtly manners were resented by the Flemish artists who were starving in Italy; they dubbed him “il pittore cavalleresco” and made things so unpleasant that he gladly accompanied Lady Arundel to Turin. He was especially welcomed in Genoa, which remembered Rubens and had heard of Vandyck’s flair for ennobling nobility, making every sitter seem a prince. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has a sample of these Genoese aristocrats in The Marchesa Durazzo—sensitive face and (as always in Vandyck) fine hands; the National Gallery in Washington has The Marchesa Balbi, and The Marchesa Grimaldi—proud and pregnant; Berlin and London have other examples; and Genoa managed to keep, in her Palazzo Rosso, The Marchese and Marchesa di Brignole-Sale. When Vandyck returned to Antwerp (1628) his pockets were full and his lace was exquisite.
His native city called him back from nobles to saints. To fit himself for these he repented of his promiscuity, willed his young fortune to two nun sisters, joined the Jesuit Confraternity of the Unmarried, and turned his hand to religious themes. He could not rival Rubens in this field, but he avoided the exuberant master’s exaggerations and carnal effulgence, and gave to his pictures a touch of the elegance he had learned in Italy. Reynolds thought Vandyck’s Crucifixion, in the Mechlin cathedral, one of the world’s greatest paintings; however, that may have been Sir Joshua’s way of repaying a debt.