Master of Shadows (5 page)

Iberti got a measure of retribution on the upstart painter. When Philip returned from the woods, the ambassador made it a point to shunt Rubens off to the sidelines at the formal presentation of the carriage and horses, even though the duke had left explicit instructions that he be given a prominent position during these proceedings. “He could still have reserved the entire management for himself, and yet have given me a place near His Majesty, to make him a mute reverence,” Rubens carped. “I say this not to complain, like a petty person, ambitious for a little flattery, nor am I vexed at being deprived of this favor … He gave me no reason or excuse for the alteration of the order which, half an hour before, had been settled between us.” In Iberti’s defense, it was the ambassador’s traditional role to make such presentations, and he can hardly be faulted for a certain degree of skepticism as to the abilities of the
star-crossed political neophyte, operating above his social station, who had arrived at his door unannounced, in debt, carting a fatally ill groom, and with the spoiled fruits of his journey rotting in the leaky crates of his own devising.

Rubens was removed from the central action at the ceremony with Philip, but when it was time to make the presentation to Lerma, Iberti made sure he was front and center. If the duke was less than pleased with the touched-up reproductions, Rubens would be there to take the blame. But Lerma wasn’t upset at all; he was thrilled. Cloaked in a luxurious crimson robe, for a full hour he carefully inspected each of the pictures, commenting on their refinement throughout. In an exultant letter addressed directly to Vincenzo, Rubens reported Lerma’s “great satisfaction” with both the quantity and the quality of the paintings. “If the donor’s reward is the approval of his gifts, Your Most Serene Highness will have achieved his purpose.” The water damage had actually been a blessing, for it gave his fresh copies a patina of age, and with that “a certain authority and appearance of antiquity.” Indeed, Lerma thought all but two were originals, and neither Rubens nor Iberti was foolish enough to dissuade him of his mistaken impression.

Back in Mantua, Vincenzo could be pleased that he remained in good stead with the Spanish court. For Rubens and Lerma, however, the trip marked the beginning of a long and productive relationship. Rubens, politically astute, had chosen his ally wisely. In later years, he would often muse about the duke’s power over Philip III, and tell an anecdote about an Italian businessman granted an audience with the king. When Philip questioned why the Italian had not first taken his business to Lerma, the man responded, “But if I should have been able to have an audience with the duke, I should not have come to your majesty.” Rubens admired the duke’s influence, and Lerma was correspondingly
impressed by the young painter—so much so that he commissioned from him a life-sized equestrian portrait and then lodged him at his country house at Ventosilla so he might complete it. The result, lost and later found in the Lerma family collection at the turn of the twentieth century, is a masterpiece, one of the painter’s first: the duke, clad in black armor and clutching a baton of command, sits formidably atop a white steed striding forward as if to march straight out of the picture frame. The obvious precedent was Titian’s 1548 mounted portrait of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at his victory over Protestant forces at Mühlberg, a painting in the Spanish royal collection and so immediately familiar to Lerma. (Rubens sketched a partial copy during a visit to Madrid at some point during his stay.) It was also a rather overt allusion to Tintoretto’s 1579–80 equestrian portrait of the present king’s father, Philip II, riding into Mantua, and so a reminder of the political alignment that prompted the gift. This allusion was reinforced by a subtle visual reference within the picture: Rubens cribbed the foreshortened steed on which Lerma sat from Andrea Mantegna’s celebrated Camera Picta frescoes at the Castello di San Giorgio, back in Mantua. Perhaps it was a reference only the artist would appreciate. But what no one could fail to see was the boldness of his composition. His face-on view of Lerma was both more dramatic and technically more difficult than the profile arrangements of Titian and Tintoretto, making it at once a repudiation of the prejudice against Flemish painters and a forthright demonstration of his own ambition.

The emphatically martial nature of Lerma’s portrait was actually somewhat ironic, for the duke spent much of the two decades after its completion working to forge peace in Rubens’s embattled homeland. The ugly situation in the Low Countries was surely a topic for discussion between Lerma and Rubens during the
painter’s residence at Ventosilla. From the middle of the sixteenth century, the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands had been engaged in an on-again, off-again civil war, with the separatist and largely Protestant northern provinces seeking independence from Spain, and the predominantly Catholic southern provinces remaining, for the most part, loyal to Madrid. Rubens’s native Antwerp, a divided city, was caught in the middle.

In the future, both Lerma and Rubens would spend enormous time and energy in their efforts to bring resolution to the conflict in the Low Countries; for Rubens, the quest for that peace would become a defining grail he would chase for much of his professional life. For the moment, however, his thoughts were focused on his painting, and he wanted nothing more than to return to Rome, where he could continue his professional development. He even refused an offer to join Lerma’s court. It was nice to be wanted by so important a client, but as far as Rubens was concerned, Spain was an artistic wilderness. Italy remained the cultural heart of Europe; it was the wellspring of the Renaissance and the center of classical learning. Fueled by the great patronage engines of a resurgent Church and an urbane nobility, it was the best place for an ambitious young painter to confront the past and establish a reputation for the future. In Vincenzo, he had a patron who allowed him considerable, though not complete, autonomy.

There was also a matter of filial piety. Rubens’s elder brother Philip was living in Rome, where he was the librarian of Cardinal Ascanio Colonna. Despite the three-year gap in their ages, the brothers had always been close, and now both of their careers were ascendant. Before moving to Rome, Philip had established himself as the protégé of Justus Lipsius, perhaps the most influential scholar in Europe, who considered him almost a son. He had also served as personal secretary to Jean Richardot, president of the
Flemish Council of State, a connection that must have been of great interest to Lerma.

As it was, Rubens would return to Italy as a more mature and able diplomat, and he would do so on his own terms. The travails of his embassy and the machinations of Iberti had hardened him, and his budding relationship with Lerma had boosted his already considerable confidence. His correspondence, passive and insecure during the ill-fated opening stages of his mission, became progressively more assured as he came into his own as a diplomat. The suggestion that he had been profligate or even dishonest in his accounts, presumably made by Iberti, was now met with an unequivocal defense from the painter. “I do not fear the slightest suspicion of carelessness or fraud,” he wrote. In fact, Iberti had been fairly complimentary in his reports back to Mantua about Rubens, though he planned to check his books.

Rubens was not concerned with accusations about his conduct, nor was he interested in a Parisian side trip intended solely to gratify Vincenzo’s prurient desire for painted French beauties. “I should not have to waste more time, travel, expenses, salaries (even the munificence of His Highness will not repay all this) upon works not worthy of me, and which anyone can do to the duke’s taste,” he wrote to Chieppio from Spain. The demand was bold, but Rubens was never one to beat around the bush.
“Qui timide rogat, docet negare,”
he was fond of saying, a maxim attributed to Seneca. “Who asks timidly, courts denial.” Rubens got his way.

Bypassing Paris and its women, Rubens returned by sea to Genoa, an elegant merchant city of churches and palazzi that enchanted him from the moment of his arrival. Rubens spent days on end dutifully recording its architectural wonders in his sketchbooks. His brother Philip was especially pleased to hear of his safe arrival on the Ligurian coast. Fearing the dangerous winter waters
of the Mediterranean, he had composed a Latin prose poem dedicated to the artist, then in transit. Like his brother’s paintings, the composition evinced a fascination with classical history and a rather dramatic artistic disposition:

MANTUA MUST HAVE
seemed a vision when Rubens saw it floating in a shroud of haze across the umbilical Ponte di San Giorgio. After a long and successful journey, it was a pleasure to return home, especially to so lovely a city. The birthplace of Virgil was a jumble of palaces and gardens enveloped by lakes that cast it in a fine mist. There was no questioning its beauty. Thomas Coryat, an English traveler in the early seventeenth century, declared it “the citie which of all other places in the world I would wish to make my habitation.” It hadn’t always been so. After a visit in 1459, Pope Pius II
complained that the place was “marshy and unhealthy,” not to mention unpleasantly hot and overrun by frogs. Vincenzo’s Gonzaga forebears took action. The architect Leon Battista Alberti was commissioned to improve standards of construction, architecture, and urban design. In the following century, Giulio Romano, the prized student of Raphael, filled the role of court architect—one of his official titles was “superior of the streets”—and set about a monumental project of building and beautification. Romano’s work at Mantua included the Palazzo Te, a masterpiece of Mannerist style, and a lordly residence for himself, which Rubens would cast as a model for his own house in Antwerp, years later. The home of Andrea Mantegna, built during his tenure as court painter in the fifteenth century, would also serve as a model for Rubens, as would the astonishingly beautiful frescoes Mantegna created for the ducal palace.

Rubens was fortunate to have found his way into Vincenzo’s illustrious stable of cultural luminaries. The Gonzagas had a long and distinguished history as patrons of the arts, a practice they had found to be both politically expedient and personally satisfying. The equation was simple: art begat prestige. Isabella d’Este, who sat for both Leonardo da Vinci and Titian, and her son Federico II—Vincenzo’s grandfather—were only the most ambitious in a long line of collectors who used the family cultural program to promote what was, effectively, a provincial outpost with limited military capacity to a place of prominence on the international political stage. Only the Vatican could claim a superior collection of old-master works. In fact, the visual arts were but one component of the Gonzagas’ patronage. The poet Torquato Tasso was a favorite of Vincenzo’s. Literature, music, theater, and other humanistic studies were equally celebrated. Rubens’s tenure at the Gonzaga court
coincided with that of the composer Claudio Monteverdi, who premiered his opera
L’Orfeo
for the duke in 1607. The astronomer Galileo Galilei was also a visitor to the Mantuan court during Rubens’s stay, and there is reasonable (though not conclusive) evidence that he is the mysterious unidentified figure in a multi-person portrait,
The Mantuan Circle of Friends
, Rubens painted in 1601.

Despite Mantua’s physical charm and the great minds that surrounded him, Rubens was naturally restive. In the year he spent in that city after his return from Spain, he completed just one major project for the duke: an altar for the city’s new Jesuit church, with portraits of the duke (a ringer for the painter) and his wife at the base of the central panel. In truth, Rubens had never been happy as a courtier, dating back to his aborted appointment as a page to the Countess of Ligne-Arenberg, during his adolescence. The formality was stultifying, and the obligations drained his time and energy from the work he not only enjoyed but also considered his true calling. Mantua was, in the end, a provincial city, and he was anxious to reunite with his brother in more cosmopolitan Rome, international center of artistic patronage.

Rubens’s personal romance with Rome had begun during his eight-month residency in the city in 1601. At that time, he had engrossed himself in Rome’s unrivaled cultural patrimony, visiting both its ancient wonders and its more recent works, Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling and Raphael’s Vatican frescoes being the most prominent among them. The recently uncovered
Aldobrandini Marriage
, a fresco dating to the first century
A.D.
, struck him so powerfully that he could recall its composition in exacting detail nearly two decades later. He documented all that he saw, and his ideas on whatever subjects interested him, in a notebook he carried
with him on his forays around the city. Nothing escaped his attention. In that leather-bound book were architectural drawings; notes on anatomy, optics, proportion, and symmetry; classical quotations; poetry; and copied details from paintings of diverse genres and periods. Those sketches would serve as inspiration and source material for his practice in the years to come, and he supplemented them with original old-master drawings he purchased and occasionally tweaked to meet his own tastes and standards. Even at such a relatively young age, his confidence in his own vision was extraordinary, almost excessive.