Master of Shadows (3 page)

As members of the court, painters were granted a standing above that of other tradesmen, and could be counted on to possess a worldliness typically restricted to those of hereditary advantage. Indeed, the profession required mastery of a broad range of fields, from chemistry (required to mix pigments), geometry (for perspective), and anatomy (for the drawing of the figure) to the classical and biblical history that served as the subject matter of so much painting. The most celebrated artists, prized for their seemingly magical image-making prowess, on occasion became trusted princely advisers. Leonardo da Vinci was a counselor to several princes (often on matters of defense and engineering) and in his later years an intimate of the French king François I. Jan van Eyck, until Rubens the most famous of Flemish painters, represented the duke of Burgundy on several diplomatic missions. Gentile Bellini, in 1457, was dispatched by the Venetian senate as a goodwill emissary to the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II at Constantinople. At the time of his trip, Rubens had yet to achieve the artistic reputation of Bellini, but his presence would similarly confer a bit of the Gonzaga family’s considerable cultural authority on the Spanish court. That the paintings sent with him were largely copies of works from the Mantuan collection, rather than originals, only reinforced the
sense of paternalism that Vincenzo hoped to convey. Every time the king and the duke glanced at these works, they would be reminded of both the magnificence and the munificence of their esteemed Mantuan ally.

The choice of an artist, then, was not unprecedented, but the choice of this artist, Rubens, occasioned a good deal of chatter among Vincenzo’s notoriously chippy courtiers. He had good manners, yes, but he was not of aristocratic blood, and he was not a member of Vincenzo’s inner circle—for that matter,
he wasn’t even Italian
. His relevant experience was, indeed, practically nonexistent, though he had been prepared, at least in his early years, for a life in court service. As a child, he had been enrolled, along with his older brother Philip, in Rombout Verdonck’s school for boys, the academy of choice for Antwerp’s burgher elite. There, the Rubens brothers were drilled in the classics: Virgil, Horace, Pliny, and especially Seneca, whose stoicism was considered a philosophical model for contemporary behavior. Art was not on the program. Jan Rubens, the boys’ late father, had been a lawyer and an alderman, and it seemed the young Peter Paul was headed down a similar path. He had always been an eager student, and a gifted one. The painter’s nephew would later write that “he learned with such facility that he easily outstripped his classmates.” Economic circumstances, however, put an end to Rubens’s formal schooling at the age of thirteen. In 1590, the family education fund was diverted to provide a dowry for an older sister, Blandina. Rubens’s evident intelligence and charm, even then, made him a prime candidate for a career as a court functionary, and his devoted mother, Maria, arranged through family connections to have him set up as a page in the residence of the Countess Marguerite de Ligne-Arenberg, whose father-in-law had been a governor-general of the Netherlands during the reign of Philip II.

It was a good appointment, but Rubens was unhappy. “There always glimmered inside him a desire for the noble art of painting,” wrote Joachim von Sandrart, a German painter who traveled with Rubens in his later years. As a child, he had spent hour after hour poring over the woodblock prints of the artists Hans Holbein and Tobias Stimmer, which were popular among middle-class families like the Rubenses. Young Peter Paul was a natural with a pen, and found himself especially drawn to the robust figures in Stimmer’s book of illustrated stories from the Bible, which had a physical presence so strong—like the imposing statues of cathedral facades—that it seemed they might just stomp off the page. From even those early drawings it was plainly evident that Rubens had artistic talent, and now he wanted to make a career of it. This was not an unprecedented decision for a Rubens; an older brother, Jan Baptist, had left the family many years earlier to pursue a career in the arts, and was thought to be in France. Rubens was not prepared to forsake his kin as his sibling had, but life as a functionary was not going to satisfy him either.

Whether or not she approved, Maria understood that once her headstrong young son had fixated on some goal, refusing him would be pointless. Again using family connections, he was apprenticed to Tobias Verhaecht, an Antwerp landscape painter of minor reputation who was a distant relative by marriage. Roughly a year later he moved on to the atelier of Adam van Noort, a respected member of the painters’ guild, and some two years after that to the studio of Otto van Veen, who figured among Antwerp’s artistic elite. He learned the basics of his craft in these apprenticeships: how to make pigments and prime a canvas, the techniques required of different mediums, how to layer colors, how to model a figure, how to compose the elements of an image. Soon enough he was working on canvases that would be finished by his masters. His education was
more than just practical. Van Veen especially encouraged Rubens’s academic interests. Before establishing his studio, Van Veen had traveled through Italy, where he absorbed the ideals of the Renaissance and the classical tradition. This was not uncommon at the time. Among the informal circle of like-minded humanists who dominated Antwerp culture, an extended tour of Italy was practically de rigueur. Even Jan Rubens, the painter’s father, had made such a trip, earning his law degree in Rome after seven years of study abroad. Van Veen was more of a proselytizer than most. Upon his return he went so far as to assume a Romanized name: Octavius Vaenius.

By 1598, Rubens had completed his training and become a member in good standing of the Guild of Saint Luke, the painters’ guild. He was a master, but he knew that he did not have all of the education he required, and he could see this deficiency quite plainly in his first commissions. A large panel painting of Adam and Eve showed his promise, but there was an undeniable stiffness to the picture, a frozen quality, that he intuitively understood as a weakness. Italy beckoned.

Rubens’s quest to travel abroad for personal and professional enrichment was contingent upon his receipt of documents from the Antwerp town hall. These letters were required of all travelers, and verified that their bearers had good standing in the community and clean health—“no plague or contagious disease.” Rubens received his papers on May 8, 1600. The next day he was off, accompanied by his first pupil, Deodate del Monte, who was similarly certified and would serve as a faithful assistant for many years to come. They traveled by horse, and though there is no precise record of their path, in all likelihood they traveled south and west, crossing through Alpine passes into northern Italy. Their first destination was Venice, a city that had supplanted Rome as an artistic capital for a brief moment in the previous century. If Venice had lost that momentum,
it could nevertheless boast a modern school of painting that was like nothing Rubens had seen in Antwerp. In place of the studied classicism of Van Veen, the works of Bassano, Veronese, Tintoretto, and above all Titian, with their explosive colors, dynamic compositions, and expressive brushwork, suggested new directions for the young painter.

Rubens made it to Venice in time for the city’s June carnival, a raucous annual event of masquerades, feasts, exhibitions, and performances with a history dating back to the thirteenth century. Vincenzo was also in town for the festivities, as an honored guest. The duke was a man of considerable appetites and liked to be on hand when there was a good debauch to be had—he was notoriously ill-tempered when not sated. To prevent this eventuality, the duke traveled with a sizable entourage, a group that included his secretary and chief political officer, Annibale Chieppio, a chubby-cheeked Milanese with a punctilious nature. In addition to his diplomatic duties, Chieppio kept an eye peeled for fresh artistic talent for the duke’s Mantuan studio. At some point during the carnival, he met the enterprising young master from Antwerp. A review of the work Rubens had brought with him over the Alps was apparently enough to convince Chieppio to add him to the Mantuan payroll. Vincenzo already had one Flemish painter on staff, the portraitist Frans Pourbus, and that had worked out well. If nothing else, Rubens would prove useful in filling out Vincenzo’s nascent “Gallery of Beauties.” The duke enjoyed the prestige of his art collection, but he was frankly more interested in the lascivious pleasures it might provide him, and kept his court studio busy knocking out portraits of Europe’s most attractive ladies. Rubens would soon find that work beneath his dignity, but for the moment he was happy for the appointment, which came with a respectable salary and accommodations in the royal compound. That same October, when Vincenzo
left Mantua for Florence to attend the proxy marriage of Marie de’ Medici to King Henry IV of France, Rubens was brought along as part of the duke’s retinue.

That wedding, which united the Medici and Capetian dynasties, gave Rubens a taste of royal splendor that made a lasting impression. The ceremony took place at the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore, under the soaring vault of Brunelleschi’s great dome. At the sumptuous banquet that followed, figures dressed as Roman gods serenaded dignitaries assembled from across Europe. (Henry, however, awaited his bride back in France, not wanting to expose himself to the predations of his prospective relatives.) In the future, Marie would become one of Rubens’s most important patrons and political allies, but at her nuptial event he was relegated to the periphery. It served, however, as a useful lesson in the formalities and grand scale of Baroque political theater.

Rubens completed his first formal diplomatic “mission” for Vincenzo in the following year, 1601, when he delivered a letter from the duke to Alessandro Cardinal Montalto, nephew and adviser to Pope Sixtus V. The job, not a particularly difficult one, required the navigation of the halls of Roman power, but served primarily as an excuse to send Rubens to Rome, where he stayed for eight months making copies of old-master works for the duke. He also took on private commissions during his residency in the Eternal City, in the process substantially elevating his reputation as an artist.

That budding notoriety may well have been a factor when Vincenzo made the decision to send Rubens abroad in 1602. Word that Rubens was a bright new talent was already beginning to filter through Europe’s capitals, and the fact that Vincenzo could claim him as a member of his artistic stable would be seen as yet another feather in the duke’s cap. As an added bonus, Rubens could paint
all the most attractive women in Madrid for Vincenzo’s cabinet. Indeed, the painter would be instructed to return from Madrid by way of Paris for no other reason than to bring images of the fairest figures in that city back for the duke’s museum of high-end soft-core pornography.

Vincenzo, then, knew just what he was doing when he had Rubens summoned to his private apartments at the Castello di San Giorgio. The artist walked briskly, as was his wont, through the halls of the palace and was ushered into the duke’s presence by an elaborately uniformed chamberlain. Chieppio was there to provide him with his instructions, or at least the basics; there’d be plenty of time to go over logistics before his departure.

It was a plum assignment, and Rubens knew it. His whole Italian experience had thus far eclipsed all of his aspirations. He had departed Antwerp in an effort to enrich himself intellectually, and almost at once he had found himself attached to one of the most distinguished courts south of the Alps. The tasks of the Mantuan studio had proven to be no great challenge for him, and he had virtually unlimited access to the duke’s collection of old masters, which he could study at his leisure. He had already traveled to Florence and to Rome on the duke’s payroll, and now he was being offered the opportunity to ingratiate himself with the new Spanish king and his many acolytes, all potential clients. The logistical and diplomatic demands of the trip would be a chore and a distraction from Rubens’s primary passion—his art—but the benefits were so great as to outweigh any thought of refusal. At the very least, he would have access to the famed royal collections in Madrid and at the Escorial, the art-filled monastery and palace complex in the nearby Guadarrama hills. And so when the delicate final moments of his meeting with Vincenzo and Chieppio arrived, Rubens was effusive. Yes, he was very pleased to be charged with this mission,
and he would do all in his power to represent the duke with appropriate dignity.

IT WAS NEARLY
a year before Rubens actually left Mantua with Vincenzo’s gifts for the Spanish king and his courtiers. That long delay, the product of some bureaucratic snafu, augured poorly for the journey. At least it should have given the palace stewards time enough to map out an easy route to Spain for the painter, one that would have avoided mountain passes, unfriendly tax collectors, and the prying eyes of the duke’s rivals. Unfortunately, careful attention was not devoted to the logistics of the journey, and Rubens did not have the experience to see just what trouble lay in store for him.