Master of Shadows (11 page)

On one of Antwerp’s typically pleasant summer afternoons, with a cool breeze blowing in off the Scheldt and scudding clouds breaking across a crystalline sky, there was no more appealing place to spend a few hours than the lush private garden tucked behind the home of Peter Paul and Isabella Rubens. The painter designed it all, house and garden, having been inspired by the elegant Mantuan homes of the artists Andrea Mantegna and Giulio Romano. His good friend Jan van den Wouvere wrote that he built it expressly to astonish his many distinguished guests.

The property was located on the Wapper, a quiet canal street just off the Meir, Antwerp’s bustling commercial boulevard. Rubens purchased it in 1610 from the Harquebusiers’ Guild for 10,000 guilders, a princely sum. It was a great deal to pay, but the lot came with a handsome house in the traditional Flemish style—three redbrick stories with white stone trim and a steep roof punctured by
stepped-gable windows—and an adjacent laundry house that, once demolished, would leave enough room for Rubens to build a new wing facing the street and, in addition, a pair of row houses to rent. In the back, there was space for a large formal garden.

It was a good five years before the Rubens family could actually move into their new home, and more than a decade before the artist was finally done tinkering and making alterations. The old Flemish house was gut renovated, and attached to it Rubens built a small Italianate palazzo to serve as his studio and workshop. The style of this building was something new to his neighbors, a precisely crafted jewel of classical design. The sketchbooks Rubens kept during his time in Italy attested to his careful attention to architectural detail. In 1621, he would even publish on this subject: a sumptuous two-volume monograph on the palaces of Genoa that so captivated him on his first visit to that city, years earlier. For the moment, however, Rubens did not build himself a Genovese-style villa. He considered those buildings, though attractive, “suited to housing families of simple gentlefolk.” For his own home, he had something a bit more substantial in mind.

The contrast between Rubens’s two buildings—the older Flemish house that came with the property and the new Italianate wing he designed himself—was stark, a visual statement of loyalties divided. Inside, however, Rubens characteristically found harmony in the marriage of disparate traditions. Visitors entered through a heavy wooden door in the Flemish side, and from there were led into a courtyard enclosed by a portico that physically and metaphorically united the two wings of the house. Visible beyond was the garden, an Edenic space with a pavilion, fountains, and exotic trees selected especially by the artist. The triple-arched portico, a mash of heavily articulated forms surmounted by statues of Hermes and Athena (gods associated with diplomacy and the arts), was something
entirely of Rubens’s invention, a translation into stone of his artistic and personal philosophy. Its elements, architectural and literary, were drawn from the classical tradition, but applied with the same unique blend of exuberance and bravado Rubens brought to canvas. To that end, Satyrs held aloft tablets with inscriptions from Juvenal that warned of life’s fragility and extolled the benefits of humility before the gods.

Rubens advocated humility as a general philosophy, but when it came to architecture, he made a distinction between houses that were solid blocks, like the Genovese buildings he recommended for “simple gentlefolk,” and those with open courts at their hearts, like his own, which he considered appropriate for a sovereign prince. Rubens was similarly unafraid to suggest, with a wink and a nudge, a suitably elevated place for his talents in the canon of art history. Across the courtyard facade of the workshop, Rubens re-created in what appeared to be low sculptural relief the works of his esteemed forebears, the most famous painters of Greek history: Zeuxis, Timanthes, Protogenes, Apelles. Their works were known only from literary descriptions, and in his own writings Rubens himself suggested it was best they be kept “in imagination alone, like dreams.” Attempts to reproduce them, he wrote, would result only in “something insipid or inconsistent with the grandeur of the ancients… and fail to do justice to those great spirits whom I honor with the profoundest reverence, preferring indeed to admire the traces they have left than to venture to proclaim myself capable of matching them, even in thought alone.” Those words had an appealingly humble ring, but in practice he teasingly violated his own warning. The frieze running along the workshop facade was actually not a frieze but a trompe l’oeil depiction of a frieze painted in grisaille, a technique in which monochrome pigment can be used to mimic the effect of stone. This artifice was extended and expanded
on the garden facade of the workshop, where a three-dimensional loggia was faked onto what was in fact a blank wall. Above this scene, a painting by Rubens was stretched out to dry, apparently hanging over the “frieze.” Only the drying canvas was not a real drying canvas but a painting of a drying canvas. The painter’s more erudite friends (and especially the artists who visited) almost certainly appreciated this elaborate inside joke. The ancient painters Rubens most admired were famous for their ability to fool the eye. The masterpiece of Apelles, the greatest of those artists, was his
Calumny, an
allegorical rumination on the dangers of bearing false witness. On that front, Rubens had surely proven himself capable of matching his illustrious predecessor. Unfortunately, that subtext was lost on the royal eye of the Infanta Isabella, who supposedly asked that Rubens take the drying work down for inspection during one of her visits to the studio—an awkward moment, to be sure.

Inside, the house was furnished and fitted in the best taste, a necessity for entertaining distinguished guests. Royalty from across Europe came to the Rubens house to sit for the painter and to arrange for the purchase of works from his studio. A stop at the elegant home on the Wapper was all but obligatory for dignitaries visiting Antwerp, though travelers did not always arrive at its doors solely with art on their minds. The large formal garden in the back of the house was an excellent place for a private stroll, where delicate political affairs might be addressed away from prying eyes and ears. Moreover, Rubens himself was developing a reputation as a man of insight and discretion, and his proximity to the archdukes Albert and Isabella made him a useful conduit for those wishing to initiate back-channel negotiations with the sovereigns. The intimacy of his relationship with the archdukes during this time is plainly evident in a painting of a gathering at the Antwerp home of Cornelis van der Geest, one of the artist’s friends. In this picture,
painted by Willem van Haecht in 1615, Albert and Isabella stand just below Rubens’s recently completed
Battle of the Amazons
, which hangs on a back wall. In the foreground is the painter himself, lecturing the royal couple on the merits of a Quentin Metsys
Madonna and Child
.

Rubens kept a private office on the second floor of the workshop, and it was from there that he conducted most of his correspondence. Ever since his return from Rome, he had become an essential node in an informal network of like-minded thinkers—men such as Lipsius, Galileo, Isaac Casaubon, and Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc—who exchanged ideas on subjects ranging from ancient history to philosophy to the natural sciences. Political affairs figured prominently, especially for Rubens. A born scholar, he had supplemented his on-the-job political education with an academic investigation into the history, theory, and practice of diplomacy. (Espionage being the dark art naturally conjoined to statecraft, he studied that, too.) He was well versed in the ideas of the Renaissance theorist Niccolò Machiavelli, the best-known, if not most admired, authority on the subject. By the early 1620s, his own theories on the importance of negotiation during wartime were so advanced that he felt comfortable offering them to Frederik de Marselaer, a Brussels-based diplomat who was revising a book on the duties of an ambassador.

Rubens did most of his writing behind closed doors, but his artistic invention was done primarily out in the open, in a large room on the first floor of his studio. This was a long gallery with four north-facing windows and high ceilings. Apprentices worked alongside him and also above on the second floor, in a domed room lit by an oculus window. There was plenty of space, but even still, Rubens couldn’t satisfy the demand for places in his studio. For Anthony Van Dyck, who would become his most famous pupil, he made room, but other talented students—even the children of
friends and relatives—could wait a year or more before finding a position, if they got one at all.

Rubens thrived on the commotion of the studio, and set about his work with a ferocious energy. Rapid brushstrokes augmented the sense of dynamism that was a hallmark of his style, and the sensuous tactility of the paint he applied enhanced the physical presence of his figures on canvas. “Abandon and audacity alone can produce such impressions,” the great Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix would later note. The more quickly Rubens worked, he discovered, the more profitable was his studio. Output increased, of course, but clients also enjoyed—and would pay a premium for—works in which his forceful stroke was readily discernible. Rubens actively promoted this fascination with his genius. It was good business, and it pleased his considerable ego. Painting, he felt, was both a discipline and a performance. Guests were encouraged to watch him at the easel. Otto Sperling, a Danish physician who saw Rubens in action, recalled that his talent was such that he could at once paint, dictate a letter, and listen to an assistant reading a classical text in Latin. “When we kept silent so as not to disturb him with our talk,” wrote Sperling, “he himself began to talk to us while still continuing to work, to listen to the reading and to dictate his letter, answering our questions and thus displaying his astonishing powers.”

A Rubens painting often began with a few quick pen sketches known as
crabbelingen
, or “doodles.” He regularly drew from a live model and built up a “costume book” as a reference to ensure his figures were properly fashioned in period attire. Depending on the circumstance, initial studies were followed with larger conceptual drawings, usually on cream paper in a brown bistre ink made from oven soot or chalk, and then preliminary sketches in oil on wood board. As he matured, he would often skip drawing altogether and
begin with an oil sketch. These were then handed off to his apprentices, who scaled his ideas to canvas and brought them to a predetermined level of execution. Some works Rubens completed entirely himself; others he simply finished with a few touches of the brush. Designs for the large tapestries that were a highly profitable Flemish specialty were sent off to local factories for execution. Contracts typically determined just how much of Rubens’s personal contribution was required in a particular work, but there was not always a contract, as he often worked on spec. The resulting confusion of authorship was a problem for some of his clients—it remains a problem for collectors and curators—but Rubens considered all of the work his own. Certainly it was lucrative. His prices were high, and he was not prone to negotiate. Indeed, he had so many buyers that he dealt with only the most distinguished connoisseurs. “He sends less competent judges to less competent painters,” wrote one client. Those who wanted his pictures had to accept his demands.

The stereotype of the artist as a destitute genius supported only by charity is largely a product of the nineteenth century. The artists of Rubens’s era were craftsmen, and those who were masters ran efficient and profitable workshops. But even judged by the standards of his contemporaries, Rubens’s success as a capitalist was extraordinary. In its prime, the Rubens studio earned something on the order of 100 guilders per day, a figure that left the painter with an annual salary more than fifty times that of the average mason, and far in excess of the income requirement not just for a baron but also for a prince. Men of those ranks, however, were precluded from engaging in something so base as a trade—let alone one that required manual labor—for their incomes.

Rubens, for his part, saw nothing ignoble in what he called his “
dolcissima professione,”
and was unashamed to show off the wealth he acquired through its practice. He could regularly be seen driving
about Antwerp in a luxurious carriage, dressed impeccably and attended to by a flock of servants and assistants. He had few enemies, but even those who found his flights of theatricality self-indulgent or pretentious never dared to accuse him of laziness. He rose before dawn and began work with the first light. He ate a small vegetarian lunch around noon—he avoided meat, lest it upset his digestion and keep him from the easel. Following the meal, he worked through the afternoon until five, after which time he would exercise one of the several fine Spanish horses from his stable along the ramparts encircling the city—the routine of a gentleman, not a tradesman. Supper was taken with family and friends, but again Rubens was fairly abstemious. He didn’t drink to excess, and he never gambled.

Evening hours were spent with his growing family and a close-knit circle of friends. Regulars at the Rubens house included his old schoolboy chum Balthasar Moretus, the scholars Jan van den Wouvere and Jan Caspar Gevaerts (known respectively in their Romanist circles as Woverius and Gevartius), and the still-life painter Jan “Velvet” Brueghel, son of the great Pieter Brueghel. (The nickname paid homage to his soft touch with a brush.) Rubens and Brueghel were so close that Rubens, more gifted with words, often handled his friend’s correspondence. Brueghel affectionately referred to him as “my secretary.” The two masters were also occasional collaborators, a highly unusual practice for artists of their stature. In these innovative works, Rubens painted the human figures, and Brueghel the surrounding floral arrangements (flowers being his specialty). Frans Snyders, another friend and an expert animal painter, was also a frequent collaborator. The benefit of these joint works, beyond their aesthetic pleasures, was that they could be sold at especially high rates, as they combined the skills of multiple masters, thereby providing “added value.”