Master of Shadows (16 page)

The printmaker in question, Lucas Vorsterman, had first walked through the big wooden doors of the Rubens studio back in 1619, and he came bearing credentials that advertised an unimpeachable pedigree. Before moving to Antwerp, Vorsterman had honed his craft under the tutelage of the revered Dutch printmaker Hendrik Goltzius, whose work was universally admired for its exquisite detail. In Rubens, he found a master of even greater stature, an artist whose genius Vorsterman understood to be commensurate with his own. Not shy about his own talent, Vorsterman fashioned himself after Rubens, the model gentleman artist. When Vorsterman’s first child was born, in January 1620, he enlisted Rubens as the godfather. He emulated everything from the cut of the great artist’s whiskers to the rake of his broad-brimmed hat. By profession and inclination, Vorsterman was a copyist, and his work was indisputably excellent.

Even under normal circumstances, the engraver’s job is a difficult one, a painstaking translation of color and shadow onto a metal surface using only scratched lines. Retaining the sense of an original work from a different medium is a challenge even with a simple
composition; the dynamic rushes of a Rubens were practically impossible to reproduce on an unforgiving plate. Vorsterman, however, was a magician with the sharp end of a burin, the engraver’s pointed tool, and his native ability was magnified by a fanatical perfectionism. Vorsterman worried over and scrutinized his every etched mark, an obsessive attention to detail that eventually so compromised his vision that he would be forced to give up his profession and live off the charity of his daughter. But for the moment, his mania and his ego put him on a collision course with Rubens. Vorsterman felt strongly enough about his own genius that he considered his prints for Rubens to be original works, and he went about acquiring his own copyrights for them. Rubens, of course, expressly considered the works to be his. The prints were copies of works he created himself, for profit, under his own imprimatur, and he had made great efforts to have them copyrighted. Indeed, his entire studio operation was run on the premise that what issued from his mind was his own intellectual property. Vorsterman, meanwhile, with his lateness and his desire for recognition, had derailed the entire engine. “I can no longer deal with him or come to an understanding with him,” wrote a frustrated Rubens. In fact, Rubens was more than willing to trade quality for speed of production, and it was for this very reason that he had hired the relatively unknown Vorsterman in the first place, an irony that was not lost on the painter. Somehow, he had found himself burdened with a toxic combination of youth and hubris.

When Rubens had received a commission, in 1621, for a memorial engraving of Charles de Longueval, a Habsburg military commander killed in Germany, he understood that a quick production was imperative. In essence, this was a work of propaganda, and its relevance stood in direct relation to its timeliness. But the disgruntled engraver either would not or could not respond to Rubens’s
demand for a quickly executed print. “We have made almost nothing for a couple of years due to the caprices of my engraver,” Rubens complained to his Dutch lawyer, Pieter van Veen. He complained as well to Vorsterman, who was emotionally unprepared for an upbraiding from the man he revered above all others, but somehow considered an equal.

There is no record of exactly what transpired between the two men. Blows were exchanged. Weapons may have been involved. It was serious enough for Rubens’s advocates to petition Isabella for a writ of protection. The infanta provided that order, affirming that her agent was indeed “endangered by the attacks of an evil-intentioned one of his men, said to have sworn his death.” Rubens, for his part, never mentioned the embarrassing episode, and his continued correspondence allayed the fears of his Parisian clients and admirers. Sadly, if predictably, it was the end of Vorsterman’s work for Rubens. The painter would henceforth use many a printmaker, but none quite so skillful as the troubled man who was also one of his greatest admirers.

Isabella, meanwhile, had good reason to be concerned for Rubens’s welfare. Apart from her interest in his artistic career and his utility as a source of foreign intelligence, a certain concentration of her retinue had become a necessity in the preceding year. In April 1621, the Twelve Years’ Truce had fizzled to an uncertain conclusion, leaving the Low Countries in a nebulous state of war that neither side seemed especially interested in pursuing. Three months later, Isabella lost something more personal: her husband and co-sovereign, the archduke Albert. Theirs had been an arranged marriage born of political convenience, but it had produced a devoted and like-minded couple of great mutual affection. The widowed Isabella, heretofore extravagant in her choice of attire, renounced her silks and laces, brocades and jewels, and replaced them with the dour
vestments of a Franciscan matron. The public was naturally sympathetic with her, but what she gained in moral authority she lost in political standing. Because she had produced no heir, sovereignty over the Spanish Netherlands reverted to Madrid, and her status was reduced to that of governor. Her independence, already constrained, was now more firmly in the hands of the Brussels-based military junta that answered directly to the Spanish king.

In his final years, Albert had been an aggressive proponent of peace in the Low Countries. In 1620, with the truce nearing an end and with the sectarian hostilities in neighboring Germany leading to mobilization on both sides of the border, he aggressively pressed Isabella’s brother, Philip III, to pursue a course of reconciliation with the Dutch. For this minor hubris, he was upbraided by the king and specifically enjoined from making direct overtures on his own initiative. For the moment, Madrid was satisfied to let war resume. Prospects for victory were marginal, but at least it was a drain on Dutch coffers and a distraction from Dutch colonial ambitions in the Americas and East Asia.

Albert ignored Philip’s order to refrain from engaging the Dutch in negotiations. In diplomatic circles, rumors circulated that Maurice, the Prince of Orange and leader of the Dutch cause, might be interested in some kind of accommodation. With the lapse of the truce imminent, Albert arranged for a meeting in early 1621 between his closest adviser and one of Maurice’s confidants, the widow Bartholde van T’Serclaes. She had informed Albert that the prince would in fact be amenable to a peace offer, and on terms favorable to Spain—provided there be a sweetener in it for Maurice personally. (Specifically, he expected sovereignty over Holland and Zeeland.) If there was reciprocal interest, Albert was to send a representative to The Hague with a formal proposal.

With this intelligence in hand, and having informed Philip that
the Dutch might be amenable to a deal (never mind his bit of insubordination), Albert dispatched an emissary to make the overture. The mission, however, was an abject failure. The Flemish ambassador’s arrival in Holland was accompanied by virulent demonstrations, and he left without the peace he had come to transact. Worse, there was a strong suspicion that the whole sorry episode—the “T’Serclaes affair”—had been engineered by Maurice, who could point to Spain’s putatively insulting terms (most egregiously, a renunciation of the claim of independence) as a means to unify the Dutch provinces and consolidate his own power.

By the time Rubens left for Paris to negotiate the Medici commission, in January 1622, the truce was a thing of the past, and hostilities between Spain and Holland had resumed, though at a halfhearted pace. In Madrid there was a new king, Philip IV, who had assumed the Spanish throne after his father’s death a year earlier. Rather than continue the fruitless ground war in the Low Countries, at the suggestion of Don Diego Messia, one of his military counselors, he opted for an economic offensive against the Dutch. Following that course, Spain used its considerable diplomatic leverage, and also its armada, to curtail Dutch trade in the Mediterranean. In one raid off the coast of France, the Spanish navy seized a Dutch freighter carrying linen, herring, and two thousand cheeses. The Dutch retaliated in kind. The river Scheldt had remained closed during the twelve years of peace, but the Spanish Netherlands had prospered by shifting trading through other ports on the North Sea, which remained open. Now the Dutch reinstated their blockade of the entire Flemish coast. Taxes on goods traveling between Flanders and Holland were increased to punitive levels. (Even war could not halt the flow of beer across the border, though the price went up.) In the far reaches of empire, in the Americas and East Asia, the fighting never stopped.

Predictably, economic war escalated into armed conflict. In the fall of 1621, Spanish forces under the direction of Ambrogio Spinola began to make some headway in the eastern districts of the Low Countries, along the contested German frontier. Buoyed by his modest successes, Spinola set siege to the heavily fortified Dutch city of Bergen op Zoom, which sat on a Scheldt tributary along the border between Flanders and Holland. As a student of history, Spinola knew well that the previous attempt on that city, in 1587 by Alessandro Farnese, had been an abject failure. Farnese had tried to starve out the city, but couldn’t complete the job. Spinola instead planned to force it into submission by assault. Recent developments in military architecture, however, made such attacks exceedingly difficult to execute. Systems of wedged bastions and redoubts, like those at the Antwerp citadel, kept defenders safe while allowing them to cover all avenues of approach. Bergen op Zoom proved especially well protected. After six months of futile action, Spinola finally called off the attack. By then, casualties and desertions had cut his force of nearly twenty thousand in half. The whole fiasco was emblematic of the general state of relations in the region: a resource-draining stalemate that accrued to the benefit of neither side but made life impossibly difficult for those sorry Flemings and Hollanders who lived in the border zones where armies collided.

WITH HIS HOMELAND AT WAR
, Rubens was forced to balance the substantial professional burden of the Medici commission with Isabella’s demand for his services as a political operative. The deadline for Marie’s paintings drew ever near, but the artist found himself spending more and more time at the Brussels court, acting as an adviser and agent to his own sovereign. When he returned to Antwerp, he was forced to dodge the manic attacks of Lucas
Vorsterman, his disgruntled engraver. In late April 1622, the same month the infanta issued her restraining order against Vorsterman, evidence suggests Rubens had been assigned a new mission by Isabella, one that would take him into enemy territory. It was in that month that he used his Dutch lawyer, Pieter van Veen, to acquire a passport to travel in Holland, ostensibly to clear the copyright privileges for his engravings. But this was almost certainly a cover for a diplomatic mission. Rubens had received his copyright privileges two years earlier.

Back in 1619, when Rubens had first instructed Carleton to advance his copyright claims in The Hague with great delicacy, he had hinted at “important reasons” for not wanting to ruffle the feathers of the Dutch political hierarchy. He knew even then that the time would come when he would have to rely on the good graces of those same Dutch politicians. Now, three years later, that day had arrived. The T’Serclaes affair, damaging as it was, had not permanently closed backdoor negotiations with the Dutch. The debacle of Bergen op Zoom only reinforced the idea, on both sides of the border, that some kind of settlement was necessary. Future discussions, however, would have to take place with utmost secrecy, lest political opponents have a chance to sabotage them. Having long since placed himself within Isabella’s circle of trusted advisers, Rubens could now present himself as a credible diplomatic alternative to T’Serclaes. In fact, Maurice, the Prince of Orange, was his half brother once removed (through Christina von Dietz, the bastard daughter of Jan Rubens and Maurice’s mother, Anna of Saxony). For the sake of propriety, he probably didn’t mention that relationship. Maurice, anyway, was not Rubens’s only relation within the Dutch court. Jan Brant, a first cousin by marriage, also happened to be a familiar and well-situated presence in Maurice’s orbit.

Despite his efforts to obtain the paperwork to travel, Rubens
never made it to Holland in 1622. Perhaps his notoriety precluded an undisclosed meeting, even with a relative, or maybe the timing just wasn’t right. The Medici project alone was enough to keep him occupied through the winter. But he and the studio worked quickly, and by May 1623 the first installment of that commission was complete. Rubens delivered it in person, carrying a single valise and nine carefully rolled canvases for Marie’s inspection. To his great frustration, he was forced to cool his heels for three weeks before the Queen Mother found time to review his work. At least she was pleased with what she saw, and had the wisdom to lavish her painter with the compliments he so much liked to hear. By August he was happily back in Antwerp, and Paris was all but empty of polite society. A fit of plague had sent the nobility bustling off to their rural estates. “As far as contagion is concerned,” Rubens advised Peiresc from the safety of home, “the best antidote for that is flight.”