Master of Shadows (35 page)

We are not likely to see a painter-diplomat like Rubens again. Ours is an age of specialization, and the practice of diplomacy has become a fully professionalized calling. Modern modes of travel and telecommunication mitigate against the need for the kind of proxy diplomacy conducted by Rubens. Though back-channel negotiations are still a useful tool in a statesman’s repertoire, it is hard to imagine a scenario in which a delicate matter of policy would be entrusted to an artist, especially a painter. The contemporary art world is an insular place, and its stars are practically groomed to challenge conventional authority and command public attention—hardly desirable character traits for a reliable political operative. A chef or an architect would seem a more plausible, if still unlikely, candidate for a covert diplomatic role. Those professions remain grounded in craftwork, but confer on their foremost practitioners a measure of deference among figures of international power.

Rubens, however, was born at a time when the greatest painters
worked at the pleasure of kings and queens and heads of state. He honored them with his brush, and served them as a diplomat. In return, he was celebrated by his royal patrons, and sometimes more for his ability as an ambassador than for his skill as a painter, which was almost universally considered without equal. Sadly, that same political career is almost entirely forgotten by scholars of political history. For art historians, it is of ancillary interest, worthy of attention to the extent that it informs Rubens’s work as an artist, but not in its own right and only marginally for any broader access it might give to his personality or the context in which he practiced.

The vicissitudes of history are at least in part to blame for this state of neglect. Rubens’s greatest achievement as a statesman, the treaty he negotiated between Spain and England, is now a footnote in the grand sweep of seventeenth-century international relations, no matter how critical it may have appeared at the moment of its signature or how much skill was required to bring it to fruition. Rubens never achieved his ultimate diplomatic objective, a reconciliation of Spain and the Dutch provinces, and with it peace in the Low Countries. That did not come until eight years after his death, with the signing of the Treaty of Münster, in 1648; with it, the Dutch formally won their independence from Madrid. That treaty was the first of a pair of accords signed in Germany in 1648 (the second was the Treaty of Osnabrück) that together constituted the Peace of Westphalia, which brought to a simultaneous close the Eighty and Thirty Years’ wars.

Münster gave the Dutch the freedom in name that they already had in practice, but it did not open Antwerp to the world. By the terms of the treaty, the Scheldt remained closed to international traffic. Antwerp’s golden age had come in the sixteenth century; the seventeenth would belong to Amsterdam. Belgium would not receive its own independence for nearly two centuries, during which time it
passed through Spanish, Austrian, French, and Dutch control. Even now it is a land without a common language, a federation of relatively autonomous and culturally heterogeneous regions. Antwerp’s resurgence as an international trading center did not come until the latter half of the nineteenth century, fueled by the spoils of Belgium’s colonial empire. Large-scale industrialized growth, funded by the Marshall Plan, followed World War II. Today, Antwerp is again one of the busiest ports in the world and an international design capital.

It is also very much a city Rubens would recognize, a fashionable center of winding lanes and discreet charm. Alva’s old citadel is gone; Antwerp’s Koninklijk fine arts museum sits in the
terrain vague
that once separated the old fort from the city proper. Its Rubens galleries are among its prized attractions. Indeed, nearly four centuries after his death, the painter’s presence in the city is ubiquitous, emanating from the bronze statue of him that commands the Groenplaats, Antwerp’s central plaza. Adjacent to this is the Onze Lieve Vrouwe-kathedraal, where Rubens’s two great altarpieces—
The Raising of the Cross
and its pendant illustrating the descent therefrom—flank the pulpit. The limpid light of the cathedral hasn’t changed much since the days of the painter, and many other landmarks of that time are similarly intact: the offices of the Plantin Press, for instance, and the home of his friend Nicolaas Rockox, filled with a connoisseur’s collection of art and bric-a-brac. The Grote Markt still has its medieval character, and the Meir is still Antwerp’s main thoroughfare. Just off it, on the Wapper, is a facsimile of the home and studio Rubens built for himself after his return from Rome. Only the portico and garden pavillion remain from the days of the artist; subsequent owners dramatically reshaped the elegant complex Rubens had built for himself. One even turned it into an equestrian academy. The painstaking reconstruction one finds today was undertaken only in the early
twentieth century, and completed during the Nazi occupation of Belgium. Rubens’s palpable eroticism was not considered “degenerate” by the National Socialists. They claimed him instead as an exemplar of muscular Aryan genius. One of the most important academic monographs on the painter was published in Munich in 1942—an uncomfortable reality for contemporary scholars.

This, of course, was always an issue with the opacity of Rubens’s works; meanings could be assigned to them, regardless of the painter’s intention, and never mind what he might have thought. Sometimes this was a benefit, sometimes not. As the scholar Jacob Burckhardt wrote in his landmark study of the painter,
Recollections of Rubens
, “The position of art is especially perilous when it has to serve a prevailing opinion, patriotic, political or religious, in great historical pictures.”

But a larger problem for Rubens has been not so much the imposition of distasteful readings on his pictures as a more profound loss of meaning altogether. Even in the seventeenth century, a lively debate could be had among critics and connoisseurs as to the utility of allegorical painting, and whether it was appropriate to combine contemporary and historical figures and events. In the years following, the British master Joshua Reynolds called that kind of mishmash a “fault,” though he gave the great Rubens a pass. By the end of the nineteenth century, Burckhardt could describe Rubens’s allegorical mode of representation as “a vogue which is now absolutely obsolete.” The mythological, historical, and biblical stories that were the subjects of his paintings are no longer familiar to modern viewers. Even scholars have trouble deciphering the intricate statecraft of seventeenth-century Europe that was the subtext (and occasionally the primary theme) of his art.

With his works shorn of so much intellectual freight, the
popular perception of Rubens has sunk to a lowest-common-denominator view of the artist as an indefatigable promoter of Baroque power with a special predilection for plump ladies. The term “Rubenesque” entered the lexicon as a euphemism for a voluptuous female figure in 1913, in the women’s magazine
Maclean’s—
the editors found his taste “eccentric.” Indeed, modern audiences, for the most part, admire rather than adore him. His works can be impenetrable, and they do not leave obvious traces of a troubled personality; Rubens was not the maladjusted, self-destructive genius so many of us have come to expect of great painters. Those characteristics more aptly describe his brooding contemporaries Caravaggio and Rembrandt, both more popular today. Rubens, however, was famously well-balanced. If nothing else, that much is clear from even a brief glimpse at one of his very few self-portraits. There is no great sense of introspection in these pictures, no hinting at unfathomable psychological depths, no access given to the inner workings of a complex mind. The traditional polarity of the portrait is inverted: you are not invited to gaze in at the soul of Peter Paul Rubens; instead, he looks out appraisingly at you, betraying little more than a commanding self-possession.

The formalist reduction of Rubens began in the decades following his death, and one of the chief culprits was his own biographer, Roger de Piles. Like Rubens, de Piles conducted diplomatic work under the cover of a career in the arts (as a collector and critic), and actually penned his influential
Abrégé de la vie des peintres
(Short History of the Lives of the Painters) while imprisoned in The Hague for spying on behalf of France. His notorious
Balance des peintres
, published in 1708, graded fifty-six contemporary and historical artists on a scale of 0 to 18 (the higher the better) in the categories of composition, drawing, color, and expression. Rubens’s combined
score of 65 was equaled only by Raphael. Leonardo and Michelangelo received 4s in color; Rembrandt was done in by a 6 in drawing; Caravaggio got a 0 for expression.

On de Piles’s ledger, Rubens received his highest marks for composition and color, and it was on these terms that he was most celebrated in Paris. His “design,” however, was a point of contention. Nationalist critics advocated the more severe classicism of Nicolas Poussin, and connoisseurs divided between camps of
Rubenistes
and
Poussinistes
. Compared with the Frenchman, Rubens appeared almost wanton in his handling of the body, an artist to be appreciated primarily for his bravura application and modulation of color. The aestheticization of the Rubens legacy was only accelerated by his association with the painters of the rococo, Antoine Watteau and François Boucher most prominently, who freely adapted his style in pictures of sweet, frivolous pleasure. As the esteemed historian Kenneth Clark wrote, “Rubens did for the female nude what Michelangelo did for the male. He realized so fully its expressive possibilities that for the next century all those who were not the slaves of academicism inherited his vision of the body as pearly and plump.”

Rubens would always be an “artist’s artist,” a painter admired for his technical virtuosity and creative invention. “He dominates,” wrote Eugène Delacroix, “he overwhelms you with so much liberty and audacity.” Some have considered him too overpowering. The English critic John Ruskin, in 1849, called him “vulgar,” a sentiment echoed two decades later by the American painter Thomas Eakins. “Rubens is the nastiest most vulgar noisy painter that ever lived,” Eakins wrote. “His men are twisted to pieces. His modeling always crooked and dropsical and no marking is ever in its right place or anything like what one sees in nature … His pictures always put me in mind of chamber pots.”

That attitude has been, for the most part, an aberration.
Rubens’s work has been a vital source for painters of various periods, schools, and nationalities. His influence is evident in the work of Auguste Renoir, Willem de Kooning, and Lucian Freud. The opacity of his paintings, along with his attention to the painted surface, anticipated the implacability and object fetishism of so much contemporary work, in particular the minimalist and conceptual movements. His workshop production remains a standard, in terms of both its scale and its profitability, by which others are measured even as art making has become an industrialized process. His works still command top dollar. In 2002, a “lost” Rubens
Massacre of the Innocents
(it had been incorrectly attributed) was sold at auction for the equivalent of $86 million, then the fourth-highest figure on record for a painting.

One of the more poignant references to Rubens can be attributed to Pablo Picasso, one of the few painters in history who could match his natural genius, and ironically one who was said to abhor him. Rubens was nevertheless an unavoidable touchstone for the Spaniard, and Rubens’s monumental meditation on the unholy cost of violence,
The Horrors of War
, was inevitably a source of inspiration when Picasso began work on his response to the Nazi bombing of the Basque village of Guernica, in late April 1937. That immense black-and-white canvas, more than twenty-five feet across and eleven feet tall, quoted Rubens’s earlier work, but with a savage, unrelieved brutality. It first was exhibited at the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 Paris World’s Fair and then traveled around the world, drawing attention to and raising funds for the republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. Three centuries earlier, Rubens had been similarly moved by the plight of innocent civilians in his own homeland.