Master of Shadows (2 page)

The nearly universal esteem in which Rubens was held, combined with his access to the highest reaches of international power, provided the foundation for his conscription into diplomatic service. Painting gave Rubens the perfect cover for clandestine work; he could appear at any foreign court and always use his art to allay suspicion of ulterior motives. It’s hard to imagine this happening in our own time; we don’t expect artists to be spies or diplomats. Political figures dabbling in art is one thing—Churchill and Eisenhower were amateur painters, and Hitler a failed professional—but not the reverse. From the Romantic era, we have inherited a vision of the painter as an emotionally volatile, impecunious radical: a critic or enemy of the state, and not someone to be entrusted with its most delicate and urgent business.

Rubens does not fit into that archetype. He was born in 1577 and came of age at a time when painting was still a respected guild profession. Those who met him almost invariably remarked on his affable nature and winning personality. He was tall and physically attractive, with a disarming, scholarly mien. His innate charisma was only augmented by his preternatural artistic ability and his encyclopedic knowledge of subjects ranging from architecture to political theory to zoology. The images for which he is now most famous—swooning women, their flesh alive in puckered ecstasy—suggest a man of unchecked libertinism. In fact, he was a devoted husband and generally moderate in his personal appetites, the chief exception being his zeal for work. A life so disciplined and successful might well have transformed him into an insufferable pedant, but instead he wore his authority lightly, and that only magnified it. He had few vices besides the occasional flash of pride.

What prompted Rubens’s engagement in politics was the condition
of his native Flanders, a land beset by sectarian violence and occupied by a negligent foreign empire, Spain, to which he owed allegiance. His beloved but decimated Antwerp, once a haven of international trade and culture, sat on the front lines of a war of independence waged against that Spanish empire by the nascent Dutch republic to the north. Rubens made it his personal mission to resolve that seemingly intractable conflict, known to history as the Eighty Years’ War. It was a goal he pursued with the same energy that he brought to his art, and one for which he risked all that he had acquired—his career, his reputation, his life.

This project, more ambitious than any painting, consumed him for over a decade, during which time he traveled from capital to capital, often under false pretenses, to negotiate with statesmen and monarchs who were also clients. Sequestered in their luxurious palaces, isolated from their subjects and the world beyond by meticulously orchestrated systems of protocol and social stratification, these rulers could be oblivious to and sometimes contemptuous of political realities. Decisions of enormous consequence were often made on ideological grounds, for the sake of national or personal pride, or merely on whim. Rubens, in contrast, was a consistent voice of moderation, a pragmatist or
politique
, in the parlance of the day.

Sectarian conflict and political dogmatism still plague the community of nations, a reality that gives particular resonance to the story of a moderate and pragmatic man who spent so much of his life fighting entrenched forces in the halls of international power. For all its relevance, however, Rubens’s diplomatic work and philosophy are for the most part unknown but to scholars, an unfortunate, though not surprising, circumstance. Contemporary audiences can hardly be expected to recall his political career when even his accomplishments as a painter remain largely unfamiliar. Among the great masters
of art history, Rubens is something of a forgotten man, respected but misunderstood, hidden in plain sight. The reasons are many. There is no single painting that defines his career, no image so iconic as the
Mona Lisa
or the
Demoiselles d’Avignon
. He does not conform to our favored image of the artist as a tortured soul. The allegorical, mythological, and biblical figures that populate his canvases are alien to modern viewers, and those canvases can be so large and so complicated as to defy ready explanation. He has been tarred by the undistinguished politics of his clients. To many, he is simply the man who painted lascivious pictures of fat, naked women.

Our inability to fully grasp Rubens’s achievement is at least in part a failure of narrative. His story and his paintings have been robbed of their urgency over the centuries following his death. What passed for common knowledge and experience in the seventeenth century can seem altogether foreign to a modern audience. It is the historian’s challenge to bridge this divide, and the rewards are well worth the effort. Rubens was possessed of an alchemical gift, an ability to bring colorful, breathtaking life to inanimate matter, and he is responsible for some of our most arrestingly beautiful and emotionally stirring investigations of the human condition. The essential lessons of these works are as fresh now as they were four hundred years ago, and we can recapture them in all their complex grandeur if we give the Rubens story the careful and sustained attention it so richly deserves.

Sometime in the late spring of 1602—there is no record of exactly when—Vincenzo Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua, decided it would be a good idea to send an extremely large gift to Philip III, the king of Spain. This was to be an act of considerable generosity, but not one motivated by pure altruism. To be a minor European monarch in the seventeenth century was to live in fear of Spain’s pitiless and well-disciplined
tercios
. Those professional armies, bristling with artillery, pikes, and Toledo steel, and drilled in formations that seemed well-nigh invincible, made Spain the most potent military force on the Continent. Spain’s possessions encompassed much of Italy, including Lombardy, Mantua’s neighbor to the west.
Vincenzo, no fool, eyed Spanish power with a healthy wariness. Like Philip, he was of Habsburg blood, but attachment to Europe’s foremost dynasty did not guarantee the autonomy of his duchy. It was therefore only prudent that Vincenzo place himself squarely within Philip’s good graces, as the young king was new to his throne.

Philip had a reputation as something of a sportsman, so Vincenzo tailored his offering accordingly. The centerpiece of the gift was to be a plush riding carriage driven by six of the finest horses from the duke’s stable, revered across Europe for its thoroughbreds. That was a good start, and Vincenzo added to it with eleven harquebus guns decorated with whalebone and silver filigree, a rock crystal vase filled with perfume, and—somewhat immodestly—portraits of himself and his wife for the king’s cabinet. These items were for Philip alone, but the duke did not stop there, for he knew that the king, in his hedonistic youth, had voluntarily surrendered much of his authority to his rapacious political Svengali, Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, the Duke of Lerma. He, too, would be on the receiving end of Vincenzo’s generosity.

Whereas Philip was a Habsburg scion, Lerma was born to minor nobility, and only created a duke by an act of his patron, the king. As with so many of history’s arrivistes, Lerma understood the practice of collecting art, traditionally a pastime of royalty, to be a path to improved social respectability. Vincenzo’s gift to him, then, was shrewdly designed to appeal to a man who would be a great connoisseur from a man who could already claim that distinction: some twenty old-master paintings, most of them actually copies of works by Raphael, several of which belonged to Vincenzo himself. (In an era before the easy mechanical reproduction of color images, there was little stigma attached to well-executed copies, even if originals were preferred and more valuable.) Lerma’s own favorite minister, or
valido
, the ruthless Don Rodrigo Calderón, would also
receive works copied from the Mantuan collection, along with damask and cloth of gold. Lerma’s religious sister would have a crystal crucifix and a pair of candelabra. A cash gift would be provided to the director of music at the royal chapel—Vincenzo was a patron of that art as well.

That Vincenzo might deliver these gifts himself was out of the question; that would have been too great an act of fealty for someone of his stature. The duke was a prideful man—in his own youth he had even killed a man over a minor indiscretion—and considerably older than Philip, who was still in his early twenties. Vincenzo thus preferred to cast himself as a benevolent elder statesman, an avuncular figure to be respected as a fellow Habsburg sovereign. He had even taken to the battlefield on behalf of the Habsburg cause, participating in a series of campaigns against the Ottomans, usually to his discredit. (He was an early—and failed—experimenter with poison gas; inept soldiering was something of a Gonzaga family tradition.) With this in mind, Vincenzo decided that an emissary would chaperone the gift. Any number of courtiers might have qualified for this job. The duke, like so many royals, surrounded himself with a cadre of ambitious grandees who would have thrilled at the prospect of a trip to the great Spanish court, not to mention a personal audience with Philip, the highest of royal highnesses. Vincenzo, however, did not choose any of these men. Instead, the duke summoned into his chamber a young Flemish painter with neither noble blood nor diplomatic pedigree. Vincenzo required someone reliable, preferably a painter who could handle any minor restoration work necessary after the long trip across the Mediterranean. But this agent also had to be someone with a bit of panache: someone who could handle the inevitable obstacles of a long journey while keeping its purpose quiet, for the duke most assuredly did not want every royal on the Italian boot to know of his private business groveling before
the Spanish throne. More important, however, Vincenzo required someone who could represent him with appropriate dignity before his Habsburg relation in Madrid.

PETER PAUL RUBENS
, age twenty-five, had been on the duke’s payroll for only two years when he was selected for this mission. In that time, he had worked without ceremony on tasks of no great import: the minor portraits and copy work that were the routine business of a court studio. There was something about Rubens, though, that made him stand out from the several other painters employed by Vincenzo. People were naturally drawn to him, and the duke in particular. Vincenzo may even have noticed a slight resemblance between himself and the artist fifteen years his junior, even if the younger man, to be frank, had a good deal more hair and a good deal less paunch around the middle. Rubens was unquestionably handsome: tall for the age, with gently receding brown hair, neatly trimmed whiskers, and a piercing gaze. Those who knew him found him to be confident but not cocky, with an innate charisma that attracted both sexes. He possessed that ineffable quality Italians called
sprezzatura
—a kind of easy, knowing charm. In the brief time they spent together, Rubens managed to impress Vincenzo as a quick-witted, refined, and highly intelligent individual of no small ambition. He was comfortable in the society of court, obsequious when circumstances demanded, and possessed of a diplomat’s natural ability to appear both deferential and sincere even when conveying unpleasant information or shaving the rough edges of truth. That he was gifted with languages was especially useful; already he was fluent in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish.

Despite these qualities, Rubens was an unorthodox candidate for an important embassy. Diplomatic work was typically reserved
for members of the aristocracy, men with political experience and the means to fund the considerable expenses of a life at court. Only those of high breeding, it was thought, could be expected to have the social dexterity and intellectual aptitude necessary to represent a sovereign prince in a foreign land. There were, however, exceptions to this rule. In one of the earliest primers on ambassadorial conduct, the Dutch-born diplomat Abraham de Wicquefort wrote that “it be not absolutely necessary, that the Embassador should be a Man of Birth, yet at the same time there must be nothing sordid nor mean in him.”