Master of Shadows (12 page)

In Rubens’s era, genre specialists like Brueghel and Snyders were esteemed somewhat less than painters of grand subjects from history, but Rubens was never snobbish about such distinctions—though he was sure to place himself in the latter, more exalted group. Indeed, his friends routinely praised his generosity and humility, traits cultivated by his mother and his Jesuit education. Early in his career, the artist neatly summed up his personal philosophy with a simple diagram that he sketched into an Antwerp guest book. Above a small circle with a dot at its center, he wrote the Latin phrase “
Medio Deus omnia campo.”
“God is all things in the middle of the field.” Art history’s most celebrated exemplar of carnality was, at least intellectually, a man of quiet moderation. His passions were released in his work.

Of course, the Baroque is not remembered as a time of self-effacement, and neither is its archetypal painter, who compensated for all that self-abnegation with an unprecedented excess of splendor in his work. If Rubens was aware of the ironic disconnect between his personal appetites and the essential nature of his art, he never felt cause to justify it. An enormous, controlling intelligence filtered his hedonistic impulses and provided the discipline that allowed him to create canvases that were larger, with more figures, more color, more drama, and more beauty than anything that had come before. And of course there were more of these pictures, thanks to his expertly staffed workshop and his own personal industry. Rubens made no secret that he reviled nothing so much as the sin of sloth. In a plague-ridden era, the ever-present specter of disease bred an expectation that precious time should be capitalized upon with full energy. When Rubens received a letter from Rome informing him of the death of Adam Elsheimer, a specialist in miniature landscapes painted on copper, he lamented his friend’s creative struggles, which resulted in “despair” and “deprived the
world of the most beautiful things.” Rubens would never be the victim of his own diffidence, but he was generous enough to act as a dealer for Elsheimer’s widow. Using his contacts, he helped her sell off the artist’s remaining works at good prices, and without commission.

Rubens was forced to confront an even more painful death in 1611, with the passing of his beloved older brother Philip, then just thirty-seven years old. It was a crushing loss. Philip had always been his closest confidant, and his death left Peter Paul as the lone survivor of the seven children born of Jan and Maria. In his brother’s honor, he created one of his most heartfelt works: a group portrait with Philip seated next to his late mentor, Justus Lipsius, and beneath a bust of Seneca, their intellectual hero. Rubens placed himself in that painting, looking out solemnly over his brother’s shoulder. His is not a comforting expression, but it does at least signal an adherence to the brand of neo-stoicism championed by Lipsius. “Constancy” was the word with which the philosopher was most commonly identified, and the title of his two-volume meditation on Senecan values, a kind of self-help guide to moral living in a turbulent world. A sense of stoicism was essential to Lipsius; the philosopher defined it as “a voluntarie sufferance without grudging of all things whatever can happen to, or in a man.” In difficult times, constancy was the “fair oak” upon which a man might lean his troubled body, and it was the intellectual crutch Rubens looked to when he found himself mourning the brother who years earlier had himself proclaimed a heart “torn apart by anxiety” for his seafaring younger sibling.

Lipsius, a severe man with a sunken face, small eyes, and an aquiline nose, cast an enormous intellectual shadow over the Low Countries during the early seventeenth century, surpassing even that of his forebear Erasmus. His erudition was legendary. (He
famously offered to read passages by Tacitus, one of his favorites, from memory with a dagger held at his gut, waiting for a slip that would never arrive.) The impact of his thinking on Rubens was especially acute. The philosopher’s story must have been particularly resonant for the Rubens siblings, as it mirrored the experience of their own family. Lipsius, like Jan and Maria Rubens, had fled the Spanish Netherlands before returning, in mind and body, to the Catholic fold. His theological philosophy was a pragmatic fusion of classical erudition and contemporary Christian orthodoxy that skirted the rifts between the most virulent Catholics and Protestants. That suited Rubens’s scholarly nature and his essential sense of temperance. The artist was never ostentatious about his faith, though he dutifully attended an early Catholic mass before beginning his workday. His parents’ Calvinist experimentation had bred in him a fairly tolerant worldview, and the religious warring of the Low Countries had impressed him as needlessly destructive. Certainly, his own family had suffered the consequences of sectarian division.

Lipsian political philosophy was similarly modeled on classical precedent, in particular the systems of imperial Rome, on which he was an expert. Lipsius echoed Seneca’s injunction that individuals of capacity were obliged to serve the needs of the state. This was something of a truism of the period, shared by humanists across Europe. Michel de Montaigne, the great essayist of the previous century, acted as a mayor, a parliamentarian, and a secret mediator during the French Wars of Religion. In his own essay on the nature of constancy, Montaigne wrote, “The Peripatetic sage does not exempt himself from perturbations, but he moderates them.” It is no coincidence that Rubens, who always understood painting to be his primary vocation, would also develop a career as a pragmatic statesman.

THE DISTINGUISHED SET
of citizen-scholars who were Rubens’s confreres and clients gathered regularly in the private art galleries, or
Kunstkammer
s, they built in their homes. These rooms were packed from their polished floors to their coffered ceilings with paintings, sculptures, and other wonders, rooms that reflected the worldliness and intellectual ambition of their owners. Nicolaas Rockox, the Antwerp burgomeester, commissioned a
Samson and Delilah
from Rubens and installed it over his fireplace, not far from a bust of Marcus Aurelius and a heartwood chest filled with shells and coins. Rubens himself collected shells, globes, books by the score, a sarcophagus, an Egyptian mummy, even plans for a “perpetual motion” machine. A Byzantine agate vase was a particular favorite.

In 1619, Rubens initiated a weekly correspondence with the Parisian politician and fellow antiquarian Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc. Rubens wrote that first letter to enlist Peiresc’s support in his mission to secure French copyright privileges for a series of printed engravings. In the years following, their epistolary friendship would grow to one of unusual devotion, and it would continue throughout their lives. For Rubens, Peiresc became an invaluable source of intelligence on political affairs in Paris. In addition to his own highly informed commentary on that subject, Peiresc routinely sent along newspapers, pamphlets, and books that were noteworthy or controversial. He also sent fawning compliments. “You surpass all the painters of this century,” wrote the Frenchman. “I am convinced that you are the equal of the most excellent masters.” Beyond flattery, the subject they engaged in most happily was antiquarian scholarship, and their letters sometimes veered toward academic absurdity. “The reason for comparing the vulva to a snail I
cannot imagine,” Rubens wrote in a letter analyzing a pornographic cameo. This, however, did not keep him from comparing the snail’s antennae to an engorged labia, though he switched languages from Italian to the more scholarly Latin to maintain propriety.

Such displays of erudition were occasionally disparaged, even then, as the ostentatious vanities of dilettantes, an accusation not without some merit. But they were also markers of an obsessive quest for intellectual enrichment, a project antiquarians considered essential for self-improvement and for understanding the world around them. The realm of scholarship, Seneca argued, was an appropriate place of retreat for men of learning in a troubled age. But men like Peiresc and Rubens also shared a Lipsian worldview in which the historical past was understood to be contiguous with the political present. Theirs was very much a practical brand of humanism, and they believed a strong academic background critical for those in positions of national authority.

Judged by its contents, the most impressive gallery in Antwerp belonged to Rubens. Its walls were adorned with his own paintings, with copies he made from old-master works, and with originals by the likes of Titian, Raphael, Tintoretto, and Veronese. He also collected from among his own circle, including his pupil Van Dyck, and local painters of good but lesser reputation. Rubens, artist of the grand gesture, had a special fondness for the small genre and landscape scenes that he rarely painted himself (and that snobbish Italophiles like Iberti disparaged as the only idioms in which Flemings might be trusted). These works were complemented by the large collection of antiquities he brought back from Rome. He also built an extensive library, with volumes on subjects ranging from architecture and botany to theology and zoology. Classical history was, of course, a special point of emphasis. His taste in literature was generally more scholarly than bombastic. He once complained
of the French writer Père Goulu, “His conceit and vanity are insufferable, and his hyperbole passes all measure.”

For Rubens, this was a working collection. Intellectually, it was his conduit to an accurate reconstruction of the historical past, one of the great aims of the antiquarian project. As an artist devoted to the ideals of the Renaissance, he believed a thorough knowledge of the classical tradition was a professional necessity. “In order to achieve the highest perfection one needs a full understanding of the statues, nay a complete absorption in them,” Rubens wrote in a treatise on sculpture, though he warned that the painter should at all costs “avoid the effect of stone.” To aid in focusing his attention, Rubens designed a special gallery for his statues, a miniature museum modeled on the Roman Pantheon, which he tacked onto the back of the refurbished Flemish house. Willem van Haecht, who had painted the image of the Van der Geest home with Rubens addressing the archdukes Albert and Isabella, depicted a version of the gallery in his
Studio of Apelles
, painted around 1628. (The title offered a thinly veiled reference to Rubens.) The small gallery was semicircular, with a half-dome ceiling punctured by an oculus window and more than fifty niches on two levels for display. This configuration had been endorsed by a long line of influential Italian architectural theorists, including Vitruvius, Sebastiano Serlio, and most recently Vincenzo Scamozzi, who illustrated a similar space in his 1615 pattern book,
L’idea della architettura universale
, of which Rubens owned a copy.

IN
1618, Rubens dramatically expanded his collection of antiquities in a deal with Dudley Carleton, the English ambassador to the Dutch government at The Hague. Carleton was in his mid-forties at the time—he was just four years older than Rubens—but he had
already developed a drawn and weary aspect about him, the product of a peripatetic career in which he had often found himself held responsible for the ill-considered behavior of his superiors. As a younger man, he had been appointed as a court secretary to one of the aristocratic co-conspirators in the so-called Gunpowder Plot, the famously ill-conceived scheme to blow up the Houses of Parliament while King James I was calling it to order. Carleton was briefly detained before he was cleared of any wrongdoing.

Carleton’s association with Rubens began before the two men had even met. In 1616, just after Carleton had arrived in the Netherlands, Rubens sold him a hunting scene in exchange for a diamond necklace valued at 50 pounds (about 600 guilders). Hunting scenes were quite fashionable with the English nobility at the time, and Carleton had in fact wanted an even larger version of the same painting. Rubens, however, demanded nearly twice as much for the bigger picture, and the ambassador was in no position to increase his offer.