Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens (Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700) 9789462985513, 9789048536665, 9789463722216, 9462985510

Citation preview

V I S U A L A N D M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E , 13 0 0 -17 0 0

J. Vanessa Lyon

Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens

Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens

Visual and Material Culture, 1300–1700 A forum for innovative research on the role of images and objects in the late medieval and early modern periods, Visual and Material Culture, 1300–1700 publishes monographs and essay collections that combine rigorous investigation with critical inquiry to present new narratives on a wide range of topics, from traditional arts to seemingly ordinary things. Recognizing the fluidity of images, objects, and ideas, this series fosters cross-cultural as well as multi-disciplinary exploration. We consider proposals from across the spectrum of analytic approaches and methodologies. Series Editor Dr. Allison Levy, an art historian, has written and/or edited three scholarly books, and she has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association of University ­Women, the Getty Research Institute, the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library of Harvard ­University, the Whiting Foundation and the Bogliasco Foundation, among others. www.allisonlevy.com.

Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens J. Vanessa Lyon

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder, The Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia, c.1615, Museo del Prado. Photo: Prado, Madrid, Spain / Bridgeman Images. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6298 551 3 e-isbn 978 90 4853 666 5 doi 10.5117/9789463722216 nur 685 © J.V. Lyon / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

For my grandmother, Dorothy Elizabeth (Betty) Caldwell Lyon, a feminist dearly missed.

Table of Contents List of Illustrations 9 Acknowledgements13 Prologue15 Introduction23 1. Samson and Dilemma: Rubens Confronts the Woman on Top 37 2. Making Assumptions: Marian Tropes after Italy 79 3. Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia 119 Part 1: Recycling Sovereignty—Maria de’ Medici 119 Part 2: Figuring Faith and Female Power—Isabel Clara Eugenia 138 4. Peace Embraces Plenty: Queering Female Virtue at Whitehall 177 5. All That Depends on Color: Feminizing Rubens in the Seventeenth Century 209 Epilogue239 About the Author 243 Index245

List of Illustrations Figures Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 1.3 Fig. 1.4 Fig. 1.5 Fig. 1.6 Fig. 1.7 Fig. 1.8 Fig. 1.9 Fig. 1.10 Fig. 1.11 Fig. 1.12 Fig. 1.13 Fig. 1.14 Fig. 1.15 Fig. 1.16 Fig. 1.17 Fig. 1.18 Fig. 1.19 Fig. 1.20 Fig. 1.21 Fig. 1.22 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5 Fig. 2.6 Fig. 2.7 Fig. 2.8 Fig. 2.9 Fig. 2.10 Fig. 2.11

Peter Paul Rubens, Samson and Delilah, c.1609 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Night, in the tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici, c.1519–34 Cornelis Bos after Michelangelo, Leda and the Swan, c.1544–66 Peter Paul Rubens after Michelangelo, Leda and the Swan, c.1600–2 Lucas van Leyden, Samson and Delilah, c.1507 Andrea Mantegna, Samson and Delilah, c.1500 Hendrik Goltzius, The Temptation, c.1597 Titian [Tiziano Vecellio], Adam and Eve, c.1550 Farnese Hercules, third-century Roman copy Peter Paul Rubens, Crouching Man Lifting a Heavy Object, c.1609 Peter Paul Rubens after Michelangelo, Prophet Ezekiel, c.1605 Titian, Entombment, c.1559–60 Frans Francken II, Banquet in the House of Nicolas Rockox, c.1630–35 Michelangelo, Samson and Delilah, c.1525–30 Jacopo Pontormo after Michelangelo, Cupid and Venus, c.1532–34 Jan Brueghel, Wedding Banquet Presided over by the Archdukes, c.1611–12 Peter Paul Rubens, Hercules and Omphale, c.1606 Bartolomeus Spränger, Hercules and Omphale, c.1585 Jan van Eyck, Arnolfini “Wedding” Portrait, c.1434 Peter Paul Rubens after Titian, The Emperor Charles V and the Empress Isabella, c.1603–4 Robert Campin, Marriage of the Virgin, c.1440 Peter Paul Rubens, Portrait of Isabella Brant, c.1620 Laocoön, first-century Christ and St. John the Evangelist, c.1300 Rogier van der Weyden, Deposition, c.1436 Peter Paul Rubens, modello for an Assumption, c.1611 Titian, Assumption, c.1516–18 Raphael, Transfiguration, c.1518 Peter Paul Rubens after Raphael, Transfiguration, c.1604–5 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Christ, detail from The Last Judgment, c.1533–41 Peter Paul Rubens, Nursing Madonna, c.1614 Peter Paul Rubens, Holy Family, c.1615 Peter Paul Rubens, St. Augustine between Christ and the Virgin Mary, c.1615

10 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2

Peter Paul Rubens, Maria de' Medici, c.1622 Peter Paul Rubens, Death of Henri IV with the Proclamation of the Regency, c.1621–25 Fig. 3.3 Peter Paul Rubens, Felicity of the Regency, c.1621–25 Fig. 3.4 Cornelis Galle I after follower of Rubens, Histoire Curieuse, c.1632 Fig. 3.5 Thomas Cecill, Truth Presents the Queen with a Lance, c.1625 Fig. 3.6 Diego Velázquez, Surrender of Breda, c.1632 Fig. 3.7 Peter Paul Rubens, Adoration of the Eucharist, c.1625–26 Fig. 3.8 Leone Leoni and Pompeo Leoni, Philip II and his family, Capilla Major, c.1598 Fig. 3.9 Diego Velázquez, Jerónima de la Fuente, c.1620 Fig. 3.10 Jacques Callot, Siege of Breda, c.1628 Fig. 3.11 Cornelis Galle I after Peter Paul Rubens, Obsidio Bredana, Antwerp, c.1626 Fig. 3.12 Peeter Snayers, Isabel Clara Eugenia en Route to Breda, c.1628 Fig. 4.1 Peter Paul Rubens, Whitehall ceiling, c.1632–34 Fig. 4.2 Peter Paul Rubens, The Peaceful Reign of King James I, c.1632–34 Fig. 4.3 Peter Paul Rubens, Allegory with the Citadel of Antwerp, c.1622 Fig. 4.4 Simon Gribelin, ceiling in the Banqueting House at Whitehall, c.1720 Fig. 4.5 Unknown artist after Lucas de Heere, An Allegory of Tudor Succession: The Family of Henry VIII, c.1590 Fig. 4.6 Paolo Veronese, ceiling in the Sala del Collegio, c.1575–78 Fig. 4.7 Paolo Veronese, Venice Enthroned between Justice and Peace, c.1575–78 Fig. 4.8 The holi bible (Bishops’ Bible), c.1569 Fig. 4.9 Unknown artist, Abondanza, in Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, 1618 Fig. 4.10 Titian, Bacchanal of the Andrians, c.1523–24 Fig. 5.1 Paolo Veronese, The Visitation, c.1577 Fig. 5.2 Peter Paul Rubens, The Drunken Silenus, c.1617–18 Fig. E.1   R.  Rushworth, The Bum Shop, 1785

Plates Plate 1 Plate 2 Plate 3 Plate 4 Plate 5 Plate 6 Plate 7

Peter Paul Rubens, Self-Portrait in a Honeysuckle Bower with Isabella Brant, c.1609 Peter Paul Rubens, Descent from the Cross, c.1614 Peter Paul Rubens, Raising of the Cross, c.1611–13 Peter Paul Rubens, Assumption, c.1613 Peter Paul Rubens, Juno and Argus, c.1610–11 Peter Paul Rubens, Isabel Clara Eugenia, c.1625 Peter Paul Rubens, Triumph at Juliers, c.1622–25

List of Illustrations

Plate 8 Plate 9

Peter Paul Rubens, Defenders of the Eucharist, c.1625 Peter Paul Rubens, Peace Embracing Plenty, c.1633–34

Abbreviations CRLB Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard: An Illustrated Catalogue Raisonné of the Work of Rubens, 27 vols. (Brussels/London: various publishers, 1968–2019)

11

Acknowledgements There was a time, about a year before I finished the research on which this book is based, that a feminist approach to Rubens’s art had begun to seem retardataire— done, even. It was the late 2000s and important and original studies of the role of gender in Rubens’s paintings seemed poised to achieve a tipping point. Margaret Carroll’s prescient indictment of baroque rape culture was followed by Svetlana Alpers’s provocative Rubens book, Kristin Lohse Belkin’s still-unsurpassed survey, Lisa Rosenthal’s crucial Gender, Politics, and Allegory, and Sarah Cohen’s brilliant, proto-queer analysis of the fluidly gendered ‘France’ in the Medici cycle. Add to these, studies of the Paris program by Geraldine Johnson, Fanny Cosandey, and Elizabeth McGrath and it becomes eminently clear, in retrospect, that this was a golden age for feminist art histories prompted by the works of a seventeenth-century Flemish artist celebrated for his paintings of ‘fleshy’ women. A few years later my perspicacious colleague then at Grinnell College, Marika Knowles, encouraged me to return to my own Rubens project. Art History had already changed by that time, for while the Bush era had produced risk-taking and political work on early modern gender, the Obama years seemed to have slowed that work, having convinced at least some of us that it was no longer as necessary. With the advent of the next president, however, a book about active, agential woman rulers and representations of powerful female bodies that challenge masculinist and hetero norms started to seem relevant, and so, I took it up again. Although the aforementioned studies loom large in my formation—along with emboldening feminist and queer readings by Patricia Reilly and Patricia Simons— my thinking and writing on Rubens and gender has been inspired, deepened, and productively tempered by my doctoral advisor at Berkeley, Elizabeth Honig. Having taught for a while now, I cannot imagine a more generous and preternaturally knowledgeable scholar and I am grateful for the exemplary—if inimitable—model she continues to provide; any missteps or oversights that follow are entirely my own. Ann Brock opened my eyes to feminist biblical studies while I was a graduate student at the Iliff School of Theology. Margaret Miles was a learned mentor and invigorating interlocutor at early stages of this work as were Darcy Grigsby, Todd Olson, and Emilie Bergmann. The 2012 and 2013 Feminist Art History Conferences at American University provided a very welcome venue for presenting portions of this material; there, I benefited from the helpful comments of Pat Simons, Andrea Pearson, and Mary Garrard. During my time in Madrid, Alejandro Vergara was a gracious contact at the Prado. Early on, Jutta Sperling took an interest in my work as I long have in hers. I am grateful to Susan Strauber for friendship and sage guidance of her new colleague back in Iowa. The Rev. Constance Delzell and the Rev. Sally K. Brown, for-

14 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

merly of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Denver, exemplify pious female power for me in so many ways. Over the years, I have received vital fellowships and assistance from: the University of California, Berkeley; the Fulbright Commission; Foreign Language Area Studies; the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and American Universities; Grinnell College; the Yale Center for British Art; the Attingham Trust; the Lewis Walpole Library, and the Huntington Library and Art Collection. At Bennington College, where I now have the pleasure of teaching, Dean Isabel Roche provided a much-needed subvention for obtaining the book’s images. My intrepid research assistant, Fionnuala Murphy, helped secure the permissions. Jay Dragon and students in my ‘Pre-Pro-Seminar’ offered savvy suggestions on Chapter 5. As an export from rural Vermont, this book could not have been completed without the patience and institutional acumen of Kathy Williams, Interlibrary Loan and Reserves Coordinator at Bennington’s Crossett Library. The esteemed Erika Gaffney of Amsterdam University Press has seen it through what were for me, some challenging times; I wish to thank her for continually astute advice and encouragement. I am also grateful to AUP’s two readers for their focused and insightful comments and suggestions which I have attempted to address. Everything changed when I met Heather V. Vermeulen, who has kept at me to finish this project since we first visited Peace Embracing Plenty together at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven. For her conversation, wit, wise counsel, and all the ways she helps me think differently and better about gender, race, and art I am very, very thankful.

Prologue In 1600, at the age of twenty-three, Rubens left Antwerp for Italy in search of gainful employment at an Italian court. Also in that year, Venice, Rubens’s first port of call, saw the publication of two of the most influential and widely read northern Italian contributions to the querelle des femmes. It was the first time two such books by women had appeared simultaneously in the Republic. And it was more than coincidence. The books’ contemporaneous publication attests to a surge of interest among Italian readers in women’s responses to literary attacks on their nature by male authors as well as the diverse rhetorical tactics available to women who wished to defend their sex. The works are quite different in approach: Lucrezia Marinella’s On the Nobility and Excellence of Women is a sharply reasoned humanistic rebuttal to The Defects of Women (Padua 1595 and 1599), an anti-feminist work by Gisueppe Passi.1 Moderata Fonte’s all-female dialogue, The Worth of Women, has been described by Virginia Cox as a more original and in some ways peerless polemic where the author, a married mother, launches fiery attacks on the institution of marriage and women’s exclusion from education, among other sources of social inequality.2 Fonte died in childbirth before her book was published. But the posthumous work was dedicated by the author’s daughter, Cecilia de’ Zorzi, to the teenage duchess of Urbino, inscribing it further in the tradition of the courtly defense.3 Cox sees this seemingly arbitrary dedication, as “somewhat speculative” in view of the noble dedicatee’s youth and lacking notoriety. When viewed as a strategic act of politesse, however, de’ Zorzi may have intended to invoke an earlier duchess of Urbino, Elisabetta Gonzaga. Referred to simply as ‘the Duchess,’ the fictional version of this distant cousin of Baldassare Castiglione presides circumspectly over the discussion and definition of the court lady in Book 3 of the Courtier.4 Urbino, the dialogue’s purported setting, and Mantua, home to one of the greatest Renaissance art collections, shared an historic association with learned women and the love of music, science, and above all painting. The aforementioned Elisabetta Gonzaga, portrayed by Titian in 1538, was the sister-in-law of Isabella d’Este, perhaps the greatest of all

1 Marinella’s book was reprinted in 1601 and 1621. See Marinella, Nobility and Excellence of Women. For the stylistic and conceptual differences between these works and the “extraordinary” circumstance of their simultaneous publication, see Kolsky, “Moderata Fonte, Lucrezia Marinella, Giuseppe Passi.” 2 Fonte [Modesta Pozzo], Worth of Women, 13ff. 3 For the dedicatory letter see, Fonte, Worth of Women, 27–28. 4 Castiglione, Courtier, 199–282. Lyon, J.V., Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789463722216_pro

16 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Mantuan collectors and a cultivated humanist who had herself been instrumental in Castiglione’s education.5 As a newcomer to Italy, Rubens, too, was to seek the favor and patronage of Mantuan nobility. Through the newly appointed governor of the Spanish Netherlands, the Archduke Albert, he was introduced to Vincenzo I Gonzaga, created duke of Mantua in 1587. Although Vincenzo is typically described as Rubens’s primary Italian patron, the artist served equally at the pleasure of the duchess, Eleonora de’ Medici. God-daughter of Pope Pius V, Eleonora was raised in the Pitti palace by a family the breadth and quality of whose artistic patronage was deemed vastly superior at the time to that of the less worldly Gonzaga. Little known today, Eleonora de’ Medici was a celebrated figure in courtly circles until her early death in 1611. So great was her renown, in fact, that this eldest daughter of Francesco I de’ Medici and Johanna of Austria was personified as an allegory of fame in a poem by Torquato Tasso.6 There is no documentary evidence that Rubens read Fonte and Marinella or the popular and often reprinted proto-feminist books and pamphlets that followed their lead.7 But his general interest in and eagerness to procure recent publications makes it possible. Rubens had books brought to him from throughout Europe concerning everything from classical archeology, astronomy, and philosophy to the latest religious controversies. His close relationship with Antwerp’s leading publisher, Balthasar Moretus, whose Plantin-Moretus press was the official publisher of the Catholic church—suggests that he kept himself well-apprised of the latest cultural discourses.8 In Mantua, more relevantly, Rubens had found himself court portraitist at a duchy presided over by a Medici noblewoman who would choose to have herself portrayed (also in 1600) not by him but by a female artist from Bologna, Lavinia Fontana.9 Fontana was heavily influenced by the strident prescriptions of Tridentine enforcers such as her countryman, Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, author of the influential Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images (1582; published in Latin in 1594). Cultivating honor as an exceptional woman, Fontana was one of many late cinquecento artists to prize religious orthodoxy over invention, submitting herself to a rigid aesthetic asceticism praised as the cure for mannerism’s sensuality and self-indulgence.

5 On the historiographical gendering of Isabella’s unconventional collecting habits, see San Juan, “Court Lady’s Dilemma.” 6 See Murphy, Lavinia Fontana, 109 and 208, no. 91, for Tasso’s “Alla Fama: in lode della sernis. Sig. Eleonora de Medici, principesa di Mantova” (1587). 7 For a general overview of Rubens’s possible library, which was not documented until 1613, when the Plantin House began to record its transactions with Rubens, see Baudouin, “Rubens and his Books,” 231–46. 8 Magurn, ed. and trans., Letters, 12–13. Rubens’s correspondence is punctuated with references to controversial and difficult-to-obtain current titles; see, for example, letter nos. 53, 79, 101, 106, and 128. 9 Murphy, Lavinia Fontana, 109.

Prologue

17

Rubens had indeed arrived in Italy at a transitional moment. While in artistic circles, the grip of Paleotti (d. 1597) and the Milanese Archbishop Charles Borromeo (d. 1585) was beginning to loosen, a new approach to Catholic art had yet to be codified. With Caravaggio’s unflinching naturalism at one extreme and Domenichino’s icy idealism at the other, the conceptual and technical parameters of Counter-Reformation painting were very much in flux in 1600.10 The strictures of the church and the absence of inimitable and idiosyncratic artists such as Bronzino, Pontormo, and Rosso had seemingly combined to produce a stylistic and critical quandary at the start of the new century, when even the philosophical underpinnings of representation and mimesis were interrogated for their conformity to the bishops’ decrees. Widely disseminated by humanist commentators, above all the Florentine Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), Platonism remained the philosophical school most associated with the flowering of the Renaissance. By the turn of the seventeenth century, however, the clerical and academic institutions that made the rules were leaning toward, or more accurately, returning to, Aristotelian principles (one example of which was the resurgence of the trope of ‘judicious selection’ from many ideals as opposed to the representation of a pre-existing (and perfect) Platonic Idea). Together with the expectation that sacred art take a selectively empirical approach, was the privileging of implicitly gendered masculine line over feminine color. “Thus as Aristotle says in the Poetics,” writes Paleotti, echoing the sentiments of the artist-biographer, Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), “a picture filled with vivid colors, but that does not resemble, will be judged inferior to one made of simple lines that does resemble, the reason being that the colors in the first are an accident of pictorial art, whereas the success of the latter in expressing the thing selected for imitation is the foundation and vigor of pictorial art.”11 The Aristotelian ascendancy had a devastating effect on early modern conceptions of sex difference and femaleness, an outcome mirrored and catalyzed by Counter-Reformation visual culture. The church’s fear of (seeing) pious and active women in life and art may provide an explanation for the close succession of the two Tridentine decrees most relevant to this book’s subject. These rubrics, both approved at the tail end of the final session of 1563, are: “On The Invocation, Veneration, and Relics of Saints, and on Sacred Images” and “Provision is Made for the Enclosure of Nuns […].” Where the former dictated that “all lasciviousness” be avoided, prohibiting saintly images “painted and adorned with seductive charm,” the latter provided that “no nun shall after her profession be permitted to go out of the monastery, even for a brief period under any pretext whatever.”12

10 For a concise account of this ‘anti-theoretical’ moment, see Wittkower et al., Art and Architecture in Italy, 14. 11 Paleotti, Sacred and Profane Images, 107. 12 Schroeder, trans., Canons and Decrees, 220, 224.

18 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

The Triumph of Thomas Aquinas When approaching a classical author such as Aristotle, especially following the doctrinaire prescriptions of the Council of Trent, it was advisable for Catholic readers to rely on the approved readings of a Christian intermediary. There was no more sanctioned Christian interpreter of the Philosopher than the Dominican scholar and exegete, Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). The ‘Angelic Doctor,’ as Aquinas was known, had devoted his life to the difficult project of fitting classical Aristotelian philosophy to medieval Christian theology. Many of Aquinas’s concordist propositions were deeply controversial from the time of his death until the zenith of anti-scholastic Christian humanism in the early sixteenth century. Ultimately, however, Thomistic theology was officially incorporated into the dogma of the Catholic church at the close of the Tridentine council. From that point forward and for the first time, Thomism assumed its place as the font of Catholic teaching and the source of approved doctrine and canon law.13 In terms of its wide-reaching impact on spiritual practice and belief, concretely felt by lay and religious women attempting to pursue an ‘active’ or public apostolate, the Catholic church’s vindication of Thomism in the sixteenth century was akin to the (re)discovery of Aristotle in the middle ages. In both periods, women’s rights were severely curtailed by ecclesiastical and doctrinal reforms. As Sharon Farmer has explained, in 1210, Pope Innocent III, fearful that certain abbesses had assumed de facto clerical status, proscribed them from such activities as preaching and hearing confession. These and other medieval women—well-known mystics, and powerfully connected nuns among them—had achieved a significant measure of social and political capital. In response to these gains, contemporaneous commentaries on Aristotle’s works provided a foundation for more socially conservative eleventh- and twelfth-century ecclesiology by providing biological and ‘natural’ rationales for the social and cultural disparities based on sex difference. As Farmer states, “Thomas Aquinas’s comments on women are indicative of the degree to which thirteenth-century theologians were receptive to Aristotle’s views of women.”14 Nonetheless, it is Aquinas who argues that “only as regards nature in the individual is the female something defective and manqué,” thereby mitigating, to a slight degree, the Aristotelian explanation of woman as a ‘lacking male’ deprived of full humanity. To be sure, as individuals, women were weak and derivative. Yet in Aquinas’s view the female sex, as a “species as a whole,” could not be understood as defectively lacking because God Himself had created it for the work of procreation—albeit a procreation in which male semen is the operative element. 13 Colish, “St. Thomas Aquinas in Historical Perspective,” 440. As Colish points out, its adoption by not only the Dominicans, as would be expected, but also by the Jesuits provides one explanation for the dominance of Thomism (or ‘Thomisms’) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 14 Farmer, “Persuasive Voices,” 520.

Prologue

19

“The procreativity of a female is the result either of the debility of the active power, of some unsuitability of the material, or of some change effected by external influences,” Aquinas had claimed. Yet “the active power in the seed of the male tends to produce something like itself, perfect in masculinity.”15 This deft rhetorical and philosophical move, with which Aquinas simultaneously frames femaleness as a genetic mishap, delegitimizes women’s role in generation, and privileges the creative and ‘productive’ role of the male, had a powerful influence on the conception and self-conception of the early modern (male) artist. Adopting a Thomistic worldview, the male artist might recognize himself as an authorized and superior image-maker having been made (more perfectly than any woman) in the image of God. Rubens’s early philosophical mentor, the Neostoic Justus Lipsius, had actually doubled this notion back on itself, making artists the model for the Creator, when he referred to a perpetually inventive God as being, “like an Image-maker,” who “formeth and frameth to himselfe sundrie sortes of portratures in his clay.”16 It is based in part on Aquinas’s ideas that Vasari was able to portray Michelangelo as ‘divine,’ that is, as a co-Creator with God of sublimely lifelike forms.17 Having arrived in Rome in his early twenties at the height of the continental Counter-Reformation it is not surprising that Rubens would begin to develop a modern understanding of sex and gender dictated less by the residual mystical Neoplatonic ambiguities of Michelangelo’s age than the burgeoning Neoscholasticism of the post-Tridentine church. There were fateful implications for what it meant to be, and to represent, a woman during this Aristotelian cultural turn. But one crucial constant remained. For both Plato and Aristotle, the elision of femininity and beauty was necessary to a theory of sex difference. Femaleness and beauty were moralized by the Greek philosophers and their early Christian interlocutors, but to distinct ends. Where, for example, Neoplatonism embraced female beauty’s capacity to reflect an interior moral goodness, Aristotelianism, and the exegetical literalism derived from it, rejected such claims in favor of a view of female beauty as superficial, “accidental,” and dangerously deceptive.18 This early modern outlook was grounded in oppositional masculine/feminine dualities of the sort exemplified in Aristotle’s Physics. But it was also anticipated by patristic and medieval commentaries on the original inequality of Adam and Eve, and was generally endorsed 15 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1.92.1 (p. 37), cited in Blamires, ed., Woman Defamed and Woman Defended, 92–93. For an overview of Aquinas’s approach to Aristotle, and subsequent interpretations of this particular ‘woman’ question, phrased by Aquinas as “Should woman have been made in that original creation of things?” see Allen, Concept of Woman, II, 91–101, 127–51. 16 Lipsius, Two Bookes of Constancie, 40. 17 On this subject see Campbell, “Fare una Cosa Morta Parer Viva,” 597. 18 See, for example, the discussion of Ficino’s synthesis of Plato and Christian theology in Maclean, Renaissance Notion of Woman, 24.

20 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

by seventeenth-century Neostoical philosophers no less than reforming Catholic theologians.19 The Pythagorean binary structure at the heart of Aristotle’s outlook may even be partly responsible for the Renaissance fascination with dueling conceits and competing sides.20 However, Counter-Reformation Italy, too, was a time and place for sophisticated artistic paragone. Within Italian, and especially Roman, artistic circles the relative supremacy of color and design, painting and sculpture, and Northern and Italian painting were continually contested—even by interested non-artists such as Galileo Galilei (1564–1642).21 Under the incontrovertible decrees of Trent, however, the terms of debate had become greatly refined, the range of potentially affected subjects, generally increased, and the punishment for rhetorical or doctrinal errors, more severe. Galileo would discover this in 1633 as a notorious victim of the Roman Inquisition, condemned to life imprisonment for his embrace of Copernicanism. Although Rubens is often characterized as a hidebound Catholic, his social networks while in Italy suggest a certain openness, or at least scientific curiosity, that could at times have been at odds with the church. Rubens and Galileo moved in the same scholarly circles while in Rome; the painter maintained ties to the astronomer’s Lincean Academy. Rubens was also part of the related group of Northern ex-patriots devoted to Lipsius, himself briefly a Lutheran, and the long-time teacher of Rubens’s brother, Philip.22 But even in less elite, more socially diverse spheres of European society, one of the most popularly debated topics was the proper social, moral, spiritual, and biological status of men and women. Addressed more and more by female writers, the ‘woman question’ rapidly gained in popularity during Rubens’s lifetime, reaching a publishing climax in the second quarter of the seventeenth century. The height of the querelle coincided with the widest reach and enforcement of Tridentine decrees. Thus for Catholic women, whose very humanity was continually debated on the basis of biblical and philosophical proofs, the Aristotelian propositions resurrected in Trent rang new changes on old themes. Constraint of women’s activity was the requirement, whether their gregarious mouths, roving intellects, or gadabout bodies. And yet, while earthly liberties were being summarily curtailed for mortal women an even greater spiritual status was being accorded to female saintliness.

19 The literature on the philosophical and theological underpinnings of the Counter-Reformation is extensive but see, for example, the classic works by Evennett, Spirit of the Counter-Reformation, and Wright, Counter-Reformation. See also Comerford, ed., Early Modern Catholicism. 20 See, for example, Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.5, 986a22. 21 Finding it the more difficult to achieve, the astronomer concluded that “excellence in painting is very much more admirable than in sculpture.” See the letter (c.1612) from Galileo Galilei to the painter Cigoli, in Enggass and Brown, eds., Sources, 24. 22 On the Academy, see Baldriga, L’Occhio della lince; Freedberg, Eye of the Lynx.

Prologue

21

On the one hand, the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries witnessed Trent’s forced cloister of nuns and the punitively literal and painfully physical bridling of women deemed unruly gossips or scolds. On the other hand, a new-found spiritual fervor arose for holy women such as the biblical Mary Magdalene and modern-day religious such as Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) and Jeanne de Chantal (1571– 1642), foundresses of religious Orders in Spain and France, respectively. An astonishing uptick in Marian devotion manifested itself in the contemporary fascination with the Immaculate Conception, a doctrine with medieval origins. A similarly renewed enthusiasm for the doctrine of the Assumption, Mary’s effective resurrection and heavenly coronation after an earthly death, increased demands for presentations of the middle-aged Mary as an unstained Virgin rising from her terrestrial grave. Less and less was the Assumed Virgin portrayed as a vigorous and powerful woman. More and more the Immaculate Mary reverted to the humble, often girlish, type of the Virgin at prayer or in a passive state of rest, her downcast eyes foreclosing the viewer’s direct engagement. The seventeenth-century church’s zealous promulgation of the Immaculate Conception is therefore perhaps the clearest example of the post-Tridentine endorsement of extraordinary (and biologically impossible) femininity over against an essentially flawed, if normative, female nature. Rubens, like Velázquez, came into his own as a Spanish subject at precisely this watershed moment in Catholic spirituality. His was a time when visual culture was newly entrusted not merely to reflect contemporary visions of desirable womanhood but to create and prescribe them as well.

Works Cited Allen, Prudence, The Concept of Woman, II (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002). Baldriga, Irene, L’Occhio della lince: i primi lincei tra arte, scienza e collezionismo (1603–1630) (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lince, 2002). Baudouin, Frans, “Rubens and his Books,” in Les humanistes et leur bibliothèque: actes du colloque international, Bruxelles, 26–28 août 1999, ed. Rudolf de Smet, Travaux de l’Institut pour l’Étude de la Renaissance et de l’Humanisme 13 (Leuven: L’Institut pour l’Etude de la Renaissance et de l’Humanisme, 2002), 231–46. Blamires, Alcuin, ed., Woman Defamed and Woman Defended (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Campbell, Stephen J., “‘Fare una Cosa Morta Parer Viva’: Michelangelo, Rosso, and the (Un)Divinity of Art,” Art Bulletin, 84 (December 2002), 596–620. Castiglione, Baldesar, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles S. Singleton (New York: Doubleday, 1959). Colish, Marcia, “St. Thomas Aquinas in Historical Perspective: The Modern Period,” Church History, 44 (December 1975), 443–49. Comerford, Kathleen, ed., Early Modern Catholicism, Essays in Honor of John O’Malley (Toronto/Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2001). Enggass, Robert and Jonathan Brown, eds., Italy and Spain 1600–1750: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970). Evennett, Outram, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation (South Bend: Notre Dame University Press, 1970). Farmer, Sharon, “Persuasive Voices: Clerical Images of Medieval Wives,” Speculum, 61 (July 1986), 517–43.

22 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Fonte, Moderata [Modesta Pozzo], The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed their Nobility and their Superiority to Men, ed. and trans. Virginia Cox (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997). Freedberg, David, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, his Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003). Kolsky, Steven, “Moderata Fonte, Lucrezia Marinella, Giuseppe Passi: An Early Seventeenth-Century Feminist Controversy,” Modern Language Review, 96 (October 2001), 973–89. Lipsius, Justus, Two Bookes of Constancie, Written in Latine, trans. John Stradling (London, 1594). Maclean, Ian, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Magurn, Ruth, ed. and trans., The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1955). Marinella, Lucrezia, The Nobility and Excellence of Women, and the Defects and Vices of Men, ed. and trans. Anne Dunhill, with introd. by Letizia Panizza (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999). Murphy, Caroline, Lavinia Fontana: A Painter and her Patrons in Sixteenth-Century Bologna (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). Paleotti, Gabriele, Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images, introd. by Paolo Prodi, trans. William McCuaig (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012). San Juan, Rose Marie, “The Court Lady’s Dilemma: Isabella d’Este and Art Collecting in the Renaissance,” Oxford Art Journal, 14 (1991), 67–78. Schroeder, H.J., trans., The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (Charlotte, NC: Tan Books, 1978). Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, XIII, trans. Edmund Hill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Wittkower, Rudolph, with Joseph Connors and Jennifer Montagu, Art and Architecture in Italy: 1600–1750 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). Wright, A.D., The Counter-Reformation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982).

Introduction The women Rubens chose to paint are what are known as fat women, and therefore to many Rubens is a vulgar painter. But a loftier vision was never bestowed on man. Rubens’s women are beautiful, but they are not what the man in the street regards as a pretty woman. They are his own women, and they are women—not creatures without beards or mustaches. And he praises us all the while in his own benign fashion. ‒ George Moore, The Lake (1905)1

Writing from the southern Netherlands in 1781, Sir Joshua Reynolds opined that among Rubens’s deficiencies as a painter, “we may reckon beauty in his female characters: sometimes indeed they make approaches to it; they are healthy and comely women, but seldom, if ever, possess any degree of excellence.”2 While Reynolds helped establish a now-standard characterization of the women Rubens painted, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term ‘Rubenesque’ was not generally in use until around 1815. In that year, it was rather benignly employed by a contributor to the English Repository of Arts to describe typically Rubensian (ornamental) accessories such as ribbons and flowers.3 By 1834, however, the adjective had taken on many of the negative anatomical connotations for which it has since been known.4 It appeared in “The Lover of Beauty; or Which will He Wed?,” a romance anonymously published in a London science and arts monthly known as The Analyst. The ‘He’ of the story is a vain and “idolatrous” bachelor captain who falls physically in love with a pretty but vapid distant female relation only to fall cerebrally in love with a less-than-conventionally attractive and/but highly intelligent female wit (in the end, the same person!). Recoiling at his first sight of the woman in question, the captain complains: “of her figure we are reluctantly compelled to speak less flatteringly, a single glimpse was sufficient to indicate that it had never been moulded by the graces […] it was, in truth, broad and cumbrous, we may say Rubenesque.”5

1 Moore, Lake, 158. 2 Reynolds, Journey to Flanders, 148. 3 Repository of Arts, no pag. 4 Lamster, “L’Esthétique du ‘more is more,’” 28, incorrectly dates the first anglophone appearance of ‘Rubenesque’ to a 1913 edition of the English magazine Maclean’s in an article that begins with the usual contrast of “Rubens’s women” to today’s “minimalist” women and emaciated models. 5 Anon., “Lover of Beauty; or Which will He Wed?,” 405. Lyon, J.V., Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789463722216_intro

24 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

In the centuries since his death in 1640, Rubens has often been associated with women. Undoubtedly, the superficial reason for this is the prominence and characteristic appearance of female figures in his art. Given the historical circumstances of his art-making, however, studies of Rubens might just as easily have focused on the Flemish painter’s exceptional cohort of strong-minded and powerful female patrons and the historical and iconographical meanings of the many influential women in his life and work. Feminist in its investments and aims, this book takes for granted the importance of women, not only as a sex—or as sex objects—but as gendered actors in Rubens’s art. In foregrounding Rubens’s representations of women’s bodies and female agency within the contexts of early modern court culture and Catholic theology, I appeal to the “figurative power of gender as a thinking resource that exceeds its own particular issue to become a critical instrument for undoing hierarchy and encountering alterity.”6 This aptly transdisciplinary paraphrase of the literary theorist and cultural critic Gayatri Spivak, by the feminist art historian Griselda Pollock, gets at gender’s capacity to reorient, or refigure, real social and political relationships both through and beyond symbolic female forms and fantasies. Looking at and thinking about Rubens’s representations of women critically and anew has the potential to uncover the complex, at times radical, nature of his conceptions of gender, conceptions in which masculinity and femininity, far from separable, are mutually constitutive. More surprisingly, as I hope to show, a fresh consideration of the gendering of female forms in Rubens’s art might even change Rubens himself, allowing us to view him not only as a painter of women but as a women’s painter. For although, as Geraldine Johnson summed it up, Rubens “devoted a significant portion of his career to painting images either for or of women,” Rubens is seldom thought of as an ally in the spirit of the female protagonist in the Edwardian novel from which this chapter’s epigraph is taken.7 If her words are any indication, during the suffragist interim between the Victorian age and the roaring twenties, a woman’s beauty was determined by her body shape and size measured against masculinist convention; then, as now, a fat woman was a vulgar woman. Many art historians, revealing a dismayingly similar outlook, have routinely aligned pronouncements on the quality of Rubens’s art with contemporary, mainstream, prescriptions of female beauty. When the strong and vigorous, well-nourished women on Rubens’s canvases have failed to emulate the wan and anemic beauty norms of successive eras, the painter has been deemed uncouth and his art derided as crude and excessive. Over the last three centuries, chauvinists and other fat-phobic writers of all genders—his champions among them—have viewed Rubens’s lauded erudition and judiciousness as somehow in opposition to the (implicitly poor) choices he made of whom and how to paint. Even, perhaps 6 7

Pollock, “Whither Art History?,” 16. Johnson, “Pictures Fit for a Queen,” 447.

Introduc tion

25

especially, now, what has become the notoriously Rubenesque female form continues to be seen by many as a lapse in personal judgment and a failure of cultural taste. It was not always so. That the female figures Rubens painted were less than beautiful was not, it seems, a possibility for seventeenth-century viewers, who sometimes faulted his portrayal of men, but generally gave him top marks for producing lovely women. It is both ironic and unsurprising that to early modern beholders of Rubens’s works, abstractions—the intangible virtues, vices, concepts, and ideas he typically rendered as female—had never seemed more titillatingly immediate and moving. Astounded by his capacity to approximate the physicality of human bodies as well as their everyday gestures and attitudes, viewers of Rubens’s day faced the challenge of recognizing his seductively sensual, real-world women as disembodied notions in his secular works and, perhaps more confusingly, as stalwart biblical heroines or paragons of chastity in his devotional art. There is, of course, a significant male population in Rubens’s world. This book will argue, however, that as his career advances, female figures increasingly bear the burden of meaning-making, assuming an ever-greater formal and compositional presence as well as more iconographically complex roles in his art. It is my belief that this is as true of Rubens’s religious pictures as of his modern histories, civic allegories, portraits, and mythological subjects. Nonetheless, it is these latter genres, presumed to be more receptive to psychoanalytical and cultural theory, that have proven most engaging to a secularized academy. These are the works that have received the greater part of scholarly attention in the Rubens monographs, case studies, and exhibitions of the last several decades. Significantly, Rubens’s mythological and allegorical works are also the shared focus of the most unapologetically feminist studies of his art. Allied with Marina Warner’s foundational work on gender and personification, many breakthrough studies of Rubens’s allegorical works highlight their propagandistic, yet also polysemous, messages. Among other things, feminist authors have pointed to eroticized figural abstractions that depend on contemporary early modern stereotypes of femaleness while having nothing to do with the historical experience of women themselves.8 Since the late 1980s, when they began to achieve critical mass, investigations of the role of gender in Rubens’s works have produced provocative and revelatory accounts not only of major paintings and recurring themes but of early modern masculinity’s constructed nature (something long observed of femininity) and of women’s contributions to seventeenth-century politics and culture at large. It would therefore be impossible to shed new light on the representation of powerful women and female power in Rubens’s religious art and devotional subjects, without drawing on field-changing feminist studies of his secular works by Svetlana Alpers, Kristin Lohse Belkin, Margaret Carroll, Sarah R. Cohen, Geraldine Johnson, 8

See, for example, Warner, Monuments and Maidens.

26 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Elizabeth McGrath, and Lisa Rosenthal.9 However, in these and other histories of baroque art, feminist and women’s and gender and sexuality studies have had a complicated and uncertain relationship with historical theology and church history—and all of the above fields with Queer theory and LGBTQ studies. This need not be the case, as the feminist historical theologian Margaret Miles has shown. Miles’s scholarly foci and innovative methods required her to turn to images for information about women’s lives and their representation unavailable in texts. In classic studies such as Image as Insight and Carnal Knowing, she demonstrates that art history’s fundamentally interdisciplinary nature can, in fact, sustain fruitful crosspollination between these fields.10 But if, as Miles has written, “the power of images to crystallize and communicate religious ideas and sensibilities is a point that must still be made in religious studies,” art history in general, and especially studies of Rubens, would similarly benefit from theologically sensitive, but no less emancipatory, queer-of-color and feminist-minded approaches to the artist’s religious works.11 Toward articulating a “critical theology of liberation,” feminist biblical studies scholar and theologian Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has stressed the difference between a restorative “hermeneutics of sympathy” and (pace Ricoeur) the more necessary and dangerous “hermeneutics of suspicion.” As the latter “attempts to decode meanings that are concealed,” it must recognize that, not unlike gender, “the Bible is to be understood as a tool of power that, as such, inspires acts of discrimination and oppression or acts and visions of liberation.”12 Where the bible and its narratives are concerned, rather than sympathetically assuming or projecting Rubens’s un/problematic orthodoxy, it is important that scholars of art and religion attempt to discern the full range of interpretive possibilities in his images. Like the feminist exegete, the feminist historian of religious art decodes meanings knowing that “one of the most effective means of concealment is the function of androcentric language that claims to be generic language.”13 Because I believe that androcentric language can be analogous to androcentric imagery, or visual rhetoric, in works of art—and certainly to the androcentric linguistics of art history—I have been guided by Schüssler Fiorenza’s revisionist framework in a project similarly concerned with decoding and unveiling the meanings behind and beneath self-consciously figurative material. When confronting the portrayal of women for and within the historically masculinist institution of the Christian church, our hermeneutical suspicions are always warranted. 9 Alpers, Making of Rubens; Belkin, Rubens; Carroll, “Erotics of Absolutism”; Cohen, “Rubens’s France”; Johnson, “Pictures Fit for a Queen”; McGrath, “Tact and Topical Reference”; Rosenthal, Gender, Politics, and Allegory. 10 “Exploration of the interdependence of religion, gender, and culture requires an interdisciplinary approach to historical evidence.” Miles, Carnal Knowing, 12. 11 Valantassis, ed., Subjective Eye, p. xxvi. 12 Plaskow and Schüssler Fiorenza, “Martin Marty Award Conversation,” 174. 13 Plaskow and Schüssler Fiorenza, “Martin Marty Award Conversation,” 174.

Introduc tion

27

This is that much truer of the art of Rubens, whose Catholicism rarely goes unmentioned. Skepticism about the sincerity of Rubens’s faith, and the sincerity of the Catholic church itself, is sprinkled, for example, throughout the critical works of Reynolds and Ruskin. By contrast, other scholars writing in the wake of Enlightenment anti-clericalism (which included the suppression of the Jesuits by Pope Clement XIV in 1773) have deemed Rubens an uncritical church lackey who accepted reactionary Counter-Reformation doctrine whole cloth. This is not a book that seeks to define Rubens’s personal religious beliefs, the specifics of which we have no real way of knowing, but which are perhaps more complicated than is often assumed. I would go so far as to claim, however, that Rubens’s images provide proof of his faith in Catholic praxis as something central to modern life, from which the spiritual was never separate or absent. In this respect, I find myself at odds with the author of The Catholic Rubens, who contends that for Protestant viewers like himself it is a “confessional error” to attribute his altarpieces “merely to Rubens’s personal, subjective piety” when they are more properly seen as public mechanisms of Catholic renewal.14 To my (Episcopalian) mind the error—still repeated in histories directed at a suspicious or antagonistic ‘us’ of monolithic Protestant or atheist readers—comes in failing to grasp that the instrumental intent of his art takes nothing away from the subtlety of Rubens’s spiritual discernment or his subjectivity as a seventeenth-century Catholic. Moreover, it is consistent with the complex nature of identity that Rubens, the early modern painter, never operated in the world as solely either Catholic, male, aspirationally noble, German-born Flemish, or (presumably) attracted to women, but was rather known and knew himself as the sum of these inextricable parts. I do agree with Sauerländer that Rubens’s “mythological and ecclesiastic pictures are one,” a fact attributable to his figurative understanding of the historicity, and typological progression, of the church. In sum, the Catholic Rubens is for me the only Rubens. In post-iconoclasm Antwerp, perhaps even more than in Rome, where similar acts of vandalism and violence had not occurred, enforcing the proper veneration of the sacro imago was an essential Catholic rejoinder to the Reformers, who had privileged the word and the ear over the image and the eye.15 Analyzing Rubens’s religious works in comparison with representations of similar themes and narratives by both earlier and contemporary artists allows us to see that many of his compositions—despite establishing artistic norms for subsequent Counter-Reformation imagery—were highly original, even unorthodox, at the time of their creation. As I will suggest, this is often most appreciable in his representations of women in/as religious subjects. A disclaimer is nonetheless in order. For even if Rubens presented his viewers with a palpably new kind of female agency by finding novel, highly naturalistic, modes through which to propagandize female power—which I believe he did—it 14 Sauerländer, Catholic Rubens, 274. 15 Herremans, “Legitimate Use of Images,” 118.

28 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

would be both anachronistic and inaccurate to consider the painter a feminist. As Carroll and Rosenthal have persuasively argued, some of his classical and mythological imagery, specifically that dating from c.1612–20, blatantly promotes not only conventional asymmetries of sex and power but the inevitability of rape, toward baldly patriarchal, absolutist ends. In a bracing, now-canonical article, Carroll calls on readers to register Rubens’s valorization of the divine-right sovereign’s subjugation of his tacitly feminized people through masterful and violent “mystifications of sexuality—with their seductive fictions of conquest and capitulation.”16 But what, one wonders, about the female sovereign in need of power and promotion? To suggest that Rubens thought differently, and differently over time, about ‘pagan’ historical women, or mythological goddesses, or women as a sex, or particular female saints, is merely to acknowledge that not all women were created equal by him. Beyond this claim, as I have indicated, is the more interesting possibility that along with the circumstances of his family life and his employment and patronage, his views on women and how they might be figured in his art changed.

Figura versus Allegory There is no doubt that Rubens had a figural type. Earthy, full-breasted, and voluptuous in some cases, athletic and muscular in others, the women in his art evince weightiness, vitality, and volume. With their rosy cheeks and typically pale, dimpled flesh, they are, more often than not, meant to appear both beautiful and natural, subtly idealized yet nonetheless approaching what we might today term realistic. While evocative of copiousness, their presence is neither gratuitous nor ‘merely’ decorative. In fact, when understood as powerfully built, thriving, and physically capable rather than abnormal, distorted, or decadently obese, the Rubenesque woman embodies, in an almost talismanic manner, transcendence of the “Pestilence and Famine” Rubens refers to as “those inseparable partners of War.” Whether she is fully clad or baring a breast, her robust physique shows as much as it tells of desirable surfeit, health, and invulnerability to the violent acts of enemy soldiers and other invaders so familiar to the citizens of Rubens’s long besieged Flanders.17 Through their scale, iconographical attributes, compositional groupings, and expressive gestures, women are commonly charged by Rubens with communicating what mattered most to him. As Kristin Lohse Belkin writes, “even in Rubens’s religious paintings, women often express the emotional content of the narrative.”18 Indeed, their emotive, metaphysicality exceeds the purely symbolic, just as their 16 Carroll, “Erotics of Absolutism,” 101. 17 Rubens to Justus Sustermans, Antwerp, 12 March 1638, in Magurn, ed. and trans., Letters, no. 242, p. 408. 18 Belkin, Rubens, 8.

Introduc tion

29

natural-seeming behavior and appearances belie the fact that they have been precisely animated and stilled at a predetermined point in a narrative that, pictorially at least, has neither a beginning nor an end.19 Creating believably human forms and performances is the inner drive of Rubens’s artistic project. Yet even the realest-seeming women in many of his religious works are not solely employed as carriers of emotion, any more than they are employed solely to represent themselves. Beyond serving as eroticized containers of abstract concepts or recognizable feelings, or providing flattering portraits of actual persons, the women in Rubens’s religious works frequently act as typological forms of expression, or figurae. Simultaneously standing for themselves and something or someone historically elsewhere, they embody Catholic ideas of sacred or spiritual fulfilment projected in the fullness of time. Species of metaphor are not always distinguished in studies of visual art. Yet one thing this book suggests is that, anchored as they are in a tradition of Christian exegesis in tension with Greek philosophy and rhetoric, Rubens’s truly figurative pictures are importantly different from the immense number of works that are generally considered his allegories. Although both modes rely on metaphor’s substitution of one thing for another, often in order to teach openly while revealing covertly, the nature of the relationship between the two ‘things’ in question is not the same. In art this has meant that allegories employ a representational form concretely present to the viewer as a means of invoking a disembodied idea located notionally off-site. Allegory’s potential for obfuscation and ambiguity, if not outright deception, is frequently heightened by an unexpected or counter-intuitive allegorical combination that might produce cognitive dissonance in more thoughtful viewers.20 Consider, for example, a ‘beautiful’ unclothed woman holding a maquette of the sun and intended as Truth. Although her nakedness cannot but sexualize the female figure, a personification of Truth is to be understood metaphorically as unadulterated or innocent, yet also encouraging her own revelation or disrobement. Similarly, the sun, productive of heat and physical brightness, stands for enlightenment, metaphorically meant as knowledge, or more properly, its discovery. But ‘knowing,’ too, carries a euphemistically sexual, biblical valence, such that the beholder might be forgiven for asking him/her/themselves what it would mean to truly know such a captivating Truth.21 While taking a turn around a Roman Palazzo one day, Queen Christina of Sweden (1626–1689) is said to have responded to Bernini’s voluptuous allegorical sculpture of Verità in just this manner.22 According to a 1668 biography, the once-Lutheran Catholic convert wryly observed to the cardinal accompanying her that it was “good that all 19 On the manner in which Rubens sacrifices drama for clarity by separating action from meaning in his early allegories, see the germinal article by Alpers, “Manner and Meaning in Some Rubens Mythologies.” 20 Kelley, Reinventing Allegory, 3. 21 For this personification allegory in an eighteenth-century context see Sheriff, “Naked Truth.” 22 On Bernini and Christina see Zirpolo, “Christina of Sweden’s Patronage of Bernini.”

30 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

truths are not marble.”23 Placed on the lips of Christina, an enthusiastic collector of art and alleged libertine reputedly “of the humour of Sappho,” the remark is a queer one on many levels. In works such as Bernini’s, allegory draws the viewer in by ‘otherspeaking,’ quite often by ventriloquizing its message through eroticized or idealized female forms offered to the public gaze (the Greek allos means other; agoreuein, to speak in the assembly).24 Because it is sometimes less than forthcoming, and often strategically so, allegory’s meaningful connections can easily and intentionally slip into a realm of seeming arbitrariness, where, as Walter Benjamin memorably observed of allegorical German baroque mourning plays, “any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else.”25 A lack of (obvious) correspondence between what is seen and what is signified is consequently a common allegorical quality. But if allegorical arbitrariness hovers at one end of the metaphorical spectrum, figurative logic occupies the other. Figurae, unlike allegories, are interrelated and contingent, their two parts resemble rather than diverge from one another. Though articulated through linear and teleological human histories, figurae find their ultimate temporality in eschatological, Godly time, or kairos, as opposed to human, calendrical time, or chronos.26 That many of the powerful female figures in Rubens’s religious art might be understood as at once historical, anachronistic, and prophetic has to do with the nature of figura herself. Grammatically feminine and synonymous with corporeality, figures—theologically figurae—have a typological structure. Within a Christian context figuration implies predictive and moralistic relationships between Old Testament and New Testament types—and here we can include persons as well as events and circumstances—across time and place, and well beyond the bible. While Erich Auerbach, still the authority on figura’s semantic history, had literature in mind when he outlined the hermeneutical practice, figural interpretation can and should be transposed to the visual realm. Its structure allows art historians to similarly propose a “connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second involves or fulfills the first.”27 Auerbach’s definition, synthesizing the development of figura from Terence to Dante, relies on an orientation to history that is generally different from that of allegory, which presents and represents abstractions as ageless and eternal. As Auerbach goes on to explain: 23 Åkerman, Queen Christina of Sweden, 305. “‘Je le crois bien,’ repartit la Reine dans le même instant, ‘toutes les vérités ne sont pas de marbre’”; cited by Arckenholtz, Memoires concernant Christine Reine de Swede (Amsterdam, 1751), 518. Christina noted in her memoirs “that after reading Sappho in the original Greek she finally understood the nature of her true feelings for women.” See Stein, “Iconography of Sappho,” 27. 24 For key studies (and bibliographies) of allegory, see, for example, Greenblatt, ed., Allegory and Representation, esp. Fineman, “Structure of Allegorical Desire”; Tuve, Allegorical Imagery, 26–48; Baskins and Rosenthal, eds., Early Modern Visual Allegory, 1–10. 25 Benjamin, German Tragic Drama, 175. 26 Minear, “Time and the Kingdom,” 81. 27 Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, 53.

Introduc tion

31

The two poles of the figure are separate in time, but both, being real events or figures, are within time, within the stream of historical life. Only the understanding of the two persons or events is a spiritual act, but this spiritual act deals with concrete events whether past, present, or future, and not with concepts or abstractions; these are quite secondary, since promise and fulfillment are real historical events, which have either happened in the incarnation of the Word, or will happen in the second coming.28

While there are important distinctions between allegory and figura, such distinctions reside at the level of intention and completion since both forms aim to convey deeper, less apparent, meanings lying beneath a literal surface that can nevertheless operate, albeit less compellingly or usefully, on its own.29 It bears repeating that figura can therefore be viewed as allegory’s theological analogue, particularly when it reveals historical echoes and correspondences with typological significance. Rubens’s figurae are not only found in biblical or religious subjects. They are also a feature of ostensibly secular stories and genres where the modern viewer might least expect them—but the erudite seventeenth-century Catholic would very likely have taken their meaning. Like any good Christian humanist, Rubens (unlike many conservative Counter-Reformation theologians) was always looking for ways to reconcile classical wisdom and culture with Catholic doctrine. This outlook was in line with what Augustine of Hippo considered the necessary process of appropriating Egyptian gold, his metaphor for those “studies for liberated minds” that must be removed from “pagans” by Christians and “applied to their true function.”30 The interpretations presented in this book adhere to Auerbach’s bipartite schema for figura, which gives equal weight to two historical sides, aware of their reciprocal, even dialectical, progress toward a spiritual goal. As Auerbach, drawing on Tertullian, states: “real historical figures are to be interpreted spiritually (spiritaliter interpretari), but the interpretation points to a carnal, hence historical fulfillment (carnaliter adimpleri: De resurrectione, 20) for the truth has become history or flesh.”31 Tertullian’s claim that the highest or truest (anagogical) fulfilment is made manifest in and through material substances may seem strange until one considers the doctrine of transubstantiation whereby the eucharistic sacraments of bread and wine are transformed into Christ’s real presence as body and blood—though without any appreciable change on the outside. Hypothetically opposed to gendered theologico-philosophical hierarchies of male spirit/mind over and against female body/matter, Auerbach’s reading, in which truth’s progress concludes with becoming history 28 Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, 53. 29 Fletcher, Allegory, 7. 30 Augustine, De doctrina Christiana, 2.40 (p. 125). 31 Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, 36.

32 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

or flesh, affords new hermeneutical possibilities for the (status of) female bodies in Rubens’s religious art.

Ways of Proceeding: Frameworks and Formal Concerns This book means to show that over the course of his career Rubens’s religious art evolves to a point where the female form figures quintessentially Rubensian powers of peacemaking, reproduction, and devotion in typological and trans-historical ways his male personae never could. I relate this evolution to changing relationships with the women in Rubens’s life—not only his living patrons, wives, and children but the Virgin Mary and other female saints he perceived to be potent and worthy of respect. Support might conceivably be sought for this argument in the documentary evidence of Rubens’s professional and intellectual life. In addition to inventories of his book purchases and art collections, this material includes a fairly large body of personal correspondence.32 The first editor of the Codex diplomaticus Rubenianus, Charles Ruelens, once conjectured that Rubens may have penned as many as 8,000 letters in his lifetime. Unfortunately, only a few hundred letters by his hand are known today. Among these one encounters occasional, if indirect, indications of Rubens’s opinions about living or historical women’s intellectual capacities and essential nature and these will be duly examined here. But with a handful of notable exceptions, the portion of Rubens’s letters that have survived—spanning his mature career but overwhelmingly concerned with diplomatic matters, war-related intelligence, and current events—provide little in the way of references to art, whether his own or that of others. More frustratingly still, discussions by the artist of the women in his works are quite rare, especially with regard to his religious paintings. Happily, we have the art. My way into Rubens has always been close looking. Here, focusing at times on details of little interest to previous viewers, I train feminist, historical-theological, and queer gazes on a selection of Rubens’s gynocentric ‘religious’ subjects and other imagery of women less obviously informed by Catholic doctrine. The works considered are but a small sample of the thousands of paintings and drawings attributed to Rubens.33 I am convinced that more attempts can be profitably made to interpret Rubens’s art diachronically within his own massive and far from static oeuvre. In the words of Hayden White, “it can be argued that interpretation in history consists 32 Based on the partially inherited library of his son, Albert, Rubens’s collection of some 500 volumes was perhaps the largest and most comprehensive associated with an early modern artist. See Arents, De bibliotheek de Pieter Pauwel Rubens, 80. 33 According to the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, Rubens’s oeuvre comprises some 2,500 compositions and around 10,000 works of art, www.rubenianum.be/en/content/corpus-rubenianum-ludwigburchard (accessed 16 December 2019)

Introduc tion

33

of the provisions of a plot structure for a sequence of events so that their nature as a comprehensible process is revealed by their figuration as a story of a particular kind.”34 The plot structure that follows is more Jacob Burckhardt than Ludwig Burchard—and intentionally, as it tracks what I perceive to be significant changes over a career of some four decades. In this respect I depart from what, in the hands of many Rubens scholars, has become an edifying approach to Rubens’s art through synchronic microhistories and technical, philological, or iconological case studies. My hope is that with all the archival, iconographical, and historical scholarship available to today’s Rubenists—with so much important work now accomplished—it is possible to write about the artist in ways that recognize this invaluable research while modestly expanding, even intervening in, accounts of Rubens and his art to date.35 Toward this goal, this book is in historiographical conversation with many well-known studies of Rubens. Analyzing the uses and abuses of gender in canonical scholarship and its common sources allows me to make the case that art historians and critics continually marshal conservative and limiting notions of sex difference and female beauty to manage Rubens, his art, and indirectly, the bodies of real women ourselves. In positing the centrality and figurative multivalence of the female body in Rubens’s works, my arguments typically begin with his formal and compositional choices and, in Michael Baxandall’s terms, with the problems (technical and social) they seek to address and the questions they raise.36 Perhaps the most overarching of these is the so-called ‘woman question,’ or querelle des femmes, a cultural debate over the status of women that reached a peak during Rubens’s lifetime. Some of the concerns and claims of the querelle set the stage for my analysis of specific paintings. But I have not tried to offer anything approaching a history of the representation of gender and sex difference in seventeenth-century Europe—or even in the art of Rubens’s own Spanish Netherlands. Nor should Maria de’ Medici and the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia, the two female sovereigns on whom I concentrate, be taken as illustrative of women more generally since their (perceived) exceptionality was arguably the source of their power to begin with. When Rubens paints women he draws on past and present conventions of masculinity and femininity in order to endow his figures with biological sex as well as rhetorical gender. In his religious works, rather remarkably, sex and gender do not always run on parallel tracks. This accords with at least some branches of Christian theology, where, as we will see, personages such as the ephebic disciple Christ loved 34 White, Tropics of Discourse, 58. 35 The encyclopedic Antwerp-based research project known as the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard is the only investigative project of its kind devoted to a single artist. Currently the Corpus consists of some twenty-nine parts in forty volumes devoted to cataloguing and explicating the various genres and subjects of which Rubens’s art is comprised. It is projected to be completed in 2020. 36 See Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, 14–15.

34 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

and/or John the Evangelist, or the virile, standing Virgin Mary/stabat mater, have been assigned traits traditionally associated with the ‘opposite’ sex. Paradoxically, in this regard, the querelle des femmes was rooted in a distinctive brand of clerical misogyny that relied on philosophical and theological binary oppositions to fuel its battle of the sexes. As Joan Scott has described historical circumstances of this sort: “the binary opposition and the social process of gender relationships both become part of the meaning of power itself.” Scott goes on to observe that “changes in the organization of social relationships always correspond to changes in representations of power, but the direction of change is not necessarily one way.”37 These two contentions, subsets of a now-classic definition, propose gender as a proper category for historical analysis, but one from which power is inseparable. Scott’s framework is doubly applicable to the realm of art, where representation is too often presumed to be the effect of a social or institutional cause rather than the other way around. For historians, Scott contends, the “interesting” questions are: “which symbolic representations are invoked, how, and in what contexts?”38 In focusing on the always-already symbolic nature of the female body, these are my questions as well, though I am equally interested in what I perceive to be Rubensian figuration’s frustration of historical directionality in the name of Godly time. *** This study moves chronologically through Rubens’s career from roughly his first decade back in Antwerp until his retirement from diplomatic service in the mid1630s, a few years before his death. Chapter 1 investigates Rubens’s developing representational strategies for depicting sex difference and female power in early works made on either side of his Italian journey (1600–8). I examine three very different Rubensian couples—Samson and Delilah, Self-Portrait with Isabella Brant, and Hercules and Omphale—as pictures not only in dynamic dialogue with one another but also in relation to conventional depictions of marriage, both sacred and secular. Chapter 2 continues with the highly productive period corresponding to the Truce of 1609–21, when Rubens would secure commissions for the iconic Antwerp Crucifixions and execute a suite of complex mythological paintings, including the deceptively prosaic Juno and Argus. Rarely examined alongside these works are the artist’s contemporaneous depictions of the Virgin Mary’s Assumption, proposed here as a via media between Rubens’s previous Michelangelesque imagery and his increasingly Venetian approach to making pictures.

37 Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category,” 1067. For a highly useful overview of the incalculable impact of Scott’s essay on subsequent feminist history, see Elliott, “Ages of Joan Scott,” 1390–1403. 38 Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category”, 1067.

Introduc tion

35

A diptych of sorts, Chapter 3 provides a comparative study of Rubens’s most inventive and important, though dramatically different, large-scale programs for female patrons. The commissions were executed consecutively in the mid-1620s for Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia. Two of the Thirty Years War’s best-known and embattled female rulers, both women endeavored to portray themselves as divinely appointed sovereign widows, receiving strikingly different artistic responses from Rubens. Chapter 4 concludes the chronology with a close reading of homoerotic imagery in the London Peaceful Reign of King James as it engages Old Testament tropes of reconciliation and peacemaking. The chapter’s focus, Peace Embracing Plenty, is one of the painted subjects in the Whitehall Banqueting House ceiling program installed in 1636. Taking up Rubens’s critical and biographical fortunes beginning shortly after his death in 1640, the fifth and final chapter traces the feminization of the artist and his style in art writing of the seventeenth century and beyond.

Works Cited Åkerman, Susanna, Queen Christina of Sweden and her Circle (Leiden/New York: E.J. Brill, 1991). Alpers, Svetlana, The Making of Rubens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). ———, “Manner and Meaning in Some Rubens Mythologies,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 30 (1967), 272–95. Anon., “The Lover of Beauty; or Which will He Wed?” in The Analyst: Monthly Journal of Science, Literature, and the Fine Arts, I (London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1834), 307–18, 400–11. Arckenholtz, Johan, Memoires concernant Christine reine de Suede, pour servir d’eclaircissement a l’histoire de son regne et principalement de sa vie privee, et aux evenements de l’histoire de son tems civile et literaire, 4 vols. (Amsterdam/Leipzig, 1751–60). Arents, Prosper, De bibliotheek de Pieter Pauwel Rubens: een reconstructie (Antwerp: Vereniging der Antwerpse Bibliofielen, 2001). Auerbach, Erich, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). Augustine, De doctrina Christiana, ed. and trans. by R.P.H. Green (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Baskins, Cristelle and Lisa Rosenthal, eds., Early Modern Visual Allegory: Embodying Meaning (Aldershot/ Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007). Baxandall, Michael, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). Belkin, Kristin, Rubens (London: Phaidon, 1998). Benjamin, Walter, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 1998). Carroll, Margaret, “The Erotics of Absolutism: Rubens and the Mystification of Sexual Violence,” in Painting and Politics in Northern Europe (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press), 96–101. Cohen, Sarah R., “Rubens’s France: Gender and Personification in the Marie des Médicis Cycle,” Art Bulletin, 85 (September 2003), 490–522. Elliott, Dyan, “The Three Ages of Joan Scott,” American Historical Review, 113 (December 2008), 1390–1403. Fineman, Joel, “The Structure of Allegorical Desire,” in Allegory and Representation, ed. Stephen J. Greenblatt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964), 26–60. Fletcher, Angus, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964). Greenblatt, Stephen J., ed., Allegory and Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).

36 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Herremans, Valérie, “The Legitimate Use of Images: Depiction, Retable and Veneration in Post-Tridentine Flanders,” Simiolus, 38 (2015–16), 118–30. Johnson, Geraldine, “Pictures Fit for a Queen: Peter Paul Rubens and the Marie de’ Medici Cycle,” Art History, 16 (September 1993), 447–69. Kelley, Theresa, Reinventing Allegory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Lamster, Mark, “L’Esthétique du ‘more is more,’” in Sensualité et volupté: le corps féminin dans la peinture flamande du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle, exh. cat. Musée de Flandre/Cassel (Milan: SilvanaEditoriale, 2010), 28–33. McGrath, Elizabeth, “Tact and Topical Reference in Rubens’s ‘Medici Cycle,’” Oxford Art Journal, 3 (October 1980), 11–17. Magurn, Ruth, ed. and trans., The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1955). Miles, Margaret, Carnal Knowing (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1989). Minear, Paul S., “Time and the Kingdom,” Journal of Religion, 24.2 (April 1944), 77–88. Moore, George, The Lake (New York: Appleton & Co., 1905). Plaskow, Judith and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “Martin Marty Award Conversation between Judith Plaskow and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 29 (Spring 2013), 165–86. Pollock, Griselda, “Whither Art History?” Art Bulletin, 96 (March 2014), 9–23. Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions and Politics (London: Printed for R. Ackerman, by L. Harrison, December 313/2, 1815). Reynolds, Joshua, A Journey to Flanders and Holland, ed. Harry Mount (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Rosenthal, Lisa, Gender, Politics, and Allegory in the Art of Rubens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Sauerländer, Willibald, The Catholic Rubens: Saints and Martyrs, trans. David Dollenmayer (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2014). Scott, Joan, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review, 91 (December 1986), 1053–75. Sheriff, Mary, “The Naked Truth: The Allegorical Frontispiece and Women’s Ambition in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Early Modern Visual Allegory, ed. Cristelle Baskins and Lisa Rosenthal (Aldershot/Burlington: Ashgate, 2007), 243–64. Stein, Judith Ellen, “The Iconography of Sappho: 1775–1875,” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1981. Tuve, Rosemond, Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval Books and their Posterity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). Valantassis, Richard, ed., The Subjective Eye: Essays in Culture, Religion, and Gender in Honor of Margaret Miles (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2006). Warner, Marina. Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). White, Hayden, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Zirpolo, Lilian H., “Christina of Sweden’s Patronage of Bernini: The Mirror of Truth Revealed by Time,” Woman’s Art Journal, 26 (Spring–Summer 2005), 38–43.

1. Samson and Dilemma

Rubens Confronts the Woman on Top Abstract This chapter proposes two of Rubens’s early dyadic couples—the Ovidian characters Hercules and Omphale (c.1606) and the Old Testament figures Samson and Delilah (1609)—as iconographical and compositional keys to his well-known Self-Portrait with Isabella Brant (1609), one of the early seventeenth century’s rare life-size depictions of a husband and wife within the same frame. Paying particular attention to such aspects of the paintings as Rubens’s placement of the women in relation to the men, the role of drapery and (cross-)dress, and the biblical topoi to which all three images gesture, this chapter reveals the Self-Portrait’s potential ambiguity, perhaps a mirror of Rubens’s own shifting notions of sex difference. Keywords: Rubens; gender; marriage portrait; Samson and Delilah; Hercules and Omphale; Isabella Brant; woman on top And thus Sampsons inordinate affection towards a wicked woman caused him to loose Gods excellent giftes, and became a slaue vnto them, whom hee should haue ruled. Where wee see howe dangerous a thing it is, for any man or woman to giue place too much to our affections, for if we doe, without doubt we shall be sure to be destroyed, as Sampson was by Dalila, who thus by wicked daliance betraid him to the Philistines for money. Iudg. 16.4. &c ‒ Thomas Bentley, The Sixth Lamp of Virginitie (1582)1

The reclining anti-heroine of Rubens’s Samson and Delilah (Fig. 1.1), painted around 1609, is widely believed to derive from Michelangelo’s sculpted Night (Fig. 1.2), of which he made a chalk drawing.2 As an elaboration on the endlessly popular Renaissance topos of the sleeping nymph or reclining Venus, Rubens’s Delilah appealed to the same tradition Michelangelo helped re-establish. Yet compositional changes introduced by Rubens, such as the transformation of the somnolent Night’s inward and melancholic closure into the falsely tender openness of cunning Delilah, 1 Bentley, Sixth Lamp of Virginitie, 141. 2 See, for example, Kahr, “Delilah,” 294. Lyon, J.V., Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789463722216_ch01

38 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Fig. 1.1. Peter Paul Rubens, Samson and Delilah, c.1609, London, National Gallery. Photo: National Gallery, London, UK/Bridgeman Images.

underscore the moral message of the biblical story: illicit sexual encounters only hasten one’s undoing; for men and women alike, coming together can mean coming apart. Thus whereas the androgynous Night is formally, narratively, and ontologically sufficient, Delilah is only Delilah with Samson in the picture.3 For this reason it is more appropriate to relate Rubens’s Delilah to Michelangelo’s lost tempera painting of Leda and the Swan (1529–31), now known only from sixteenth-century copies and a print (Fig. 1.3), and of which Rubens made two similar versions sometime around 1600–2 (e.g. Fig. 1.4). Rubens’s copies of Michelangelo’s overtly sexualized pairing of beauty and beast exist as the perfect middle term between Night and his own Samson and Delilah. In the copy, Rubens has softened, and one might say de-idealized, Leda’s features rendering her that much more human. Even such subtle additions as the loose tendrils of hair at the nape of Leda’s, now less phallic, neck, and the elongation of her heavy-lidded, more almond-shaped eyes, result in a massive yet more conventionally feminine female form. Leda’s bare feet, their soles vulnerably 3 Although Night’s arm does not resemble Delilah’s there are formal similarities between her raised arm and that of Rubens’s reconstructed Borghese Hermaphrodite, whose pose differs from that of the original sculpture.

Samson and Dilemma

39

Fig. 1.2 . Michelangelo Buonarroti, Night, in the tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici, c.1519–34, Florence, Cappelle Medicee, Basilica of San Lorenzo. Photo: Cappelle Medicee, San Lorenzo, Florence, Italy/Bridgeman Images.

exposed and toes arched, are also echoed in Delilah, whose bowed head, high, round breasts and erect nipples find their source in Leda as well. None of which is to ignore, as many have, the inverse positions of the avian Jupiter and the sleeping Samson. It is the latter whose pitiable obliviousness is echoed in the poet Michelangelo’s nocturnal prosopopoeia. Vasari quotes the poem as the master’s wistful response to one of the many versified tributes to his sculpture for the Medici tombs: “Dear to me is sleep, and dearer to be of stone while wrongdoing and shame prevail; not to see, not to hear, is a great blessing: so do not awaken me; speak softly.”4 These poignant lines could just as well have been spoken by the Old Testament strongman as the Platonic personification. Yet in Samson’s case the loss of sight was no blessing. It is, instead, metaphorically punitive, a graphic figuration of his blameworthy—and self-inflicted—spiritual blindness. In the biblical account, therefore, this monumental male is far from flawless. In fact, the story of Samson and Delilah—unlike the biblical exemplum of Judith and Holofernes, also essentially the tale of a strong man’s undoing by a single-minded woman—leaves neither character unindicted. As the epigraph’s 4

Cited in Vasari, Lives, 369.

40 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Fig. 1.3. Cornelis Bos after Michelangelo, Leda and the Swan, c.1544–66, New York, Metropolitan Museum. Photo: Metropolitan Museum, New York (Creative Commons Zero).

Fig. 1.4. Peter Paul Rubens after Michelangelo, Leda and the Swan, c.1600–2, London, National Gallery. Photo: private collection photo, ©Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images.

Samson and Dilemma

41

Fig. 1.5. Lucas van Leyden, Samson and Delilah, c.1507, New York, Metropolitan Museum. Photo: Metropolitan Museum, New York (Creative Commons Zero).

biblical commentator suggests: if Delilah was sinfully covetous of money, Samson was fatally covetous of her. Despite the moral ambiguity of its hero, by Rubens’s time, the story of Samson and Delilah (Fig. 1.5) had long formed a part of a larger series portraying the devious Powers of Women. (The subject was made popular through sixteenth-century prints by Lucas van Leyden and others, examples of which included Phyllis riding a humiliated Aristotle and Hercules tricked into

42 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

cross-dressing and spinning by an oversexed Omphale.)5 As a sacred story with secular appeal, Samson and Delilah offered Rubens the perfect context in which to advance a moralizing account not only of sex difference but also of sex and the inherent, perhaps even inevitable, weakness displayed by men and women continually beset by their inordinate affections.6 Ripe for eroticization, the story already implies the role of irresistible feminine wiles, greed, and unbridled passion in Samson’s earthly downfall—as well as Delilah’s seeming triumph. In Judges 16, we read that Samson was “enticed” by the woman Delilah, who has agreed to discover the source of his strength at the behest of a group of Philistines, each of whom has promised to pay her “eleven hundred pieces of silver.” Madlyn Kahr mapped the graphic tradition of Samson and Delilah imagery, which has roots in Burgundian manuscripts and was employed for both secular and religious ends by early Northern Renaissance master engravers such as Dürer and Lucas as well as Italian contemporaries such as Andrea ­Mantegna (Fig. 1.6).7 But while Rubens was certainly familiar with this genre of generally small-scale, printed images, his composition departs from the reigning graphic paradigm in important ways. First, as previous scholars have noted, the nocturnal setting and cavelike, intimately domestic interior are two innovations in the Flemish painting. For just as the Edenic environs of the double portrait with Isabella Brant of the same year (about which more will be said below) encourage its association with imagery of Adam and Eve (Figs. 1.7; 1.8), the portrayal of a woman simultaneously in control of her man and confined within the walls of a candlelit contemporary bedroom easily evokes the risky spaces of the brothel. Rubens may have arrived at this solution from the text itself, which opens with Samson’s visit to a “harlot” in Gaza, with whom he lays until midnight. In any case, it is the soon-to-be violated comfort of Delilah’s luxe lair—conspicuously displaying a pagan statue of Venus and Cupid and richly laid with textiles—that suggests her occupation as a lady of the night. The presence of a hag-like would-be procuress and effeminate male servant resolve any doubts the viewer might have about Delilah’s profession. With this established, Rubens is free to depict Delilah in a wanton state of undress, contrasting her plump and luminous décolletage with Samson’s sun-kissed, muscular arm. The portrayal of Delilah in this manner is significant for Rubens, who with a 5 See, for example, Philip Galle’s six-part engraving, The Might of the Woman c.1605, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, illustrated in Lurie, “Gerard van Honthorst: Samson and Delilah,” 333. Davis, “Women on Top,” mentions Bruegel’s Dulle Griet (c.1562) in the context of the Spanish Netherlands, 129. 6 Aligned with her sustained interest in humanistic (rhetorical) exempla, Georgievska-Shine, “Rubens and the Tropes of Deceit,” 465, deftly mobilizes Leonard Barkan’s notion of “diachronic transumption”—a somewhat secularized version of figuration—to describe the intertextual allusions between Rubens’s painting and an astounding range of classical, as well as patristic, sources, Leda in particular. 7 Kahr, “Delilah.”

Samson and Dilemma

43

Fig. 1.6. Andrea Mantegna, Samson and Delilah, c.1500, London, National Gallery. Photo: National Gallery, London, UK/Bridgeman Images.

mercenary courtesan in mind, concocts what appears to be the first fully realized version of the Tintorettesque bare-breasted woman in a red dress, who will continually reappear in his future works as a symbol of emotive femininity literally spilling over its material constraints.8 In the pictorial time of Rubens’s image, the scene is captured toward the end rather than in the middle of the action. Samson has “told Delilah all his heart” and she has entreated him to “sleep upon her knees.” The textual specificity of this description 8 See, for example, the nursing woman in the side panel of the Antwerp Raising of the Cross (1611); the reddressed woman in the London Massacre of the Innocents (1611); Juno in the Munich Juno and Argus (1611).

44 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Fig. 1.7. Hendrik Goltzius, The Temptation, c.1597, private collection. Photo: private collection/Bridgeman Images.

explains the arrangement unanimously adopted by early modern artists, virtually all of whom portray an upright Delilah hovering over a prostrate or reclining Samson. Although Rubens is no exception in this regard, his near-nude Samson, whose rippling, almost topographically descriptive back occupies the center of the composition, is, I think, unprecedented.

Samson and Dilemma

45

Fig. 1.8. Titian [Tiziano Vecellio], Adam and Eve, c.1550, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Prado, Madrid, Spain/ Bridgeman Images.

It has been suggested that Rubens’s sleeping behemoth is based on the Roman statue known as the Farnese Hercules (Fig. 1.9), whose mythological subject shared notable biographical and physiological similarities with his Old Testament type.9 Both Hercules and Samson were emasculated by women, Omphale and Delilah, respectively; both men’s solidity, strength, and virility were metaphorically symbolized by the pillars which factor in their narratives—positively for Hercules, who erects a pair of columns at the successful conclusion of his tenth labor, and negatively, for 9 See Muller, “Rubens’s Theory and Practice,” 236. Rubens made a black chalk drawing of the Farnese Hercules, now in the Ambrosiana, Milan.

46 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Fig. 1.9. Farnese Hercules, third-century Roman copy, Naples, Capitoline Museum. Photo: Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples, Campania, Italy, Mondadori Portfolio/Electa/Sergio Anelli/Bridgeman Images.

the martyred Samson, who uses brute force to bring down the pillars supporting the house of his enemy—killing himself in the process. Though Hercules boasts a longer and more elaborate litany of awe-inspiring feats and near disasters, Samson, in the words of a nineteenth-century biblical scholar, “is the muscular, intrepid, religious, rollicking Hercules of sacred story.”10 Discovered in 1546, the Farnese Hercules was 10 Boardman, “Story of Samson,” 88.

Samson and Dilemma

47

still something of a novelty when Rubens reached Italy in 1600. For him, the Roman statue’s blockish head, lavishly curled beard, pugnacious features, and chiefly, his brawny physique, would easily have provided a compelling exemplar for a colossal scriptural personage such as Samson. It is possible, moreover, that Rubens intended to suggest the latent fortitude, and even the inward mettle, of his wayward, sleeping giant. But the ‘leaning’ Hercules, as the upright Farnese sculpture is sometimes called, seems only vaguely related to the slumping Samson, who remains asleep in Delilah’s lap in a state of “postcoital repletion.”11 The ancient sculpture, conversely, depicts the tired but triumphant Hercules following the completion of his labors—still standing and, miraculously, not yet spent. Any formal similarity between the two figures lies in their facial features and the exaggerated musculature and rigor of their overlong arms, details that carry through from Rubens’s preparatory pen-and-ink drawings and oil sketches to the final painting.12 In the figure of Samson, for iconographical as well as aesthetic reasons, Rubens has clearly settled on a distillation of sheer physicality in the form of muscular definition and the strength it implies—even in a state of rest. In this regard, Rubens’s Herculean Samson bears a strong resemblance to two studies from around the same time known as the Kneeling Man in Rotterdam and the Louvre Crouching Man Lifting a Heavy Object (Fig. 1.10). Some scholars have suggested that these sheets were drawn by the artist in his studio ‘from life,’ in the modern sense, that is, with a live model in view.13 Yet, as Catherine Lusheck points out in her invaluable study of the rhetorical nature of these two graphic and “glyphic” works, Rubens was of an ambivalent if not antagonistic mindset where live models were concerned.14 In the words of a contemporary English art writer, Edward Norgate: “Sir Peter Paul Rubens told me that at his being in Italy diverse of his nation had followed the Academy course for 20 years together to little or no purpose.”15 Toward the achievement of the robust male nude, Rubens evidently valued the imitation of art more highly than the imitation of life.16 For him as for Michelangelo, a dynamic figure evocative of male activity, constrained by artifice yet always implicitly about to spring forth or rise, such 11 Sutton et al., Drawn by the Brush, 90. 12 See, in particular, Rubens’s highly finished oil sketch for Samson and Delilah, c.1609, Cincinnati Art Museum; and the pen-and-ink wash drawing in a private collection, Amsterdam, illustrated in Sutton et al., Drawn by the Brush, 90–91. 13 Lusheck, Rubens and the Eloquence of Drawing, 171. 14 Lusheck, Rubens and the Eloquence of Drawing, 172–73, cites the English writer Edward Norgate, whose Art of Limning, published c.1648, some twenty years after its dedication, suggests to her that “Norgate’s account highlights the artist’s eventual dismissal of the slavish drawing of academies as a waste of time and effort given their stifling, deadening effect on his art.” 15 Edward Norgate, MS Haarlem 60000 (London, British Museum), fol. 12v, in Norgate, Miniatura or the Art of Limning, ed. and trans. Muller and Murrell, quoted in Lusheck, Rubens and the Eloquence of Drawing, 173. 16 See Muller, “Rubens’s Theory and Practice,” 232–35.

48 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Fig. 1.10. Peter Paul Rubens, Crouching Man Lifting a Heavy Object, c.1609, Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: ©Réunion des musées nationaux-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York.

as the Prophet Ezekiel (Fig. 1.11) or the Belvedere torso on which he is based, would have served as a worthy model for a compressed if innately forceful male nude.17 As such, the Boijmans sketch and the Louvre’s Crouching Man, single-figure studies that appear as if they could have been executed after a model in Rome or Florence—or heightened and reworked based on an extant drawing—crystallize Rubens’s interest in what Lusheck has termed synecdochical masculinity.18 In Rubens’s sheets, the long, strong arm and the architectonic, weight-bearing back are indeed parts that imply or stand for the whole. Anatomy as iconographical attribute is one way to understand Rubens’s approach. Thus in the figura of Samson-Hercules, the enormous, articulated arm becomes a representative part not only of the man in question but of manhood itself. Conspicuous in the two chalk studies as well as the painting is the structural presence of Samson’s huge, simian-looking hand, the fists or knuckles of which serve to balance the weighty body like the foot of a tripod. Whether the strapping male in question is literally or figuratively in a state of 17 The history of these statues and their fortunes in Renaissance art and thought are elucidated by Summers, “Contrapposto.” 18 Lusheck, Rubens and the Eloquence of Drawing, 190.

Samson and Dilemma

49

Fig. 1.11. Peter Paul Rubens after Michelangelo, Prophet Ezekiel, c.1605, Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: Louvre (Cabinet de dessins), Paris, France/Bridgeman Images.

inactivity, his tensed muscles and bulging veins remain a constant; an implicit claim to the figure’s might. In a culture where paintbrushes were likened to penises, it is not necessary to repair to the commonplaces of psychoanalysis to consider the possibility that in Samson and his kneeling, crouching, even detumescent, figures of men Rubens implies the presence of one male member through the prominence of another. In Rubens’s oeuvre, as Lusheck has noted, some body parts in particular are endowed with an “expressive power,” even though, “Rubens did not locate this male potentiality primarily in the genitalia, but in other massive, highly visible sites of the male body, particularly the muscles of the shoulders, legs, arms, and back.”19 How 19 Lusheck, “Content in Form,” 142.

50 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Fig. 1.12. Titian, Entombment, c.1559–60, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York.

else to read the arm’s position as it plunges through Delilah’s vermillion folds? Which begs the question: did the thirty-something Rubens also conceive of femininity in a similarly synecdochical manner? In the most basic sense this was unnecessary, for the portrayal of women’s breasts, the external anatomical marker of difference with which the sex as a whole is most frequently associated, was well within the bounds of representational decorum (consider “Bosom,” a female character of Dickens often given as an example of synecdoche in twentieth-century dictionary definitions). Here however, Rubens goes one further. In addition to offering his beholders a bared breast sensually framed and delimited by a double band of ribbon, he proceeds to transform Delilah’s dress, endowed with at least as much tactile descriptiveness and care as Samson’s musculature, into a surrogate or symbol of her sex and his sexual entrapment. Whereas Delilah’s Petrarchan palette and enticing breasts betray both the secret of her success and the error of her ways, Samson’s nudity is proposed by the artist as both revealing and redemptive. Despite a moment of weakness, when stripped down to essentials, stalwart Samson is actually an invincible—and Christlike—hero. Faced with the ethical dilemma of Samson’s suicide, St. Jerome may have been the first to posit this figurative connection, arguing, as in a paraphrase by the Elizabethan divine, George Abbot: “Samson slue more at his death, then he did in all his life time, so

Samson and Dilemma

51

Fig. 1.13 . Frans Francken II, Banquet in the House of Nicolas Rockox, c.1630–35, Vienna, Liechtenstein Museum. Photo: Art Resource, New York.

Christ although while he liued, he gaue many a wound to Satan, by his miracles and his doctrine, yet it was his death and his suffering, that broke the back of hell and the verie heart of Satan.”20 With his dangling, perpendicular arm, Rubens’s Samson bears a passing resemblance to a deposed Christ, that of Titian’s Entombment (1559–60), for example (Fig. 1.12). But although in the story from Judges it is Samson who has been broken, Rubens’s Herculean back gives little indication of this to the beholder. Conversely, Delilah, pinned on her back by Samson, assumes her rightful position as a beautiful and unredeemed whore ergo a fallen woman. Her dangerous—because superficial—feminine beauty, quite unlike Samson’s innately blocklike masculine solidity, functions as a concealing disguise rather than a metaphor unveiled.21 One is hardly surprised that a woman like Delilah has been—and will be—bought for a price. Rubens’s painting was in fact purchased shortly after completion by Antwerp’s burgomaster, Nicolas Rockox.22 The civic-minded Rockox, like Rubens, an antiquarian and avid collector, became one of the artist’s most devoted patrons. In the engaging kunstkammer by Frans Francken (Fig. 1.13), painted some twenty years after the 20 Abbot, Exposition on the Prophet, 133. 21 Leaves from Rubens’s ‘pocketbook’ display his experimentation with geometrized Herculean forms, most notably iterations of cubed heads and bodies derived from antique marbles. See Lusheck, Rubens and the Eloquence of Drawing, 206. And see Muller, “Rubens’s Theory and Practice.” 22 For the painting’s patronage, see Georgievska-Shine, “Rubens and the Tropes of Deceit,” 460–61, 465, 468–69.

52 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

completion of Samson and Delilah, Rubens’s artistic supremacy is made clear by the painting’s physical dominance over the collector’s otherwise quite impressive assemblage of old masters. Rubens is identified here as the new master for a new age. His Italianate history painting seems deeply at home in a genre scene whose merrymaking men and women come dangerously close to violating Samson and Delilah’s supposed warning that unchecked sensual pleasures lead all too quickly to an unhappy fall. An anomalously Romanist painting some two decades old thus sets the tone in a scene intended to celebrate the patron’s good modern taste. The privileged position of the large canvas conveys Rubens’s status not only as one of the greatest baroque painters, but as one of the first baroque artists. A subject frequently depicted and popularized by Northerners, Samson and Delilah demonstrates the degree to which Rubens was capable of appropriating central Italian artistic idioms in the service of a cosmopolitan new kind of art for Flanders. The allegorical or figurative impulses to which Rubens continually responds afresh are among the most important and defining features of baroque art. Thus, as we have seen, the quasi-nude, christological Hercules offers so persuasive an argument for masculine inviolateness that the beholder is virtually unable to read the robust Samson as the tricked and emasculated whoremonger he truly is.23 By contrast, the figure of Delilah, channeled through two of Michelangelo’s best-known works—the sculpted Night and the painted Leda—has become less a historically significant individual woman than a symbolic vessel devised to hold and perform a certain type of femininity that is absorptive and confounding by nature. Read backward to the Renaissance, Rubens’s irresistible Delilah is Leda, the mother of Helen and a queenly beauty in her own right who according to Ovid, was “deceived by the swan.”24 Read forward to the Counter-Reformation, the bare-breasted, white-shouldered seductress might be viewed as a type of the iconic fallen woman and reputed former prostitute, Mary Magdalene. Conversely, but in line with his own coldly eroticized couples, Michelangelo remains safely at a distance from heteronormative intercourse. Nowhere in his related images are the powers of actual female actors at stake, or even on view. Michelangelo’s own peculiar confrontation of Rubens’s subject, his chalk drawing of Samson and Delilah (Fig. 1.14), probably dating from around the early stages of the Medici chapel sacristy sculptures, confirms the ways in which he and Rubens differ in 23 By contrast, Georgievska-Shine, “Rubens and the Tropes of Deceit,” 468, considers Rubens’s Samson to have been successfully subjected: “Rubens’s visual hint at the earthly woman who had humbled Zeus into changing into a form more beautiful than himself and, by extension, of her daughter, who would be endlessly and ruinously sought by men, provides a kind of poetic rationale for Samson’s submission.” 24 The full passage is “Leda makes Jove my father, deceived by the Swan, false bird she cherished in her trusting bosom.” Ovid, Heroides, trans. Showerman, 229. For this connection, see Georgievska-Shine, “Rubens and the Tropes of Deceit,” 467–70.

Samson and Dilemma

53

Fig. 1.14. Michelangelo, Samson and Delilah, c.1525–30, Oxford, Ashmolean Museum. Photo: Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, UK/Bridgeman Images.

figuring a moral. For while it seems likely that Michelangelo understood Samson as a powerful victim, a man unjustly brought low by his lust for a woman, the Italian artist fails to convey the viability of this narrative by employing a pixie-like Delilah. Apparently wary of giving the woman on top any real control, Michelangelo concocts an asymmetry of scale reminiscent of his lost Cupid and Venus (again known mainly from a copy, in this case by Pontormo; Fig. 1.15). Whatever sexual charge there may be to Michelangelo’s Samson remains predictably situated in the exposed genitals of an angry but appropriately placid, shorn giant, who has just awakened to find himself powerless. Such a graphic representation of Samson’s sex is, as we have seen, in contrast to Rubens’s more relational, figurative, and narratively complex approach. While Rubens’s hero is no less muscular or ostensibly potent, his plight is rendered acceptable, even logical, by Delilah’s full-bodied allure. Samson and Delilah thus marks a crucial shift in Rubens away from Otto Van Veen’s formal classicism toward naturalism in the philosophical, ‘empirical’ sense, that is, as direct observation of human/nature. From this point forward, one sees Rubens activating metaphorical signification not merely in the single, stand-alone personification, but through physical and psychological relationships between and among figures. Indeed, as Svetlana Alpers has shown, where

54 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Fig. 1.15. Jacopo Pontormo after Michelangelo, Cupid and Venus, c.1532–34, Florence, Galleria dell’Accademia. Photo: Florence, Galleria dell’Accademia & Museo degli Strumenti Musicali. Photo ©Nicolò Orsi Battaglini/Bridgeman Images.

passionate attachments are concerned, the dyadic pair will remain one of his most vital modes of expression.25 But the rather abrupt emergence in Rubens’s art of a complementary, if asymmetrical, understanding of sex difference and its conception in the transposable form of the signifying couple was, it seems, far from coincidental. In 1609, the same year he painted Samson and Delilah, Rubens married his first wife, Isabella Brant, the mother of three subsequent children, and a woman whom he famously described on the occasion of her early death some years later as “an excellent companion who had no feminine weakness, but was all goodness and honesty.”26 *** Like the other legends of the woman on top, Samson and Delilah is a cautionary tale—at least from a certain male perspective. Despite their story’s supposedly unhappy endings, however, the women whose actions shape these narratives are no 25 Alpers, Making of Rubens, 148–52, advances this argument primarily through a collection of dyads including several of those considered in this chapter. 26 Rubens to Pierre DuPuy, 15 July 1626, in Magurn, ed. and trans., Letters, no. 84, p. 136.

Samson and Dilemma

55

less central than the men whom the misfortunes befall. Rubens understood this. His struggle in these early encounters with ‘bad’ women is to find a way to simultaneously demonstrate and curtail their power. The distillation of biblical history into a kind of everyday allegory where the actors are represented in a more naturalistic style, as beings with a past and future, was an inventive conceptual solution with a long history in Northern art. Today’s art history, which often ignores the interpictorial/ intertextual sources for Rubens’s anti-heroines, has tended to see these defining early works and the altarpieces to follow, as evidence of Rubens’s unswerving devotion to the biological supremacy, aesthetic superiority, and iconographical transparency of the male nude. In view of Rubens’s increasingly conspicuous artistic and conceptual investment in the female form, however, centering masculinity fails to tell the whole story, in the process reaffirming maleness as both universal and art historically sufficient. For the feminist iconographer, the artist’s elision of Delilah-Leda-Night is equally significant as his merging of Samson-Hercules-Christ. What are we to make of Rubens’s recurring explorations of the expressive and rhetorical potential of female bodies and feminized forms if, as Lusheck writes: “Rubens’s robust males proved the most prominent and memorable figure types to which the artist turned to meet the demands of his increasingly rhetorical and political paintings, especially during the first and second decades of the seventeenth-century”? In the first place, we must consider Rubens’s confrontations with Renaissance femininity alongside his changing appraisals of male ideality as espoused by Italian artists such as Michelangelo, Giulio Romano, and Mantegna. There is no doubt that Rubens went to Italy, in the words of an approving Roger de Piles, “to see the most beautiful works of the ancients and moderns, to meditate upon them, to copy them, and to make his brush commensurate with what he would find most beautiful there.”27 It is also clear that while in Italy Rubens’s studies after Michelangelo, which included, in addition to Night and Leda, the Sistine sibyls, were not restricted to conventionally robust and/or male bodies and subjects. The commensuration of which de Piles writes occurs when Rubens returns to Flanders, where he must adapt what he has learned to the local culture. It is there that he earnestly embarks on the process of appropriation and figuration that will become so central to his lifelong practice. Only upon his return to Antwerp does Rubens seem to struggle with the proper way to incorporate the male nude into an established and locally prized Flemish vernacular, where the depiction of human bodies—male and female alike—tended to warrant neither less nor more attention than the theater of natural wonders, inanimate objects, and irresistibly rich materials in which Northern, and especially Flemish, art was historically invested.28 The radical allure of Michelangelo’s muscular male 27 De Piles, Dissertation, trans. Scott, 61. 28 Alpers, Art of Describing, 76–80.

56 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

physiques, with all the fitness and humanistic erudition they implied, was perhaps even more profound for Rubens as he renegotiated his place in Flemish society in the city of his youth and artistic formation.

Isabella Brant: Marrying Up Like his daring and successful Samson and Delilah of the same year, Rubens’s remarkable self-portrait with his first wife, Isabelle Brant (Plate 1), marks his return to an imminently peaceful Flanders and the beginning of his professional life post-Italy.29 The canvas is one of the first works produced by Rubens as the newly appointed royal painter to the archdukes Albert (1559–1621) and Isabella (1566–1633). Yet it is clearly devised to convince the viewer of its status as an extra-courtly, even intimate, portrayal of Rubens as a private citizen and a man at home in the world of aristocratic leisure. Endearingly candid yet carefully contrived, the portrait might also be interpreted as a manifesto of Rubens’s conventional, if evolving, beliefs about marriage and gender at the beginning of his family life and career. As Hans Vlieghe put it, leaving little room for debate over the painting’s formal language: “Rubens’s work in every way emphasizes the strength and inviolability of the marriage bond.”30 In the seventeenth century any composition in which a man and woman were the sole subjects was instinctively viewed as a primer on sex difference; to be female was, moreover, to be inferior by nature. There was, in Rubens’s day, sincere speculation about whether a truly good woman could exist since the Aristotelian designation of the female state “as being, as it were, a deformity” was widely accepted. This pervasive notion together with the Greek philosopher’s understanding of women as passive, material receptacles for male form—itself “the principle of movement”— provided an authoritative source for subsequent centuries of misogynistic thinking and writing.31 Articulated through and against a range of chauvinistic proof-texts, the querelle des femmes was an early modern controversy with legal and religious implications as well as artistic and literary ones. Throughout the seventeenth century, tracts and pamphlets alternately blaming and praising the female sex were published at a furious pace, particularly in England, France, and Italy. As previously noted, there is no explicit written documentation of Rubens’s belief in the defense of women or the equality of the sexes. But his extant correspondence does offer the occasional insight. 29 In 1609 a truce between the Spanish and the Dutch was concluded; the peace would last until 1621 when the terms were not renewed. Rubens’s Adoration of the Magi was commissioned to adorn the Chamber of States, where the peace was ratified. Belkin, Rubens, 99. For the details of the truce see, for example, Israel, Dutch Republic, 74–95. 30 Vlieghe, Portraits, 163. 31 Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals 1.1, 775a.

Samson and Dilemma

57

An early and interesting letter in this regard dates from just after Rubens’s return to Antwerp. It is 1609, and a light-hearted thirty-two-year-old Rubens writes to his former doctor in Rome, the papal botanist, Johann Faber, with details of his new life. The artist’s brother, Philip, is about to be married and as a result the siblings find themselves “unable to attend to anything but serving the ladies.”32 Rubens bewails the “intricate” nature of the forthcoming nuptials before providing the following genial observation: In short, my brother has been favored by Venus, the Cupids, Juno, and all the gods: there has fallen to his lot a mistress who is beautiful, learned, gracious, wealthy, and well-born, and alone able to refute the entire Sixth Satire of Juvenal.33

The painter ranks “beautiful” first in this list of wifely virtues—though, notably perhaps, this quality is immediately followed by learnedness. And learned a young bride would have to be in order to refute the numerous aspersions cast on the female sex by the narrator of Juvenal’s notorious screed.34 In citing the sixth satire, a caustic collection of womanly vices and misdeeds directed to the naive husband-to-be, Rubens demonstrates his humor, classical training, and possibly, a contrasting and more liberal view on the education of women. Judging from the cultured women in his circles, Rubens seems to approve of the conduct Juvenal laments in “the woman who as soon as she’s taken her place at dinner is praising Virgil and forgiving Elissa [Dido] on her deathbed, who pits the poets against each other and assesses them.”35 Nothing, as far as I know, is documented about the intellectual background of Philip’s wife-to-be, Maria de Moy, who belonged to an old Antwerp family. But considering Rubens’s comment, one can assume she was educated. A reference to Juvenal—whose anti-feminist vitriol is resuscitated in Bocaccio’s Il corbaccio, a counter-effort to De mulieribus claris—permits Rubens to establish his familiarity with misogynist sources without (necessarily) affirming their content. As the artist would have known, the sixth satire was addressed to wary young bachelors of exactly his rank, particularly those who might marry for convenience rather than love. Equating money with control and well-born women with wantonness, the epigrammist warns elsewhere in the same work that “a wealthy woman who marries a greedy man is in effect single.”36 32 Rubens to Johann Faber, Antwerp, 1609, in Magurn, ed. and trans., Letters, no. 20, p. 52. 33 Rubens to Johann Faber, Antwerp, 1609, in Magurn, ed. and trans., Letters, no. 20, p. 52. In a similar fashion, Juvenal’s narrator provides a list of ideal attributes: “She can be beautiful, graceful, wealthy, fertile,” Juvenal, Satires, 6.164, in Juvenal and Persius. 34 On the possibly sarcastic chauvinism of this Satire see for example, Smith, “Husband vs. Wife in Juvenal’s Sixth Satire”; but see, too, Kartzow, Gossip and Gender, 89–92. 35 Juvenal, Satires, 6.434–37, in Juvenal and Persius. For Rubens’s interest in Juvenal’s Satires in these early years see McGrath, “‘Not Even a Fly’: Rubens and the Mad Emperors,” 699. 36 Juvenal, Satires, 6.139, in Juvenal and Persius.

58 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Juvenal offered cold comfort to a man of Rubens’s costly tastes but limited means. Later the same year, the Roman author’s admonitions aside, the artist, too, had wed. In canny Isabella Brant, the daughter of prosperous and learned Jan Brant (and intriguingly, a niece of Maria de Moy), Rubens found a worthy spouse. Despite the obvious practical advantages of their union, Peter Paul and Isabella appear to have married for love and to have been genuinely happy and well-matched. The Brant family’s elite contacts proved endlessly useful to Rubens, who received some of his most important commissions during his first ten years in Antwerp, including the Prado Adoration of the Magi (1609) and the two monumental altarpieces: The Raising of the Cross (c.1611–13) and the Descent from the Cross (c. 1614).

Rubens in Love In 1608, upon receiving news of his mother’s rapidly deteriorating health following an asthma attack, Rubens had departed the duke of Mantua’s employ in haste, dashing off his last Italian letter “mounting horseback.”37 His mother, Maria Pipelincks, did not live to see her beloved son married to the clever daughter of one of the most respected humanists in Antwerp. But she would likely have been gratified that the woman’s father was, like her own long deceased husband, a lawyer, and a successful one at that. Rubens’s wedding occurred very shortly after he became court painter, an honor that can only have recommended him further to the Brant family. At the time of Isabella Brant’s marriage, her father, Jan, served as one of Antwerp’s four esteemed secretaries alongside, incredibly enough, Rubens’s brother Philip, and Philip’s fatherin-law, who, as mentioned, was Isabella Brant’s uncle.38 Rubens had thus married into an elite clique of civic-minded intellectuals—in the Brant’s case, also one of the richest families in Antwerp. As art historians have often noted, the Self-Portrait with Isabella Brant of 1609 can safely be seen as a pictorial assertion of the artist’s recently established place within the socially and intellectually ambitious orbit of his new Flemish family.39 The painting is compactly composed, its two full-length figures filling the large canvas to the exclusion of virtually anything else. It is a bourgeois double portrait of noble proportions, larger, at roughly 6 by 4½ feet (180 by 140 centimeters), than some of Rubens’s Italian altarpieces. In it the potent combination of the sitter’s monumentality and remarkable self-assurance might be said to verge on social presumption or pictorial wish-fulfillment. Yet Rubens has tempered the picture’s to-the-manor-born sensibilities by placing his subjects out of doors in an unexpectedly modest arbor 37 Rubens to Annibale Chieppio, Rome, 28 October 1608, in Magurn, ed. and trans., Letters, no. 19, p. 46. 38 Magurn, ed. and trans., Letters, 438. See also Belkin, Rubens, 98. 39 See, for example, Belkin, Rubens, 98–99.

Samson and Dilemma

59

Fig. 1.16. Jan Brueghel, Wedding Banquet Presided over by the Archdukes, c.1611–12, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York.

of flowering branches. Here beneath the shade of the honeysuckle on a clear-skied summer day, we find the artist seated on a stool, legs crossed nonchalantly, the fingers of his left hand lightly supporting the hilt of a sword. Isabella Brant, Rubens’s new wife, kneels gracefully by his side on the grass at her husband’s feet. Both sitters are splendidly attired in richly trimmed satins and cut velvets. Rubens has delineated nearly every thread of his own lace-and-linen falling collar and his wife’s impeccably starched cuffs and knife-edged cartwheel ruff—costly, locally made accouterments for which Flanders was famous. The artist’s wife displays a fashionable embroidered satin stomacher of the type once worn only by gentry but becoming more common among the moneyed merchant classes.40 She also wears the same kind of straw hat with a folded brim seen in Rubens and Brueghel’s collaborative courtly pastorals of the following decade, where the Archduchess Isabel is often seen similarly attired (Fig. 1.16). Although Isabella Brant wears mainly primary colors: a yellowish bodice over a red gown with blue lining or underskirts, Rubens is dressed in complementary hues: a dark green flocked satin doublet and startlingly stylish, iridescent orange silk hose. Placed at different levels, the two figures form a pleasingly continuous ‘S’-curve that begins at Rubens’s shoulder and continues through Isabella’s bejeweled left arm, 40 Ribeiro, “Fashion at Antwerp,” 665.

60 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

arching loosely at her side. Like the humanistic references in Rubens’s letter quoted above, this quietly performative painting projects something of his self-perception—or more precisely, something of the way in which he wished to be perceived: as a learned and tasteful master of art as well as women. Rubens thus strives to embody effortless elegance, for the painting is surely an essay in Flemish sprezzatura. Returned from a sojourn in Italy, he is also intent to convey the powers of his intellect. In the true humanist spirit this would have meant the intelligent restatement of ancient notions and authorities, of which Juvenal was among the best-known on the subject at hand, namely, marriage.

Early Modern Marriage and the Subjection of Women For early modern Christians marriage was a sacred institution with an incontrovertible scriptural heritage. Biblical teachings on marriage, widely believed to justify the subjection of women in society at large, found amplification in commentaries by the Fathers of the church, to which Counter-Reformation theologians continually referred. Of a handful of scriptural passages concerning marriage, one of the most frequently cited was the following, addressed by God to Eve in Genesis: “I will multiply thy sorrows, and thy conceptions: in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children, and thou shalt be under thy husband’s power, and he shall have dominion over thee” (Gen. 3:16, Douai-Rheims). It did not escape Early Christian commentators that after the fall the biblical references to the man and the woman become prescriptions for ‘husband’ and ‘wife.’ In patristic exegeses, woman’s subjugation and the pain experienced in childbirth are regarded as double punishments ordained by God for Eve’s original sin: that of woman’s disobedience. Of an inherently guilty Eve, progenitor of wifely subjection, St. Augustine had written further: “For we must believe that even before her sin woman had been made to be ruled by her husband and to be submissive and subject to him.”41 The Latin doctor thus added a tautological inequality by asserting that the dominion of husband over wife was in fact ordained by the natural order of things even before the knowledge of good and evil was discovered by a curious Eve. Notwithstanding the authority of patristic commentators, arguments against both scriptural and philosophical-scientific rationalizations for female incapacity and servitude were to be found throughout the Middle Ages. In the twelfth century, for example, Abelard, impressed by Heloise’s faith and achievements, had come to advocate the “dignity of women” and their more active participation in the life of the church.42 Yet a proto-feminist literary tradition as such cannot be said to have emerged until the mid-fifteenth century, when anti-misogynist vernacular discourse found its boldest 41 Augustine, Literal Meaning of Genesis, II, 171. 42 See, for example, Muckle, “Letter of Heloise on Religious Life.”

Samson and Dilemma

61

articulator in the Italian-born biographer of the Burgundian court. Christine de Pizan was the author of the famous City of Ladies as well as a series of level-headed letters penned in response to Jean de Meun’s scathingly anti-woman Romance of the Rose.43 In addition to proto-humanist responses to scholastic misogyny, the advent of the Protestant Reformation in 1517, also spelled radical changes for the Christian conception of women’s roles within church and home. Two of the most decisive of these changes were the dissolution of monasteries and convents and the related sanction of clerical marriage. It is surprising in some respects that the Protestant emphasis on the salutary effects of marriage was accompanied by the divestment of matrimony’s sacramental status by architects of the Reform such as Luther and Calvin. For Catholic theologians, the Reformers’ relegation of marriage from sacred act to civil ceremony was a travesty of the divine economy. In response to what they viewed as a heretical reversal of doctrine, the bishops at Trent reiterated the sacramental nature of matrimony in the Council’s twenty-forth session in 1563, which begins “the perpetual and indissoluble bond of matrimony was expressed by the first parent of the human race.”44 But the theological tide following the marriage in 1525 of Martin Luther, a former Augustinian monk, to Katherina von Bora, a former nun, was not to be stemmed. European views of the proper relationship between husband and wife would henceforth be dictated by a growing assortment of confessional attitudes, religious practices, and vernacular translations of the bible—Anglican, Lutheran, Calvinist, Zwinglian, and Catholic among others. In tandem with marital relations, the woman question also gained momentum at this time, propelled—as were the Protestant and Catholic Reformations—by advances in print technology. This reordering of doctrinal priorities and the cultural anxieties provoked by it are reflected in post-Tridentine art as well as literature. From Protestant, officially Anglican, England, as if in direct response to the recently published Decrees, came the entertaining Elizabethan dialogue A brief and pleasant discourse of duties in Mariage, called the Flower of Friendshippe (1568) by Edmund Tilney. Tilney’s text, composed as a courtly conversation along the lines of Castiglione’s Courtier, includes the following remarks from one Lady Isabella—whose name is the Spanish version of Elizabeth—on the matter of “Obedience”: I know not, quoth the Lady Isabella, what we are bound to do, but as meet is it, that the husband obey the wife as the wife the husband, or at the least that there be no superioritie betwene them, as the auncient philosophers have defended. For women have soules as wel as men, they have wit as well as men, and more apt for procreation of children then men.45 43 Christine de Pizan (c.1365–1440) had a literary career of over forty years. Warner provides an introduction to Christine’s life and works in her introduction to Christine de Pizan, Book of the City of Ladies. 44 Schroeder, trans., Canons and Decrees, 182. 45 Tilney, Flower of Friendship, 133.

62 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

The assertively pro-marriage and pro-procreation attitude of this lay author is usually ascribed to his desire to see his willfully single sovereign, Elizabeth I, safely wed. The Virgin Queen never did marry, of course, since English law allowed women to rule as princes, whether espoused or no. Marital power dynamics and sex difference were of continuing interest to early modern gender theorists on both sides of the equality debate. Yet given the popularity of these subjects in contemporary literature, it comes as a surprise that marriage portraits, particularly of untitled—or extra-biblical—sitters, were far from common in early seventeenth-century art, especially in Catholic countries. Rubens’s choice to paint a self-portrait with his wife was a purposeful one with the unstated but obvious goal of presenting himself as an exemplarily married gentleman. Yet the capacity of a representation of marriage—when grafted to self-portraiture—to construct his personal identity may also have intrigued a socially aspiring Catholic court painter. Combined, the two subgenres offered Rubens an opportunity to exploit the possibilities of the courtly full-length portrait while offering a nuanced visual discourse on the relation of the sexes as sanctified by the church.

Painting, Man, and Wife The novelty of Rubens’s composition is immediately obvious. As has been frequently noted, the absence of painterly attributes in a portrait of the artist—the canvas, brushes, and palette by which early modern painters are often accompanied—is a crucial divergence from previous (male) portraits where nobility of attitude, attire, and physiognomy mitigate the presence of art-making tools. In Rubens’s canvas, the substitution of sword for mahlstick clearly fixes the painter’s aspirations to the ranks of nobility from the very outset of his career.46 It also underscores his confidence in pictorial self-fashioning as a means of social advancement—not unlike marriage. In this sense, Isabella, too, as a wife who defines her husband’s status, functions in the painting as an abstract, meaning-making symbol or attribute. From a compositional standpoint, however, Isabella’s complementary role in Rubens’s image calls to mind female subjects from amorous pairings of mythological men and women whose genders are similarly defined by differences in posture and gesture. Ovid was the preferred source for narratives of this sort. Whether mined from the Fasti, the Heroides, or Metamorphoses, tales of love, lust, and loss among the gods and goddesses of ancient Rome provided early modern artists, patrons, and beholders with a safely indirect means of confronting real-life dynamics of sex and power. Speaking through the bodies of mythically randy satyrs and gullible nymphs an artist could advise, exalt, judge, and condemn. When asked to commemorate a marriage, he or she could use myth to embody what Augustine had termed “the 46 Belkin, Rubens, 98–99.

Samson and Dilemma

63

Fig. 1.17. Peter Paul Rubens, Hercules and Omphale, c.1606, Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: ©Réunion des musées nationaux-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York.

proper order of desire” without fear of retaliation or censorship since portrayals of pagan material were not implicated in Trent’s stringent rules for sacred painting.47 Rubens had produced a small number of mythological-allegorical works of this type while in Italy. Two of these, Hercules and Omphale (Fig. 1.17) and the Death of Adonis, were likely intended to commemorate the 1606 marriage of the Mantuan nobleman, Giovanni Vincenzo Imperiale.48 Frances Huemer, who first suggested this 47 See Schroeder, trans., Canons and Decrees, sess. 35, 1563, “On the Invocation, Veneration, and Relics of Saints and on Sacred Images,” 218–20. 48 The relationship of these two works as pendants, and the possibility that Venus and Adonis may predate Hercules and Omphale by as much as four years, is discussed by Rosenthal, Gender, Politics, and Allegory, 133–34.

64 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

purpose for the Ovidian paintings, saw the purported pendants as a manner of visual marriage counseling offered to the prospective bride and groom, who must guard equally against the natural inclinations of their sexes. “One painting,” she writes, “might be a warning to women not to be too domineering (like Spenser’s Omphale and Shakespeare’s Kate); the other a warning to men to seek peace (love) rather than war.”49 As visual advisements, the two paintings would have thus spoken to both bride and groom through a pair of love stories with tragic endings for the male characters. Huemer’s rather joyless interpretation captures the instructive spirit of Rubens’s stiff and workmanlike pictures. But it is the first ‘warning’ and the image from which it derives that Rubens appears to have drawn on for his own marriage portrait, made some three years later. Rubens’s Hercules and Omphale is a dense, carefully crafted painting, suffused—one could say inundated—with allusive and symbolic meaning. In it Rubens appeals to numerous and diverse visual sources, from Roman sarcophagi to his courtly precursor, the German mannerist, Bartolomeus Spränger (Fig. 1.18).50 A recurring theme in Northern as well as Italian art, Hercules and Omphale tells the tale of a woman disastrously in charge. Enlivened by a material exchange of power through cross-dressing, this Ovidian ‘perversion’ of gender roles has Omphale, the Lydian queen, arraying the vanquished hero in “gauzy tunics” and a “dainty girdle” while she takes on “the heavy club, the lion’s skin, and the lesser weapons stored in their quiver.”51 Rubens faithfully incorporates these details in a grottolike setting packed with didactic classical reliefs, sumptuous costumes, and even extra-textual characters such as a procuress and rapt cohort of juvenile woolworkers. From such darkly comedic condemnations of effeminized manhood the demigod received the epithet “distaff Hercules,” since part of his humiliation lies in being forced to take up the inescapably domestic women’s work of spinning. In an essential discussion of the genre, Lisa Rosenthal has shown the ways in which Rubens’s Hercules—and all distaff Hercules—can be associated with the early modern women-on-top or world-upside-down imagery so much a part of the Northern printmaking tradition.52 Art lovers of a humanistic bent would have relished the classical commonplaces used to illustrate the dangers of a dystopian world order in broadsheets and other inexpensive, heavily circulated prints showing “the inversion of multiple social hierarchies (such as class, age, and profession, as well as gender) alongside the upending of natural ones (such as relations of hunter and prey).”53 Rubens’s mannered distaff Hercules clearly participates in an Ovidian variant of this 49 Huemer, “Dionysiac Connection,” 574. 50 Huemer, “Dionysiac Connection,” 574; on sarcophagi and other Northern versions see Huemer, “Dionysiac Connection,” 565–68. 51 Ovid, Fasti 2, trans. Frazer, 313–20. 52 Rosenthal, Gender, Politics, and Allegory, 127–34. See also the pithy early essay by Zemon Davis, “Women on Top.” 53 Rosenthal, Gender, Politics, and Allegory, 129.

Samson and Dilemma

65

Fig. 1.18. Bartolomeus Spränger, Hercules and Omphale, c.1585, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York.

genre. Yet it is not the book-smart iconography but rather the straightforward inversion of gender conventions that gives this work its satirical and moralizing impact. The painting’s most telling compositional move in this regard is surely that of the standing woman and the seated man. This reversal of the traditional sexual hierarchy associated with masculine vigilance and feminine passivity immediately signals the unnaturalness of the male-female relationship on view. Although classical sources typically show the two figures on the same (ground) level, previous Renaissance artists had also seized on the conceit of asymmetrical poses to signify an imbalance in power. Rubens seems to be using Spränger’s version of the subject as his primary source of inspiration, freely borrowing basic architectural elements such as the socle

66 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

and plinth as well as the general sitting-standing format of the principal characters. Yet the degree to which Rubens heightens the spatial discrepancy between the elevated Omphale—raised further by a block of stone—and the put-upon Hercules is worth noting. As of course, is the Flemish artist’s addition of the notorious ear-tweaking, which adds a humorous infantilizing note even as it renders the hero more pathetic. More could be said in another context about the interesting points of divergence between Rubens and Spränger, whose works are both more farcical and psychically murky by comparison. To mention just two departures from Spränger’s model: Rubens, the younger artist, renders Omphale frontally in a bold and sensible change that allows the classically trained painter to render, as Huemer notes, “the divine belly” or omphalos. With her coyly crossed legs, Rubens’s Omphale thus becomes a convincing iteration of Raphael’s Eve, a fitting allusion that also anticipates the similar sitting-standing opposition in Rubens/Brueghel’s Paradise with the Fall of Man (1615). With regard to Rubens’s marriage portrait, moreover, Hercules and Omphale provides a classical corollary to the biblical text describing, and morally positioning, the original husband and wife. In the Italian picture he makes it formally clear that the woman’s superior height is achieved by artificial, or false, means. He also situates her on Hercules’s pictorially inferior or ‘sinister’ left. By relating Omphale to Eve through her crossed legs and problematically agential status, Rubens encourages the beholder to see her true identity just as he projects the stronger and more heroic sculptural form of the Belvedere torso onto the temporarily emasculated distaff Hercules. Similarly occasioned by matrimony, yet radically different in manner and mode, these two early works, a self-portrait as a married man and a mythological narrative, reveal Rubens’s grasp of what Alpers recognized as the transferable compositionality of gender.54 Regardless of genre or biological sex, he employs dress and pose in unconventional ways that produce unconventional, potentially subversive, subjects, whether or not this was his intention. Chastising his non-Christian readers, Tertullian, the rancorous desert father, derided any show of sympathy for “disgraceful” distaff Hercules, “transfigured” by lust “in his dress”: that Club-shaft-and-hide-bearer, who exchanged for womanly attire the whole proud heritage of his name! Such licence was granted to the secret haunts of Lydia, that Hercules was prostituted in the person of Omphale, and Omphale in that of Hercules.55

By means of clothing, Rubens’s Hercules also exchanges status and power. Huemer’s relatively benign reading of Omphale as little more than a lamentable shrew-type, 54 Alpers, Making of Rubens, 149. 55 Tertullian, De pallium, 4.3.1.

Samson and Dilemma

67

though the wrong kind of wife to be sure, fails to demarcate the painting’s more vehement anti-feminism. For Rubens not only suggests the disobedient and sinful nature of Omphale who, as a type of Eve, is “drawn to her destruction.”56 He also implies that the Queen of Lydia, like all precarious idols (of which those toppled in the biblical flight into Egypt were the apocryphal model) will ultimately fall57 If there is any confusion about the resulting humiliation of a once-formidable man at the hands of an unnaturally powerful woman, Rubens effects a visual sex change by means of painted cross-dressing. Thus in place of Hercules’s genitals we encounter only the red folds of Omphale’s tunic, a Galenic transposition that echoes the irreverent placement of the chunkily phallic lion’s tail across and between Omphale’s legs.58 What is removed and displaced from Hercules, his manhood, is thus translated to the body of Omphale.59 Subtly metamorphosed by the clothes they wear, both forms are rendered monstrous and unnatural, as an unstable pairing well suited to a falling pagan world that demands to be set right.

Formal Matters: The Man on Top The heightened anti-feminist flavor of Rubens’s Hercules and Omphale would seem to provide his negative response to the woman question c.1606. In relation to Spränger, Rubens ups the rhetorical ante with a pictorial stance that seems somewhat inconsistent with his written one a few years later. In the previously mentioned letter describing his brother Philip’s forthcoming wedding, Rubens had hinted at his notion of the ideal woman with a seemingly progressive list of desirable wifely traits, albeit by referring to a famously woman-hating satire. Superficially, the double portrait with Isabella is similarly ambiguous. Yet formal clues in Rubens’s painting do in fact suggest his views of the relative positions of man and wife in an exemplary marriage such as the one he hoped to have—the question is whether we are to take the portrait’s clues at face value as an orthodox prescription or read them suspiciously, in the more radical tone of serio ludere. 56 Babington, Notes vpon euerie chapter of Genesis, 14. 57 Numerous fifteenth-century illuminated manuscripts depicting the flight show the toppling of an idol while the donkey-riding Mary passes by, bearing Jesus, led by Joseph; see, for example, a Book of Hours for the use of Rouen, c.1480, fol. 064r, in the Bodleian Library. As late as c.1750, The Episode of the Falling Idol, a print after Tiepolo represents the decapitated idol as a statue of a beautiful, semi-nude woman, possibly Diana. 58 Galen believed that the female reproductive organs were an inverted and internalized version of the male genitalia, such that the “uterus = inverted penis, ovaries (testes mulierum) = testes.” See Maclean, Renaissance Notion of Woman, 33. 59 Rosenthal, Gender, Politics, and Allegory, analyzes Rubens’s cross-gendering of attributes and other signs as constructions of the Freudian “phallic woman” (mother) (140); although we sometimes undertake parallel interpretations, her psychoanalytic/semiotic approach—tending to critically invoke heteronormative, familial or patriarchal, notions of desire, loss, and recuperation, primarily in Rubens’s secular and mythological imagery—offers a kind of pendant methodology to my own investments in homosociality and queerness visà-vis Christian theology in Rubens’s art.

68 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

With an eye to the compositional conventions of gender used in the Ovidian marriage painting for his patron in Mantua, we can observe that Rubens has placed himself near the top edge of the canvas, literally a head over his young wife (the painting has been cut down, which explains the bisection of Rubens’s high crowned hat—a feature that would have further emphasized his superior position). Isabella’s face, ringed by the petal-like folds of a starched white ruff, is lower and closer to the beholder. By seating his wife directly on the ground, Rubens underscores the presumed proximity of women and the natural world, a connection said to account for their capricious, inconstant ‘nature’ and inherent irrationality.60 In the form of scrolling leaves, Nature is again impressed on the fabric of Isabella’s gold and ivory bodice, which shares the same golden range as the honeysuckle behind her. Pictorial gender conventions also account for Rubens having placed himself on the painting’s honorific left side, typically reserved for males.61 This practice has its origins in religious and devotional art. It is particularly evident in images of Adam and Eve after the fall (see Figs. 1.7 and 1.8), where the archetypal husband and wife often dominate the image field in a similar manner—and from which Rubens may have borrowed his garden-like setting. Nearly all plants and flowers depend on the generous warmth of the sun. If Rubens’s radiant face, with a Titianesque blue sky peeking out behind it, acquires something of a solar splendor, this too, may allude to healthful light of the sort equated by Aristotle with masculine heat and energy. Just as Isabella’s location partially in shadow—and nearer to the domesticated canopy of the honeysuckle bower at upper right—would conjure in the mind of an attentive beholder notions of feminine darkness and interiority, quasi-anatomical qualities associated with cold-wet women and derived in part from Galen’s theory of genital inversion.62 “Consider first whichever ones you please,” the Roman Imperial physician wrote of male and female reproductive organs, “turn outward the woman’s, turn inward, so to speak and fold double the man’s and you will find them the same in every respect.”63 With Isabella’s inactivity, implied by the closed fan in her left hand, can be contrasted Rubens’s vigilance and preparation for action—suggested by the artist’s grasp, however, light, of his standing sword. Seen in this way, as Hans Vlieghe and others have noted, Rubens’s picture consciously calls to mind an earlier double portrait painted by his Flemish predecessor, Jan van Eyck.64 The so-called Arnolfini wedding portrait of 1434 (Fig. 1.19) was a treasured possession displayed in the Habsburg painting collection at the time Rubens 60 The modesty of the earthbound female figure is also evoked in the trope of the humble Madonna, see Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo (1505–6) and, more generally, Meiss, “Madonna of Humility”; on matters of gender, Levi d’Ancona, “Doni Madonna”; Vlieghe, Portraits, makes this association as well, 163. 61 Honig, “In Memory: Lady Dacre,” 67. 62 See the groundbreaking exhibition by Filipczak, Hot Dry Men, Cold Wet Women, 24–25. 63 Galen, De usu partium, trans. Talmadge, II, 628. 64 Vlieghe, Portraits, 163.

Samson and Dilemma

69

Fig. 1.19. Jan van Eyck, Arnolfini “Wedding” Portrait, c.1434, London, National Gallery. Photo: ©National Gallery, London, UK/Art Resource, New York.

twice visited Spain. In it, according to some scholars, the legendary inventor of oil painting presents a figurative commentary on the sacrament of marriage expressed in the literal form of a double portrait of two contemporaries who may have been the patrician Italian banker, Giovanni Arnolfini, and his intended Jeanne Cenami.65 65 In response to earlier readings pro and contra Panofsky’s foundational interpretations of this painting, Sandler argues for the arrangement of its purported subjects, Giovanni Arnolfini and Jeanne Cenami, as an allusion to “canonical” and “clandestine” marriages in fourteenth-century illuminations contained in an English encyclopedia, the Omne bonum. See her “Handclasp,” 488–49.

70 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

In his minutely rendered domestic scene, Van Eyck employs the ‘disguised symbolism’ of his milieu to full effect, alluding to the mysterious alchemy of what Margaret Carroll has described as “collaborative partnership” through the gendered vernacular of his time—just as Rubens will do in his.66 In Van Eyck’s portrait, the precisely rendered furnishings of a soberly luxurious domestic interior add to an overall impression of worldly refinement and God-given wealth. Gleaming brasses, overgenerous bed hangings, and a rich Persian carpet inscribe the couple’s status as prosperous foreigners cut from the same socio-economic cloth. Indeed, since the Arnolfinis stand on the same ground it is difficult to discern which, if either, of the two might be of a higher social rank; both are expensively dressed, his ostentatious fur-lined tunic fittingly sets off her intricately slashed and pinked, also fur-trimmed, green velvet robe or mantle. The sitters’ balanced rank in Van Eyck’s composition precedes a probable intermediary source for Rubens, Titian’s likeness of Emperor Charles V and Empress Isabella from around 1548, one of a small number of Italian Renaissance depictions of a man and wife within the same frame.67 As Alfred Scharf points out, much more common in the fifteenth and sixteenth century: were the portraits of two persons facing each other on separate panels which were either united in a diptych or hung as companion pictures, the man being placed on the left, the woman on the right: for example, the portraits of about 1460 by Piero della Francesca of Federigo di Montefeltre, Duke of Urbino, and his Duchess, Battista Sforza, now in the Uffizi at Florence. This mode spread throughout Italy and may be found at Milan and Venice as well as at Florence and Ferrara.68

The diptych double portrait had its roots in the Netherlandish tradition. Consequently, Titian’s frontal portrait, though half-length, represents an abrupt—and distinctively Venetian—departure from previous models.69 In Titian’s composition the emperor and empress (the latter of whom had died before the painting was made) sit together at a table, a clock between them, each looking into the distance; behind the solemn couple a curtain parts to reveal a landscape. Or so we can assume, for the original painting perished in an all-consuming 1734 fire at the Spanish royal palace. As luck would have it, Rubens himself painted a copy of the imperial portrait while he was in Spain (Fig. 20). From the copied Titian we can judge Rubens’s familiarity 66 Carroll, Painting and Politics, 20. 67 But see Lotto’s Prado Marriage of Master Marsilio and Wife, 1523, and, by the same artist, the Hermitage Family Portrait, c.1523–34. 68 Scharf, “Rubens’s Portraits of Charles V and Isabella,” 260. 69 Single marriage portraits of two sitters were not uncommon in Tudor England, however, where Elizabeth Honig has linked their presence to the rhetoric of “companionate marriage” in a Protestant key. See Honig, “In Memory: Lady Dacre,” 63–65.

Samson and Dilemma

71

Fig. 1.20. Peter Paul Rubens after Titian, The Emperor Charles V and the Empress Isabella, c.1603–4, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Album/Art Resource, New York.

with a format for double or marriage portraiture that was scarcely less common in early seventeenth-century Flanders.70 Rubens’s portrait with Isabella Brant—with two very similar likenesses of seated married couples made by Van Dyck after 1618— are the only extant life-size portraits of a husband and wife on the same canvas painted in Antwerp before 1621.71 Perhaps with both fifteenth-century Flemish and sixteenth-century Venetian paintings in mind, Rubens disingenuously suggests a meeting of social equals. For although the artist came from a ‘good’ family he was by no means wealthy; in economic terms the erstwhile cash-strapped artist had married above his station. And while he might have chosen to show Isabella (as) his social equal by situating her directly at his side, as in the aforementioned portraits, he decided instead to tip the scale in his favor. By employing established visual conventions for the symbolic representation of philosophical and theological notions of female inferiority, the upwardly mobile painter assumes his place as the man on top. If Isabella was socially higher in status as a woman of means, Rubens, regardless of his wealth, or lack thereof, ranks higher 70 Though Scharf dates Rubens’s copy from the first trip to Spain, c.1604, most subsequent scholars date it to the second trip, c.1628–29. 71 Barnes et al., Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue, nos. i.ii.4 and i.ii.5, pp. 108–9. 72 For the origins and controversy around this motif see Sandler, “Handclasp,” 489; Vlieghe, Portraits, 163.

72 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

still simply for being a man. The portrait thus appears to render Rubens superior in every way, as a man who effortlessly oversees even a rich, educated, and well-connected wife, moving up in the picture he also moves up in the world.

Until Death At the risk of destabilizing the reading just offered, I now want to suggest that there could be more to the story. More, even if no further insight can undo Rubens’s obvious appeal to established pictorial strategies for designating women as somehow lowly by nature. If Rubens’s positioning of himself and his wife within a garden alludes to the relative supremacy of male to female and husband to wife in biblical terms, the portrait can also be read, as noted, as a figuration of faithfulness and the sacrament of marriage. Symbolic, quasi-historical portrayals of the bridal union of husband and wife exist in the pages of illuminated manuscripts from well before the time of Van Eyck. Depictions of an extra-ecclesial ‘handclasp’ ceremony—found in early encyclopedias and treatises on canon law—have attracted the interest of legal historians as well as medievalists.72 The private, essentially common law, weddings illustrated in such scenes were permissible for Catholics until 1563, when a Tridentine decree, in Panofsky’s words: “condemned such clandestine weddings which had produced extremely awkward situations in the past if one of the partners subsequently denied the fact that a marriage had taken place.”73 Prior to Trent, when the presence of a priest was not mandated, the grasping of hands was the standard of matrimony. If there is any doubt as to the iconographical weight of the handclasp in his picture, Rubens, the painter, ensures that Rubens, the sitter, draws it to our attention, using both old and new compositional tricks. First, having boldly evacuated the center of the canvas of all content, Rubens anticipates the upward progression of the viewer’s eye from the dark folds of the fabricated gap to the two faces, and next to the disembodied hand that seems to float between them. It has already been observed that the fingers of this hand rest on the hilt of a genteel sword, which Rubens, who was not a member of the nobility, may have received as a gift from the archdukes.74 But the inclusion of the sword serves another, equally important, purpose. For it allows Rubens a place to rest his remaining fingers, which have been made to point, index extended, to the arrangement of the newly-weds’ hands. Here we encounter neither 73 Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, I, 202. 74 Velázquez’s teacher, Francisco Pacheco, includes the following anecdote in his Arte de Pintura (1649), written in 1630: “after returning to his country he built a grand home in which he now lives […] the Infanta, in the presence of her husband, fitted a sword around his waist, and she put a very rich gold chain around his neck, calling him the honor of his homeland.” Translated by Alejandro Vergara, Rubens and his Spanish Patrons, 189.

Samson and Dilemma

73

Fig. 1.21. Robert Campin, Marriage of the Virgin, c.1440, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Prado, Madrid, Spain/Bridgeman Images.

the wife’s bare finger offered in anticipation of a ring as in some Italian depictions of the betrothal of Mary and Joseph nor the unexplained and still controversial rightleft grasp in the Arnolfini picture, believed by some scholars to represent a secret or clandestine marriage of the unsanctioned type mentioned above.75 In fact, where certain gestures are concerned, Rubens’s marriage portrait comes closer to a work such as Robert Campin’s Marriage of the Virgin (Fig. 1.21). In this highly unusual painting of around 1430–40, also from Philip II’s collection in Spain, the hands of the bride and groom are united and wrapped by the priest/rabbi in his stole. Like Rubens, Campin implies something about a husband’s status through the spatial elevation of the male figure. His Joseph rises above even the Virgin herself. The resemblance ends here, however, for one of the most impressive aspects of Campin’s engrossingly illusionist painting is the typological argument invoked by profoundly different styles of elaborately historical church architecture. Rubens, by 75 Schabacker, “De Matrimonio,” 375–98.

74 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

contrast, eschews a narratively and temporally restrictive church wedding. Though his image is avowedly a marriage portrait, its interpretive key remains the husband and wife’s right-hand to right-hand clasp, or iunctio dextarum. It is a tribute to his powers of invention that Rubens’s portrait gracefully surmounts the age-old formal problem of depicting this right-handed, profile-inducing handshake. With the exception of Campin, previous painters had typically resorted to the less-than romantic placement of two facing figures with their right arms extended toward each other. “When looking at a portrait,” wrote Alois Riegl in his singular study of Dutch group portraiture, “a modern viewer in particular always tends to concentrate primarily on the eyes and then, after that, on the mouths.”76 Yet to focus on the eyes of Van Eyck’s sitters is a difficult and uncomfortable task, which surely accounts for some of the peculiar remoteness of their portrait. Oddly, in a painting deeply concerned with optics and qualities of sight, Van Eyck does not permit his sitters to engage the beholder visually. In this respect he clearly fails to achieve what Riegl calls the “ultimate goal” of the portraitist, namely “to express the character of the sitters, as revealed by the way they gaze observantly out of the painting.”77 Regarding the (un)communicative power of the Arnolfini gazes, one can only suppose that Van Eyck had his reasons, for he was entirely capable of painting portraits of solitary sitters who meet the eyes of their beholders, as the penetrating stare of his Man in a Red Turban of the previous year ably demonstrates. For Rubens, however, the Rieglian observant gaze was clearly a desideratum. Equally characteristic of the 1609 likeness and subsequent portraits of Isabella Brant (e.g. Fig. 1.22) is a steady, intelligent stare, the intensity of which is consistently offset by lips gently pursed as if she hopes to conceal, if not a laugh, then some intimate pleasantry to which only her husband-portraitist is privy. This inside joke, if that is what it is, may go unshared with the beholder, but he or she is nevertheless made keenly aware of Isabella’s lively and complex personality—communicated in the way she sees things. Indeed, even if one is unwilling to accept a mondo reverso reading of Isabella’s upper hand as a jesting gesture revealing at least a degree of dominance, it would be difficult to discount the powerful presence and female gaze of ‘Rubens’s’ Isabella. Completely inescapable is the bright-eyed, dead-on look with which she meets the beholder and by implication, her husband, the artist. Viewing the image as a furtive endorsement of inverted, or at least, more balanced, gender roles, one might want to read both satisfaction in the young Mrs. Rubens’s slight smile and bemusement in Rubens’s painted acknowledgement of the sway his beloved will have over him for many years to come. 76 Riegl, Group Portraiture, trans. Kain and Britt, 132. 77 Riegl, Group Portraiture, trans. Kain and Britt, 132. Riegl’s comments are made in the context of Netherlandish group portraits of the 1530s, which also—or more accurately, given the earlier date of Van Eyck’s painting, still—fail to meet the author’s criterion.

Samson and Dilemma

75

Fig. 1.22. Peter Paul Rubens, Portrait of Isabella Brant, c.1620, Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art. Photo: ­Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio, USA, Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund/Bridgeman Images.

What one imagines as the knowing portrayal of genuine affection and like-mindedness is one of the most appealing qualities of Rubens’s double portrait. In order to appreciate this aspect of such an innovative painting, it is necessary to focus not only on Rubens’s simultaneous roles as subject and object but on the viewer/outsider’s place in the painting’s triangulated premise. It is necessary to grant what Harry Berger Jr. unforgettably terms the “fiction of the pose”—an unspoken understanding among early modern viewers that in posing before the artist a sitter “was projecting the self-representation aimed at future observers.”78 With self-re/presentation firmly in mind, then, the painting is engineered to firmly establish Rubens’s dominant place in society in general and in one prominent Antwerp household in particular. Could this explain the almost subliminal nature of its equivocity? Perhaps the answer is yes, if, as many believe, the intended recipient of the painting was Isabella’s father.79 Jan 78 Berger, “Fictions of the Pose,” 99. 79 Rosenthal, Gender, Politics, and Allegory, 204. See also Vlieghe, Portraits, 164.

76 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Brant, like Philip Rubens, moved in the fraternal, cult-like circles of Justus Lipsius, whose neo-Aristotelian views on women were decidedly masculinist. Yet referring again in the letter quoted above to his brother’s felicitous betrothal to Maria de Moy, Rubens teased that he would not dare to follow Philip’s example since “he has made such a good choice that it seems inimitable.”80 Well aware of his father-in-law’s Lipsian tendencies, perhaps the artist wished to show that he too, would be the kind of husband who recognized an exceptional woman when he saw one but would nonetheless put their house—and their sexes—in proper order. Again, there is nothing in Rubens’s letters to affirm this proposition. Yet ultimately, Rubens’s decision to marry into a branch of the same family as his respected and successful brother does smack a bit of imitation; one even wonders if Rubens, seeking the greatest rhetorical effect, had already decided to ask for Isabella’s hand at the time of the letter’s writing.

Works Cited Abbot, George. An Exposition on the Prophet Ionah contained in certain Expositions (Oxford, 1600). Alpers, Svetlana, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983). Alpers, Svetlana, The Making of Rubens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Modern Library, 2001). Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, 2 vols., Ancient Christian Writers 42 (New York/Ramsey, NJ: Newman Press, 1982). Babington, Gervase, Certaine plaine, briefe, and comfortable notes vpon euerie chapter of Genesis (London, 1592). Barnes, Susan, Nora De Poorter, Olivar Millar, and Horst Vey, Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). Bedaux, Jan Baptist, “The Reality of Symbols: The Question of Disguised Symbolism in Jan van Eyck’s ‘Arnolfini Portrait,’” Simiolus, 16 (1986), 5–28. Belkin, Kristin Lohse, Rubens (London: Phaidon, 1998). Bentley, Thomas, Sixth Lamp of Virginitie, in The Monument of Matrones (London, 1582). Berger, Harry, Jr., “Fictions of the Pose: Facing the Gaze of Early Modern Portraiture,” Representations, no. 46 (Spring 1994), 87–120. Boardman, George Dana, “The Story of Samson,” Old Testament Student, 8 (November 1888), 88–96. Carroll, Margaret D., Painting and Politics in Northern Europe: Van Eyck, Brueghel, Rubens, and their Contemporaries (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008). Davis, Natalie Zemon, “Women on Top,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 124–51. De Piles, Roger, Dissertation sur les ouvrages des plus fameux peintres (Paris, 1681), trans. Katie Scott, in The Lives of Rubens, ed. Jeremy Woods (London: Pallas Athene, 2005). Filipczak, Zirka Z., Hot Dry Men, Cold Wet Women: The Theory of Humors in Western European Art, 1575–1700, exh. cat. (Williamstown: American Federation of the Arts, 1997). Galen, De usu partium, trans. Margaret Talmadge, 2 vols. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968).

80 Rubens to Johann Faber, Antwerp, 10 April 1609, in Magurn, ed. and trans., Letters, no. 20, p. 52.

Samson and Dilemma

77

Georgievska-Shine, Aneta, “Rubens and the Tropes of Deceit in Samson and Delilah,” Word & Image, 23 (2007), 460–73. Honig, Elizabeth, “In Memory: Lady Dacre and Pairing by Hans Eworth,” in Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in Renaissance Culture, 1540–1660, ed. Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn (London: Reaktion, 1990), 60–85. Huemer, Frances, “A Dionysiac Connection in an Early Rubens,” Art Bulletin, 61 (December 1979), 565–74. Israel, Jonathan. The Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World, 1606–1661 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982). Juvenal and Persius, ed. and trans. Susanna Morton Braund (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). Kahr, Madlyn, “Delilah,” Art Bulletin, 54 (September 1972), 282–99. Kartzow, Marianne Bjelland, Gossip and Gender: Othering of Speech in the Pastoral Epistles (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009). Levi d’Ancona, Mirella, “The Doni Madonna by Michelangelo: An Iconographic Study,” Art Bulletin, 50 (March 1968), 43–50. Lurie, Ann Tzeutschler, “Gerard van Honthorst: Samson and Delilah,” Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, 56 (November 1969), 332–44. Lusheck, Catherine, “Content in Form: Rubens’s Kneeling Man and the Graphic Reformation of the Ideal, Robust Male Nude,” Jaarboek van het Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (2002), 126–63. Lusheck, Catherine, Rubens and the Eloquence of Drawing (London/New York: Routledge/Ashgate, 2017). McGrath, Elizabeth. “‘Not Even a Fly’: Rubens and the Mad Emperors,” Burlington Magazine, 133 (October 1991), 699–703. Maclean, Ian, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Magurn, Ruth, ed. and trans., The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1955). Meiss, Millard, “The Madonna of Humility,” Art Bulletin, 18 (December 1936), 435–65. Muckle, J.T., “The Letter of Heloise on Religious Life and Abelard’s First Reply,” Medieval Studies, 17 (1955), 255–58. Muller, Jeffrey, “Rubens’s Theory and Practice of the Imitation of Art,” Art Bulletin, 64 (Jun. 1982), 229–47. Norgate, Edward, Miniatura or the Art of Limning, ed. and trans. Jeffrey Muller and Jim Murrell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). Ovid, Fasti, trans. James Frazer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). Ovid, Heroides, trans. Grant Showerman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977). Panofsky, Erwin, Early Netherlandish Painting, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). Ribeiro, Aileen, “Fashion at Antwerp,” Burlington Magazine, 119 (September 1977), 665–68. Riegl, Alois, The Group Portraiture of Holland, trans. Evelyn M. Kain and David Britt, introd. by Wolfgang Kemp (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999). Rosenthal, Lisa, Gender, Politics, and Allegory in the Art of Rubens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Sandler, Lucy Freeman, “The Handclasp in the Arnolfini Wedding: A Manuscript Precedent,” Art Bulletin, 66 (September 1984), 488–491. Schabacker, Peter, “De Matrimonio ad Morganaticam Contracto: Jan van Eyck’s ‘Arnolfini’ Portrait Reconsidered,” Art Quarterly, 25 (1972), 375–98. Scharf, Alfred, “Rubens’s Portraits of Charles V and Isabella,” Burlington Magazine, 66 (June 1935), 259–66. Schroeder, H.J., trans., The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (Charlotte, NC: Tan Books, 1978). Smith, Warren S., Jr., “Husband vs. Wife in Juvenal’s Sixth Satire,” Classical World, 73 (March 1980), 323–32. Summers, David, “Contrapposto: Style and Meaning in Renaissance Art,” Art Bulletin, 59 (September 1977), 336–61. Sutton, Peter and Marjorie Wieseman, with Nico van Hout, Drawn by the Brush: Oil Sketches by Peter Paul Rubens, exh. cat. (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2004). Tertullian, De pallium, in Fathers of the Third Century, trans. S. Thelwall (1870), in Ante-Nicene Fathers, IV, Christian Classics Ethereal Library [online resource], www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf04.iii.ii.iv.html (accessed 15 July 2019).

78 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Tilney, Edmund, A brief and pleasant discourse of duties in Mariage, called The Flower of Friendship (London, 1568). Vasari, Giorgio, Lives of the Artists, trans. Julia Connaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Vergara, Alejandro, Rubens and his Spanish Patrons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Vlieghe, Hans, Portraits of Identified Sitters Painted in Antwerp, CRLB 2 (London: Harvey Miller, 1987). Warner, Marina, introduction to Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea Books, 1982).

2. Making Assumptions

Marian Tropes after Italy Abstract This chapter addresses Rubens’s highly productive period corresponding to the Truce of 1609–21, when the artist would secure commissions for the iconic Antwerp Crucifixions and execute a suite of complex mythological paintings, including Juno and Argus. Rarely examined alongside these works are Rubens’s contemporaneous depictions of the Virgin Mary’s Assumption, posited here as a via media between his previous Michelangelesque works and his increasingly Venetian approach to making pictures. The shift of stylistic allegiance from Rome to Venice has had important implications for responses to Rubens’s art from a critical tradition long placing gestural, Titianesque painting and feminized, haptic colorito in opposition to the conventionally rational and masculine linearity considered a hallmark of central Italian disegno. Keywords: Rubens; gender; the Assumption; Michelangelo; colorito; lactation; Juno

The Flemish and the Dutch masters are always languid unless they are profane. Leonardo is only to be seen in the Cena; Titian only in the Assumption; but Rubens only in the Battle of the Amazons, and Vandyck only at court. Altar-pieces, when wanted, of course either of them will supply as readily as anything else. Virgins in blue, or St. Johns in red, as many as you please. Martyrdoms also, by all means: Rubens especially delights in these. St. Peter head downwards, is interesting anatomically, writhings of impenitent thieves, and bishops having their tongues pulled out, display our powers to advantage, also. Theological instruction if required “Christ armed with thunder, to destroy the world, spares it at the intercession of St. Francis.” Last Judgments even, quite Michelangelesque, rich in twistings of limbs, with spiteful biting and scratching; and fine aerial effects in smoke in the pit. In all this, however, there is not a vestige of religious feeling or reverence. […] Mary of Nazareth must be painted if an order come for her; but (says polite Sir Peter), Catherine of Medicis, or Mary, her bodice being fuller, and better embroidered, would, if we might offer a suggestion, probably give greater satisfaction. ‒ John Ruskin, Modern Painters (1860)1

Lyon, J.V., Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789463722216_ch02

80 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Cross-Dressing Despite its forlorn and abject tenor, Rubens’s Descent from the Cross (Plate 2) is frequently acclaimed by twentieth-century art historians as a balanced and serenely classical altarpiece—a curious departure in style and mood from the dramatic and definitively baroque Raising of the Cross (Plate 3) from around the previous year.2 While stylistically the two works known as the Antwerp Crucifixions are undeniably unalike, they are nonetheless linked by a shared compositional source. In Italy, Rubens had taken full advantage of the opportunity to sketch ‘from life’ many of the same wondrous statues that had inspired Michelangelo and Raphael. Indeed, both figures of Christ in the Antwerp altarpieces derive from the head and body of the dying Trojan priest in the Hellenistic sculptural group of Laocoön (Fig. 2.1), of which Rubens had made multiple drawings while in Rome c.1601–2. Although put to different dramatic uses, the Christ raised on the cross and the Christ deposed are based on the same tormented antique body.3 As a result, Rubens’s anatomical quotations cleverly infuse the two altarpieces with multiple antitypes. For example, by invoking Laocoön’s futile piercing of the Trojan horse with a spear Rubens also calls to mind the revelatory piercing of Christ’s side by the skeptical centurion, who subsequently recognizes a condemned man as the son of God. With Catholic reform in mind, the classical citation may also conjure up not only the vengeful nature of the ancient gods but possibly the awful fate awaiting priests who heretically marry and have children—as Laocoön (and Luther!) had done.4 Notably, the behemoth St. Christopher on the outer wing of the Descent is based on another Greco-Roman classical statue, the Farnese Hercules—a model of superhuman masculinity Rubens often draws upon. Although ancient sources serve as models for Rubensian bodies in these Catholic works, it is never without the implication that the Old Law—and with it the old art—has been superseded by the new. When reconfiguring three-dimensional works for his painted Antwerp Crucifixions, Rubens was undoubtedly aware of Pliny’s view of the Laocoön, so frequently copied by cinquecento sculptors, as “a work that may be looked upon as preferable to any other production of the art of painting or of statuary.”5 In proposing Christ as the true High Priest, Rubens simultaneously implied his own role as successor to the old canon. He also posited his naturalistic painting as every bit as poignant and affecting as the sculpted form. 1 Ruskin, Modern Painters, 272. 2 Martin, ed., Antwerp Altarpieces, 37, 48. 3 Martin, ed., Antwerp Altarpieces, 48; Belkin, Rubens, 113. 4 The tale appears in Book 2 of Virgil’s Aeneid. In Hyginus’s version Apollo condemned Laocoön for marrying; see Daley, Vatican, 185. 5 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 1.36.4.

Making Assumptions

81

Fig. 2.1. Laocoön, first-century Greek/Hellenistic original, Vatican City, Vatican Museums and Galleries. Photo: Vatican Museums and Galleries, Vatican City/©Stefano Baldini/Bridgeman Images.

Moreover, the painter’s use of the same statue to achieve distinct emotional and artistic effects may have been calculated to draw attention to his hybrid, and flexible, style. It might thus make sense to consider the Antwerp commissions as respectively Northern and Southern (Italian) variations on the theme of pagan art in Christian subjects rather than antithetical examples of Rubens in a major (classical) versus a minor (baroque) key. David Jaffé and Minna Moore Ede imply as much when they refer to the Descent as a “more contemplative and restrained” rejoinder to the

82 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

energetic and “arresting portrayal of physicality” in the Raising of the Cross.6 What is immediately apparent in this and most other accounts of the two altarpieces, however, is the authors’ choice of descriptive language inflected by conventional notions of masculinity and femininity. The critical reception of the triptychs, and even their subject matter, as active, heroic, and masculine on the one hand and passive, introspective, and feminine on the other more clearly explains what John Rupert Martin termed their “very different principles of composition” than any appraisal of the works’ adherence to the anachronistic Wölfflinian criteria of classic and baroque.7 Formal and stylistic differences between the altarpieces are certainly there. Yet the specific moments of the passion, or via crucis, portrayed in the two central panels would explain, at least to some degree, jarring divergences in their affective tone (though not in their dramatis personae): One certainly expects a mature, classically proportioned body struggling for life to bear little resemblance to the hours-old corpse of a tortured everyman, and likewise, that the reactions of witnesses to an execution will be other than those of mourners. And yet attributing dissimilarities to their unique narrative moments, or even to Rubens’s supposed break with certain central Italian ideals in the Descent, does not explain why he should have aimed for and achieved such a graphically touching kind of devotional painting immediately following the success of an altarpiece in which corporal violence is mystified and propagandized. How might we register and analyze these striking shifts beyond the limiting binary of vigorously victorious and serenely sentimental? And, further, what if the art historical consensus about the true nature of the discrepancy between the works made before and after 1611 is intuitively right? In other words, what if the Raising of the Cross and the Descent are indeed gendered by the artist—not only in terms of their painterly style but also their iconography? In order to more fully grasp what Max Rooses considered the “profound transformation that had come over the manner of Rubens in the transition between one work and the other,” the time has come to trace numerous changes in the artist’s use and representation of sex difference during the remarkably active period of 1611–14.8 One obvious development where the Antwerp commissions are concerned is the increased number of women in the narrative action of the Descent compared with their nominally active and symbolic presence in Raising of the Cross. In the interior panels of the Raising of the Cross, for example, women are sealed off and entirely sequestered in a single wing of the continuous crucifixion scene (Plate 3). By contrast, the central panel shows an all-male elevation of the crucified Christ. The right wing, largely occupied by the mounted Roman soldier, is also solely populated by men—and animals. Rubens’s soldiers and executioners, charged with cruel, 6 D. Jaffé et al., Master in the Making, 19. 7 Martin, ed., Antwerp Altarpieces, 48. 8 Rooses, Rubens, 171.

Making Assumptions

83

physically demanding acts but displaying, in the few views of their faces, scarcely perceptible emotions, are some of the most insistently ‘robust’ male nudes he will produce. The brutish physicality of these faceless doers, who heave and grunt and strain under the weight—more spiritual than material—of their divine victim, has long elicited critical enthusiasm. The most influential comparative account of the Antwerp Crucifixions appeared among the ecstatic panegyrics of the French painter and writer Eugène Fromentin. Les maîtres d’autrefois (1876), a critical work entirely devoted to Dutch and Flemish painting, has influenced generations of historians of Northern art. Even the ambivalent Burckhardt approvingly cites Fromentin’s famous description of the two altarpieces as revelations of “the Gospel in Flemish” in his Recollections of Rubens (1898).9 Writing at a moment poised between Romanticism and fin de siècle decadence, Fromentin favorably compares Rubens’s Christ in the Descent to “some beautiful flower, plucked and withered.”10 Here and elsewhere, he, too, assesses the two triptychs via a gendered idiom. For him, the heroic Raising of the Cross proclaims Rubens as “original, bold, and strong,” full of “fiery spirit”; it is a picture in which “compassion and tenderness, the mother and the friends are far away”; the Raising of the Cross is thus akin to a Pindaric ode, lyrical and sublime. Contrarily, in the Descent, inert and penetrated male anatomy—Fromentin’s “indescribable slender grace—pliant, almost too thin”—is always in danger of becoming womanly; bodies of this kind best transport the beholder to the realm of feminine feeling.11 As Rooses summarizes it, in words that might just as well prescribe the proper comportment of a seventeenth-century woman: “The sentiment springing from the whole picture is one of affection and respectful solicitude.”12 Reminded of Theodore Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa (1819), and with it perhaps his countryman’s fascination with the material qualities of fragmented and tortured male bodies, the Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix found the Raising of the Cross eager to please the critics and “full of Michelangelo.”13 Closer to our own time, the German art historian Hans Evers perceived Rubens’s division of the events at Golgotha in forthright terms, observing that the lower left wing is “a purely feminine world, comprising three ages […] a counterpoint to the exclusively masculine world of the central picture.”14 As a whole, however, the left interior wing—which Evers later casts as “grief”—cannot be purely feminine in an anatomical or biological respect since the youthful, voluminously robed St. John is included there at the Virgin’s side.15 Evers’s characterization 9 Fromentin, cited in Burckhardt, Rubens, 51. 10 Fromentin, cited in Martin, ed., Antwerp Altarpieces, 87. 11 Fromentin, cited in Martin, ed., Antwerp Altarpieces, 83. 12 Rooses, cited in Martin, ed., Antwerp Altarpieces, 107. 13 Delacroix, cited in Martin, ed., Antwerp Altarpieces, 76. 14 Evers, cited in Martin, ed., Antwerp Altarpieces, 115–16. 15 “There is of course a division of the total meaning within the different panels: on the left wing is grief; on the right wing the command; and in the center the event itself.” Evers, cited in Martin, ed., Antwerp Altarpieces, 115.

84 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

is understandable. Especially in view of Rubens’s segregated picture world, where gender rather than sex determines one’s status and location and, consistent with the times, masculinity and femininity are measured on a continuum according to which the coldest male may be deemed weaker than the hottest female. Within the image, Rubens follows a conventional humoral hierarchy when in an otherwise female pictorial space he grants St. John the more powerful left-side placement vis-à-vis the Virgin.16 That this female-gendered panel is surprisingly also the triptych’s valorized left wing is explained by the female subjects’ superior moral standing in relation to the right wing’s sinful thieves and Romans. Although the long-haired St. John is not a woman, his presence in the feminine realm is justified by a historical and scriptural designation as “the disciple Christ loved,” and as the apostle who reclined on Jesus’s bosom at the Last Supper (John 13:23–26). In St. John’s account of the passion, Mary and John are commended to each other by Jesus shortly before his death (John 19:26–27, Douai-Rheims): When Jesus therefore had seen his mother and the disciple standing whom he loved, he saith to his mother: Woman, behold thy son. After that, he saith to the disciple: Behold thy mother. And from that hour, the disciple took her to his own.

At Jesus’s request John becomes his mortal proxy, but also a kind of son-in-law, to the mother of God. Like the Virgin Mary, the chaste disciple embodies uncorrupted humanity, tenderness, and compassion in addition to a preferential or chosen status among Christ’s followers. As a reflection of Christ’s intimate relationship with John, medieval illuminators and Northern sculptors, paralleling contemporary mystics, developed an artistic tradition depicting Jesus and St. John in an affectionate gesture of hand-clasping which draws on marriage imagery (Fig. 2.2), as we have seen.17 In this context, St. John, who figures as the ‘bride of Christ’ or ecclesia, is depicted as a beardless, rosy cheeked youth, with long, golden hair, not dissimilar to Rubens’s sensitive, hand-wringing disciple on the left wing of the Raising of the Cross. In the Descent, Rubens differently frustrates the gendered boundaries of Evers’s masculine and feminine worlds. One immediately notes the artist’s concentration of women in the bottom left corner and men in the top right. Male figures—all of whom, except St. John, are raised off the humble ground plane—occupy the upper half of the panel, while female figures, as appropriate to their naturally lower status, are shown kneeling or standing on Golgotha’s hard soil. Rubens has composed the figures around Christ in a chiasmic ‘X’ such that the diagonal made by the arm of the man with the sheet in his mouth extends through Christ’s arms to the outstretched 16 Filipczak, Hot Dry Men, 16, 68–69. 17 See, for example, Jirousek, “Christ and St. John the Evangelist.”

Making Assumptions

85

Fig. 2.2. Christ and St. John the Evangelist, c.1300, Swabia, oak, and polychromy, Cleveland Museum of Art, J.H. Wade Fund 1928.753. Photo: Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio (Creative Commons Zero).

hand of his mother.18 A similar diagonal is formed by the bare, muscular arms of the Caravaggesque figure high on the cross. Reaching over the beam, his hands retreat from Christ’s shoulder, releasing him to the extended, but unseen, hand of the young disciple in red, whose arm and shoulder create the remainder of the diagonal. Not only are women newly present at the heart of this Crucifixion, they are given an honorable position to the right of Christ. This privilege may be countered, or balanced, by the higher placement of the men, a possible assertion of the superiority of things rational and heavenly to things emotional and earthly. Or, by a different, but 18 Although scholars have often located an important model for Rubens’s composition in the The Descent from the Cross of Daniele da Volterra (Rome, Santa Trinità del Monte)—see, for example, Bialostocki, “Descent from the Cross,” 511, no. 4—this ‘X’ structure is also very similar to that of Fra Angelico’s Santa Trinità Deposition, to which Rubens’s Magdalene bears a resemblance.

86 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

not conflicting, reading of the supremacy of active/male over contemplative/female religiosity. In the end, however, it is the holy women who are charged with the burial of their savior. While the Virgin reaches protectively toward Christ’s bloodstained arm, the younger women negotiate the corners of the shroud in a strangely intricate manner which continues to perplex modern scholars, but which may simply predict their subsequent attentions to his corpse. In what appears to be a further post-figuration, a lock of the Magdalene’s golden hair artificially rises to meet Christ’s feet, now moistened with blood rather than the ointment and tears described in their encounter while Christ was alive. There is a solidity and cohesiveness to the triad of holy women, who counter masculine busyness with Marian calm and expectancy. In the painting, it is St. John who bears Christ’s weight, a surprising circumstance, given his typical role as passive bystander. Consistent with his emasculated status and acting as what Sarah R. Cohen terms a “gender mediator” in a later Rubens painting, St. John occupies a spatially indeterminate world in Rubens’s altarpiece with one foot in the masculine territory of the ladder and one foot on the feminine ground.19 The saint will shortly step down, however, and in doing so, he will guide Christ’s body into the eager hands of the female witnesses. Feminized by association, John puts right a numerical imbalance; the figures are divided by gender equally when he is counted as one of two female pairs in the panel’s lower half. Associated with the women in this way, John becomes an androgynous screen onto which a level of womanly compassion can be projected. Importantly, there are different kinds of ‘feeling-with.’ Here, rather than displaying his profound love for Christ in tearful lamentation or expressive hands, the evangelist is touched by and physically upholds, the lifeless body of his beloved. If Rubens wished the beholder to relate (or possibly, to contrast) the disciple’s experience of Jesus’s death with his mother’s loss, he accomplishes his goal through John’s expressionless gaze at the gasping Mary, whom the artist has placed almost directly opposite the saint as in a medieval Deisis. But while St. John is grouped with the women as a receiver rather than as a deposer of the dead Christ, he is also separated from them by Christ’s body, with which he has more complete contact than any other figure. This narrative, compositional, and theological privileging of St. John is unusual for two reasons. First, as noted, John is often less directly involved in the act of removing Christ’s body from the cross, and second, because he is typically presented as the apostle specially charged with comforting and consoling the Virgin Mary. John’s stoical attitude is here in sharp contrast to the ‘womanly’ concern he displays in the Raising of the Cross.20 Indeed, the beloved disciple is often employed as a kind 19 Cohen, “Rubens’s France,” 505. 20 The figure is similar to Cigoli’s St. John in a slightly earlier Deposition, from which Rubens may have borrowed the idea of the red-mantled youth at the foot of the cross.

Making Assumptions

87

of second for the Virgin Mary, a role he shares with Mary Magdalene, who is both like and unlike the Virgin mother in virtue and purity. Both saints can be said to trouble prescriptive gender norms. Though male, John was exalted for his virginity; though female, the Magdalene was commonly viewed as a prostitute or sexual outlaw. Yet the Virgin Mary and John are commonly paired as equals in innocence when the ‘opposing’ nature of the Magdalene receives narrative primacy and privilege. Jan Bialostocki, in an analysis of the Rubens studio’s many later iterations of the Deposition theme, sees the “definitive” Antwerp Descent as emphasizing the intimacy of Christ and his penitent female follower. For him, “Rubens’ [Virgin] Mary takes part in the chief action; she partakes in the divine work of Redemption. But the human motif shifts in Rubens’ pictures to the relation: Christ-Magdalene.”21 This reading seems slightly off to me. For, following Bialostocki’s own insights, Rubens’s new-found interest in differentiating the women and their distinctive if complementary theological roles need not mean that one is more important than the other or that the painter’s emphasis has decisively shifted from divine to human love. Yet the observation that as co-redemptrix the Virgin Mary is here relieved of the role of the vicariously compassionate, model sufferer remains a helpful one, for it explains her upright stance and solemnity as stabat mater. To understand the Magdalene as a Rubensian “personification of repentant humanity” is, as Bialostocki points out, consistent with contemporary Catholic devotional literature. But although she appears in virtually all subsequent versions of the subject traceable to Rubens and/or his followers, Mary Magdalene never achieves the physical presence and redemptive power of the Queen of Heaven, or her most intimate, effeminate, supporter, St. John.22 The Magdalene does remain the most recognizable of Jesus’s female disciples— even though other women who witnessed Christ’s passion are mentioned in all four Gospels. The other female witnesses are typically identified as Mary the mother of James and/or Mary Cleophas. Although they are included in the text—and therefore of inestimable importance in feminist biblical studies—there is very little description of the women’s attitudes or responses to the events so sparely related in the Gospel accounts. The Lucan narrative of the “Road to Golgotha” (Luke 23:27–30, Douai-Rheims) offers a slightly augmented variation in the form of Jesus’s direct address to the women initially “at a distance” who have come to minister to him at the hour of his death: 21 Bialostocki, “Descent from the Cross,” 514. As the author notes, “The importance of Mary Magdalene, even in this first version of the subject, may be seen in the fact that the consecration of the triptych took place not on St. Christopher’s day, but three days earlier, on the feast of St. Mary Magdalene, July 22, 1614” (514). Yet, the transfer may be explained in part by the higher liturgical status of Mary Magdalene, named multiple times in the bible in contrast to St. Christopher, who as is well known, was ultimately removed from the canon of saints for lack of historical documentation. 22 Bialostocki, “Descent from the Cross,” 522.

88 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Fig. 2.3. Rogier van der Weyden, Deposition, c.1436, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Prado, Madrid, Spain/Bridgeman Images.

And there followed him a great company of people, and of women, which also bewailed and lamented him. But Jesus turning unto them said, Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children. For, behold, the days are coming, in which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the paps which never gave suck. Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us; and to the hills, Cover us.

The painter’s emphasis on the grief of weeping and lamenting women, and specifically, the nursing woman in red, likely originates in this biblical passage. By Rubens’s time, the extratextual imagery of Marian swooning (lo spasimo) so popular in Lamentations, Entombments, and Crucifixions from well before the great Deposition (1434) of Rogier van der Weyden (Fig. 2.3), was frowned upon by Counter-Reformation theologians.23 A dozen years after the Protestant Reformation, the Spanish Dominican, Thomas de Vio, Cardenal Cajetan, advanced his argument (given in response to an exploratory query on the subject by Julius II) in these terms: 23 On the earlier tradition of swoon imagery, which may originate in Byzantine art, see the foundational article by Neff, “Pain of Compassio.”

89

Making Assumptions

in truth the Blessed Virgin did not swoon in this way either, for she was “full of grace” (Lk 1). It is necessary to deny such a bodily defect in her because it would have impeded this plentitude and perfection of grace. It is plain that grief which would have made her “beside herself,” would have impeded her use of reason at that moment when it was the time for her to meditate most intensely and intelligently on the passion […]. It was more pleasing to God that Mary should have shared in the passion of her Son not only in her feelings but also in her mind since that is the nobler part of man in which grace and merit reside.24

It is noteworthy that Cajetan should seek to strengthen Mary’s status with a gendered appeal to her use of ‘masculine’ reason and intelligence in the employment of her noblest part, the mind. But how was an artist to render this interior shift from heart to head? Following Cajetan, whose theories were endorsed by Tridentine bishops, of whom the majority were Spanish, Mary’s emotional capacity to withstand the blow of her son’s execution was to be represented figuratively as well as figurally: her posture was to convey not only manly, even phallic, stamina, but the intelligent operation of mental processes unimpeded by emotional frailty. The woman described by the conciliar bishops as “the Virgin Mother of God” was henceforth to be shown as a female saint of physical, and by implication moral, fortitude and steadfastness. The untested Rubens ignored this proviso in his earlier, Italian, versions of the subject such as the Grasse Raising of the Cross perhaps recognizing that verging from the fainting posture would have required a new visual language for suffering, pity, and grief. The figures of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalen had become standard symbols of a profound if temporary emotional undoing that should, according to convention, only be displayed by weakened and histrionic women, or—and this supports the claim—by the youthful and effeminate disciple who kept their company, St. John. Back in Antwerp, of which she was the patron saint, the Virgin Mary could no longer faint, but she could—and did—look on in hopeful or horrified despair, her loss and humanity’s amplified in the mournful attitudes of the other Marys at her side. *** The discernable impact of Rubens’s Italian years—his intention in the Raising of the Cross to identify himself with Michelangelo and the Flemish Romanists before him, and in the Descent from the Cross to show the extent to which he had absorbed and translated into the local language the lessons of painterly Venetian colorito—has made this artificially conjoined diptych irresistible to art historians. “They are greatly 24 Quoted from Cajetan’s Opuscula: quaestiones et quodlibetá (1529) in Hamburgh, “Problem of Lo Spasimo,” 46. As the author points out, pace Steinberg, despite Cajetan’s prescriptions, numerous swooning virgins appear in cinquecento devotional art. See Steinberg, “Pontormo’s Capponi Chapel.”

90 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

admired, almost without exception, and this is rare for Rubens,” wrote Fromentin.25 By his time, following the destruction of St. Walburga, where the Descent was originally installed, the two altarpieces had been long situated roughly adjacent to each other in the arms of the transept of Antwerp’s cathedral. But even prior to their contrived pairing in 1816, both triptychs were considered de rigueur viewing for the Antwerp visitor. Accessible to tourists, artists, and amateurs, the two works have come to define Rubens not only as a religious painter but as an artist tout court.26 “Between them,” an appreciative Kenneth Clark declared, “they established for the next century, the range of pathos as it could be expressed through the nude body.”27 For Clark, this martyred nude is definitely male and Christ, the pathos ranging from the vulnerable and deconstructed flesh of a Jesus no longer of this world to the prefiguration of his triumphant resurrection in a masculine body, rhetorically intact, and impervious to suffering. Heroic male nudes were never so numerous in the devotional paintings that followed the Raising of the Cross. And female figures, variously clad, achieved a new iconographical and compositional prominence beginning with the Descent. Was gender, then, a zero-sum game for Rubens? Was female power, or at this stage, even female presence, only achieved with the diminishment of the heroic male form?

Assumptions In view of the gendered stylistic and critical binaries imposed on the Antwerp Crucifixions, a third or combinatory Rubensian devotional mode has hardly seemed art historically possible. While it is rarely considered in conjunction with the two celebrated christological altarpieces from 1611–14, however, another major project, one whose subject arguably required a merging of these oppositional styles and religious attitudes, occupied Rubens at precisely this time. In the midst of finishing and installing the triptychs representing the Descent (c.1612–14) and the Raising of the Cross (c.1611–13), Rubens was at work on at least two ideas for a very different kind of devotional work: a massive, vertical, single-panel ‘portico’ altarpiece depicting the Assumption of the Virgin.28 Overshadowed by the ‘youthful exuberance’ of the passion altarpieces, this important intervening project was initially commissioned for Antwerp cathedral. It is comparatively overlooked by historians of the early years after Rubens’s return from Italy, when on 22 April 1611, 25 Fromentin, Masters of Past Time, trans. Boyle, 56–71. See also Martin, ed., Antwerp Altarpieces, 80–81. A highly successful painter and art critic in his time, Fromentin conceived his last book, a study of Netherlandish painting, during a month-long visit to Holland and Belgium. Les mâitres de L’Autrefois (1876) was written shortly before his death the same year. 26 According to Rooses, cited in Martin, ed., Antwerp Altarpieces, 111. 27 Clark, Nude, 347. 28 Imported from Italy, the ‘portico’ altarpiece is characterized by its vertical format and architectonic sculptural frame flanking the canvas insert with monumental columns. See Peeters, “Rubens’s Altarpieces,” 110.

Making Assumptions

91

Fig. 2.4 . Peter Paul Rubens, modello for an Assumption, c.1611, London, Buckingham Palace. Photo: Royal Collection Trust/©Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2019.

the canons of Antwerp’s Cathedral of Our Lady received as requested from him two sketches.29 These modelli, the most plausible candidates for which are The Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin today in Leningrad and the Assumption (Fig. 2.4) in Buckingham Palace, presented two compositional alternatives.30 While the former 29 An exception is the informative study by Baudouin, “Altars and Altarpieces”; interpretations later expanded upon in his volume of the Corpus Rubenianum, the Life of Christ after the Passion (1984), were proposed by Freedberg, “Source for Rubens’s Modello.” 30 Following Freedberg, many scholars believe two alternative sketches, or modelli, were presented to the original patrons, namely the Leningrad Assumption and Coronation and the Assumption in Buckingham Palace, both c.1611–12.

92 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

shows Mary humbly kneeling to receive her crown at the side of a standing Christ, the latter is a more traditional Ascension with the Virgin rising into a clear blue sky while a crowd of apostles and holy women swarm around her rocky tomb below. The commission was competitive. One month earlier, Rubens’s esteemed teacher, Otto van Veen, had also submitted designs for the altar. It is telling that having been back in Antwerp less than two years, the younger artist possessed sufficient skill and confidence to usurp his respected master and secure the project for himself.31 In his ultimate response to the original commission, the Assumption today in Vienna (Plate 4) and dated by David Freedberg to around 1613, Rubens arrives at a new kind of Virgin. Her appearance and pose derive not only from Titian’s painterly Venetian tradition as has often been argued, but, less obviously, from the hard-edged forms of Raphael. The northern and southern poles of Italian style between which Rubens oscillates in the Antwerp Crucifixions are thus merged in the Vienna painting, where Titianesque colorism meets Roman high classicism. In a further amalgam, Rubens’s Assumption creatively mixes elements of the two audition sketches with the end result that the figure of Mary alone dominates the upper half of the painting while a craggy mountain sepulcher echoes her theological role as both a personification of the church and a link between the heavenly host and Christ’s earthly followers. Compositionally, Mary is presented as an intermediary between the absent dead and the present living who pray for them. A transitional altarpiece itself concerned with transitions, the Vienna Assumption can be seen as a dialectical work reflecting Rubens’s attempts to negotiate artistic and aesthetic tensions between the muscular rigor and linearity of the central Italian Renaissance and the calculatedly seductive sensuality of cinquecento Venetian coloring.

The Figure of the Madonna Properly speaking, an Assunta is neither the staging of a sacra conversazione nor the illustration of a biblical narrative. Mary assumed into heaven is an extra-canonical subject, the visualization of an article of faith meant to clarify the ontological status of the mother of Jesus. The doctrine of the Assumption jointly affirms Mary’s inherent nobility and perfect maternity while underscoring her unique intercessory role for souls ‘detained’ in purgatory. Shortly after its founding around 1540, the Society of Jesus had taken the Virgin as their patron saint thereby setting the standard for Marian devotion in a wide array of liturgical and artistic forms. The first Marian Congregation at the Jesuits’ Collegio Romano was in fact initiated by a young Fleming, Jan Leunis, in 1563.32 In 1585, the Jesuit Franciscus Costerus helped establish Antwerp’s 31 Baudouin, “Altars and Altarpieces,” 64–65. 32 O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 197.

Making Assumptions

93

first lay confraternity, or sodality, devoted to the veneration of the Virgin Mary. By 1609 the group, whose membership was limited to married men, numbered 174.33 The construction of the Jesuit church of Antwerp, across from which the Marian sodalities later held their meetings (and to which Rubens would ultimately contribute a cycle of thirty-nine ceiling panels), would not be completed until 1622.34 The Vienna Assumption therefore dates from an earlier period when Rubens was still largely untried by local ecclesiastical patrons, including the Society of Jesus. In what remains one of the most insightful discussions of the subject, Jacob Burckhardt refers to the Assumption as “one of the very great tasks” of Rubens’s life. The Swiss historian is quick to note a certain level of discomfiture on the artist’s behalf.35 He writes: Where Rubens becomes inadequate in all these pictures is in the figure of the Madonna, not within the limits of the style we have once accepted as his, but in relation to the imaginative implications of the problem and to the rest of great art.36

It is a harsh appraisal from the nineteenth-century author most familiar with the scope of Rubens’s imagination. Yet Burckhardt’s evaluation is the product not only of comparisons of Rubens’s imagery to the more inventive Italian Renaissance Assumptions of Titian, Andrea del Sarto, and Veronese but with works by Rubens’s closer contemporaries such as Guido Reni, Cigoli, Lanfranco, and the Carracci. These artists, too, looked to “the rest of great art”—previous as well as contemporary—for inspiration and justification. Care needed to be taken with a subject whose historicity was a topic of debate throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, even among Catholics. As Protestant critics of the Catholic communion of saints were eager to assert, there is little in the way of scriptural evidence for the life and death of Mary. Passages in the Old Testament can be read as typological prophecy (Gen. 3:15); (Is. 7:14). But only the Lucan infancy narrative, where, for example, the Magnificat is found (Luke 1:46–55), offers much in the way of biographical detail.37 Even within the Catholic church the Assumption would not be defined as dogma until the twentieth century. Backing up his promulgation of the transitus with citations from advocates of the miracle such as Anthony of Padua and Bernardine of Siena, Pope Pius XII declared in the bull Munificentissimus Deus (1 November 1950): it “is 33 Due to the sodality’s rapid growth and popularity, a separate group consisting of bachelors was founded in 1608, among whose members was Anthony van Dyck. See Muir, “Art and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Antwerp,” 57. 34 The colonial altarpieces representing The Miracles of St. Ignatius Loyola and The Miracles of St. Francis Xavier, which also hung in the Jesuit church, are thought to predate its construction by at least seven years. On these paintings as well as the ceiling program, see Martin, Ceiling Paintings for the Jesuit Church, 36ff. See also Boeckl, “Plague Imagery as Metaphor.” 35 Burckhardt, Rubens, 92. 36 Burckhardt, Rubens, 94. 37 On this point see Pangborn, “Christian Theology and the Dogma of the Assumption,” 94.

94 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

reasonable and fitting that not only the soul and body of a man, but also the soul and body of a woman should have obtained heavenly glory.” Yet during the earlier period when the Assumption remained a popular belief rather than the official feast of the Virgin Mary, it was sensible—and safest—for Counter-Reformation artists to look to their creative forebears, who were variously clear on Mary’s status given her sex. Moreover, although previous Flemish painters had some experience portraying the Coronation of the Virgin, usually shown ascending to the Trinity, imagery of Mary’s resurrection and earthly appearance to the apostles was considerably more common in Italy.38 As a result, Rubens was in effect charged with creating a new template for Marian devotion. To date, his religious paintings had included mournful Magdalenes and other vaguely eroticized saints, muscle-bound extras, and an emasculated, almost gelatinous Christ, but never the apotheosis of a powerful holy woman; he had not yet painted a major church commission with a virtuous woman on top. It may be the Vienna Assumption’s novelty, and its questionable rhetorical success, that catches Burckhardt unawares. For as he goes on to state, by following the “infatuation shared by the Italians,” who also “miss” the opportunity to use body language to their advantage, Rubens insistently “shows the Madonna sitting on the clouds, while the moment absolutely required a standing or floating figure.”39 This is strange. Especially since the (Italian) artist best attuned to Burckhardt’s vision is also the author of the most famous Assunta of all. In Titian’s great altarpiece (Fig. 2.5) for the Franciscan church in Venice, an awestruck and properly mature Mary stands lightly on a cloud, her billowing garments caught up by a sudden gust of wind in a chaste version of the famous film still of Marilyn Monroe. Titian’s levitating Virgin seems almost magnetically drawn to the drastically foreshortened God the Father hovering directly over her head—where an angel also awaits her arrival with a crown. In this way, the Venetian artist presents a figure who is both appropriately humble, we note her shocked gaze and exclamatory gesture, and newly empowered, as her unflappable stance and liminal position between heaven and earth make obvious.40 Titian was not the last northern Italian artist to depict the Virgin Mary in this staidly regal manner. Subsequent painters such as Tintoretto and El Greco (who also studied in Venice) would follow his example with similarly upright Marys. But in the Rome that Rubens had known, the tradition was moving in other directions. In 1601, Annibale Carracci had created a majestically leaden Mary, who emerges from the tomb and into the heavens as if in slow motion, uplifted by the sweet-faced cherubim and seraphim under her feet. One year earlier, the Jesuits in Rome had commissioned Van Veen’s former teacher, Federico Zuccari to paint another type of Assumption inside the dome of the Angel Chapel in the Gesù, their mother church. Perched on 38 Burckhardt makes this contention in Rubens, 92. For the early Flemish tradition see, for example, Tamis, “Genesis of Albert Cornelis’s ‘Coronation.’” 39 Burckhardt, Rubens, 94. 40 On Titian’s Assunta, see, for example, Rosand, Painting in Sixteenth-Century Venice, 38–45; Humphrey, Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice, 301–4.

Making Assumptions

95

Fig. 2.5. Titian, Assumption, c.1516–18, Venice, Church of the Frari. Photo: Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice, Italy/Bridgeman Images.

a dense cloud bank, Zuccari’s Virgin completes the pyramid positioned below the traditional presentation of the Trinity, with God the Father and God the Son seated beneath a radiantly nimbed Paraclete in the form of a dove.41 Given that Rubens had such diverse and familiar modern precedents to choose from, it is surprising that his assumed Virgin Mary resembles none of them. In addition to her peculiar posture not so much seated as embedded in a diagonal swath of 41 On Zuccari’s Angel Chapel frescoes at the Gesù, see Balass, “Five Hierarchies of Intercessors.”

96 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

cloud, Rubens’s Mary cranes her neck so far beyond the picture that her expression is hardly detectable. From what we can see, the mother of Jesus is young and almost girlish, with loose, golden curls and soft features, far from the sixty or seventy years Mary was thought to have reached when she died.42 Perhaps most unexpectedly, Rubens has attired the heavenward Mary in silvery white rather than her usual mantle and robes of rose, blue, or, on occasion, green. There are logical explanations for some of these innovations. In Rubens’s painting, Mary’s drastically outward gaze conforms to the architectonic structure of the altar’s original frame. Like those Rubens designed for other altarpieces such as the Raising of the Cross, the elaborate sculptural frame originally incorporated three-dimensional forms of God the Father or the resurrected Christ, with which the painted figures below were meant to visually and spiritually communicate.43 The sight line of the ascending Mary in our Vienna painting would likely have terminated in a similar, sculpted representation of God the Father—and possibly Christ—a formal motive that also explains to some extent her location at the very periphery of the altarpiece’s arch, as if she is only moments from disappearing out of view and into the heavens.44 The rationale for the Virgin’s unusually pale and monochromatic attire is harder to surmise. While Freedberg views Titian’s Frari Assumption as “by far the most important pictorial source” for this and all of Rubens’s versions of the subject, it seems possible that Raphael, a painter often portrayed as Titian’s opposite number, was also in the mix.45 Considering the painter’s knowledge and appreciation of Raphael’s compositional devices, it is tempting to suggest as the source of Mary’s gleaming white garments, the Italian artist’s chromatically similar Christ (Fig. 2.6), of which Rubens had made impressive studies around 1605.46 By this coloristic association the transited Mary calls to mind the transfigured Christ, conventionally portrayed by artists as he is described in the earliest account (Mark 9:2–3, Douai-Rheims): And after six days Jesus taketh with him Peter and James and John, and leadeth them up into an high mountain apart by themselves, and was transfigured before them. And his garments became shining and exceeding white as snow, so as no fuller upon earth can make white. And there appeared to them Elias with Moses; and they were talking with Jesus.

42 Voragine (1229–1298), quoting Epiphanius and other authorities, places Mary’s age at the time of her death at either sixty or seventy-two. See Voragine, Golden Legend, 77. 43 The altar in the Mary Chapel (Hautappelkapel) later constructed based on a design by Rubens is reproduced in Leurs, “Barokkerken te Antwerpen,” plate 27, no. 24. 44 A further example of this integrated altar design for an Assumption, perhaps the earliest (c.1616), is found in the Kappellekerk of Brussels, though the painting originally intended for this altar is no longer in situ. See Baudouin, “Altars and Altarpieces,” 80–81. 45 Freedberg, Life of Christ after the Passion, 139. 46 See Rubens’s three studies of Raphael’s Transfiguration, all in ink and body color, in the Louvre.

Making Assumptions

97

Fig. 2.6. Raphael, Transfiguration, c.1518, Vatican City, Pinacoteca, Sistine Chapel. Photo: Vatican Museums and Galleries, Vatican City/De Agostini Picture Library/Bridgeman Images.

In visual terms, the transformation, or transfiguration, of Jesus into Christ is made manifest by a change of clothes. Ostensibly, in Rubens’s painting the Virgin Mary undergoes a similar metamorphosis in order that she may depart the sensual, terrestrial world of color and mortality to be crowned the immaculately pure Queen of Heaven. As St. Augustine claimed: “The bane of corruption ought not to overtake her who suffered no corruption of

98 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

her integrity when she gave birth to so great a son.”47 And yet this original, even radically interpictorial, gesture somehow falls flat. For despite her scale and luminosity, the calm, rising Mary pales in comparison with the earthy disciples, whose Giottoesque gesticulations run the emotional gamut, capturing the viewer’s attention through color and expressiveness. In dramatic terms, the Virgin Mary’s glacial beauty is eclipsed by the active trio of girls on the ground. Surrounded by men, the three young women struggle to keep their wits about them as they witness the apostles’ astonished interjections while simultaneously gathering the fragrant rosebuds that have miraculously issued from a dusty tomb. Little about Rubens’s bland and detached Queen-in-the-making deflects our attention from the joyful instantaneity and recognizably human chaos below. Raphael wisely avoided this imbalance by representing Christ as a mysterious and compelling body resplendently isolated in his own airspace. Although he is flanked by Moses and Elijah, Jesus stands alone, untouchable and surrounded rather than supported by celestial cloud and light. Like Titian, whose Assumption may slightly predate the Transfiguration, Raphael defines Christ as the living God through the pathosformel of fluttering drapery.48 Rubens chooses instead to suggest Mary’s resurrection and ascension by sinking her into a cumulus pastiche of frolicking angels, grounding a figure that, according to Burckhardt, ought rightly to soar or float. While still in Italy, Rubens himself had painted an enormous version of Raphael’s Transfiguration (Fig. 2.7). Abundantly draped in molten white, the slim, long-haired, and rather delicately featured Christ in the great painting today in Nancy raises his right hand and lowers his left in a manner identical to that of the artist’s later, assumed Mary. Understood figuratively, such christological body language—in contrast to her more common imploring gesture or hands clasped in prayer—may have encouraged viewers to see the Immaculate Mary in a more effectual, spiritually powerful light. And there are other indications that the artist has strained to find a new kinetic vocabulary through which to communicate Mary’s impending power, unsurpassed virtue, and unique capacities as mediatrix.49 In the Vienna Assumption we have been discussing and for which the Leningrad modello is likely a (partial) preparatory sketch, it seems clear that Rubens is interested in doing something new with the story of Mary’s Assumption and crowning. Admiring Raphael’s color and clarity and aware of Titian’s sophistication, Rubens 47 Augustine, as quoted in Voragine, Golden Legend, 84. 48 See Aby Warburg, Revival of Pagan Antiquity, trans. by Britt, 89. In his essay “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring,” Warburg coined this term (translated by Britt as “emotive formula”) to express what he describes as “accessory forms—those of garments and of hair,” represented in motion. Fluttering draperies, in addition to connoting life, movement, and the passage of time may further infuse a work with qualities formally indicated by inanimate materials in quite literal terms, e.g. the goodness of the heavens above or the evils of hell below.” 49 The term has earlier origins in the Speculum humanae salvationis (1475), where Mary is portrayed beside Christ, interceding for humanity. See Balass, “Five Hierarchies of Intercessors,” 182–84.

Making Assumptions

99

Fig. 2.7. Peter Paul Rubens after Raphael, Transfiguration, c.1604–5, Nancy, Musée de Beaux-arts de Nancy, inv. 71. Photo: Musée des Beaux-arts de Nancy, Nancy/Cliché P. Mignot.

may also have contemplated the doctrinal implications of the Assumption as outlined in contemporary didactic books and prints, particularly those circulated by his Jesuit friends. As Freedberg has argued, in the illustrated annotations of Jerome Nadal, for example, Rubens very likely read of the Virgin “coming forth with the most radiant garment of immortality, adorned with glory,” words which may have inspired him to bathe the departing mother of God in an “effulgence the quality of which it is impossible to imagine any other artist in the Netherlands attaining.”50 Yet Rubens would also almost certainly have turned to the Golden Legend, a controversial but still much-trusted compendium of hagiographical vitae written by a Medieval contemporary of Thomas Aquinas. In those pages, he would have encountered a militant adjudicator Mary who confronts the devil face to face saying: Wicked spirit, what rashness led you to presume to harm my devoted follower? You will not go unpunished for this, and I now impose this sentence upon you. Go down to hell, and never again dare to do injury to anyone who invokes me with devotion!51

Rubens’s great task, then, was to concoct an authoritative female figure capable of containing the potentially adverse incarnations—immaculate queen and condemning judge—of the Blessed Virgin. 50 Freedberg, “Source for Rubens’s Modello of the Assumption,” 435. 51 Voragine, Golden Legend, 86.

100 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

I have purposely used the word contain to describe the manner in which I believe Rubens continued to think about the women he painted at this time—as vessels into which he could deposit the abstract notions and qualities necessary to convey the narrative and its message for the pious beholder. Yet what had been his approach in Italy was undergoing a change in Antwerp. In Rubens’s Assumptions, according to Freedberg: The important difference from almost all the accounts (except the Syriac and Coptic texts, which Rubens can hardly have known) is Rubens’s inclusion of the holy women amongst the apostles at the tomb. Their number varies from three to five, although usually only three are present. They had only occasionally been depicted earlier in representations of the scene in late sixteenth century Netherlandish and French art […] but the textual evidence for them is not clear.52

Lacking an obvious textual source, but perhaps in search of a traditionally gendered balance of ethos and pathos, Rubens had begun to integrate female figures more fully in his religious narratives. The three nameless and interchangeable young women in the Assumption infuse the image with a necessary element of empathy and tenderness in much the same way the Marys at the cross had done in his Crucifixions. But in this sense the women are as much personifications as they are specific, historical people. However impossible the Virgin Mary was as a woman—“a virgin not sterile, but fertile; married to a man, but made fruitful by God; bearing a son, but knowing not a man”—she was under no circumstances to be understood as a mere allegory of virtue.53 It is Mary’s true humanity, however preternaturally unblemished, that makes her powerful. Even so, for Rubens she seems not yet to have signified as a representable individual with a psyche, soul, and being of her own. Knowing what Mary had accomplished, Rubens may well have looked to Raphael, whose heuristic for resurrection—Christ’s levitation in snow-white raiment—he boldly adapted to a virginal female figure.54 Considering Mary’s place in the spiritual hierarchy, as just judge second to, if not coefficient with, her son, he also drew upon models of the upward/downward gesturing Christ portrayed in both Northern and Italian Last Judgments. The arrangement of the Virgin’s arms, for instance, seems an indication of her supposedly upward passage through space and, quite possibly, an allusion to the judging, triumphant Christs of Jan van Eyck and Michelangelo (Fig. 2.8) Though her gesture more closely approximates the former, Rubens’s solidly 52 Freedberg, Life of Christ After the Passion, 138. The Norton Simon Museum’s “Women at the Holy Sepulchre” is also fascinating within this context; see Held, “Holy Women,” 67–68. 53 St. Peter Canisius, De Maria Virgine incomparabili (1577), cited in Maclean, Renaissance Notion of Woman, 23. 54 Bellori names Raphael as the “main” (and only) early modern artist with whom Rubens makes “comparisons” in his now lost Notebook, partial transcriptions of which exist in a sketchbook by Van Dyck. See Bellori, Lives, 205.

Making Assumptions

101

Fig. 2.8. Michelangelo Buonarroti, Christ, detail from The Last Judgment, c.1533–41, Vatican City, Vatican Museums and Galleries. Photo: Bridgeman Images.

built Mary shares the sedentary pose, and even the folds arranged on her lap, with the latter. It is perhaps by fusing these two pictorial traditions that Rubens arrived at the figure we now know. But as much as one might wish to see this original conflation of Mary and Jesus as in some way progressive, Rubens’s unusual vision of the Virgin should, I think, be understood not as a feminized Christ but as a masculinized Mary.

102 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Caroline Walker Bynum has demonstrated that twelfth- and thirteenth-century theologians and religious referred to Jesus at times as “mother” investing him with conventional female qualities and devoting themselves to him as a compassionate and nurturing caregiver. For Bynum, texts such as the Monologion of Anselm of Canterbury, where the author describes both St. Paul and Jesus as “mothers by affection, fathers by authority; mothers by kindness, fathers by protection, mothers by compassion,” can be read as evidence of the period’s feminization of religious language and imagery.55 What Rubens does in this early Assumption is something else. His Mary is not Jesus as Mother but Mary as Son. By imbuing what is really no more than a Marian cipher—we can read her uncomplicated symbolic gestures more easily than her facial expression—with christological powers, the artist retreats once again to the one-sex model of Michelangelo, a representational episteme in which, as Thomas Laqueur puts it, “woman does not exist as an ontologically distinct category.”56 Even so, the painting should be viewed as a pivotal one in terms of Rubens’s changing visualization of femininity. For it demonstrates his confusion and uncertainty about (representing) virtuous, de-eroticized, female power. In point of fact, he would never achieve his most impressive Marys in portrayals of the Assumption nor his most powerful and dignified women in the guise of Mary.57 Despite this, the formal and theological challenges presented by the ideal of the Assumption appear to have impacted the development of Rubens’s ideals of womanhood. Perhaps having recognized the respects in which his beautifully banal Queen of Heaven failed to achieve the grandeur and gravity befitting her, Rubens began to seek new ways to make the saintly female form matter.

Expression and Lactation Clara Serena Rubens was born on 21 March 1611. This well-loved daughter was the couple’s only charge for three years until, in 1614, a son, Albert Rubens, joined the family. Four years later, in 1618, Isabella gave birth to a third child, Nicolas. Rubens’s tenderly candid drawings and gentrified oil portraits of his children in their early years are well known.58 It would seem the bustling Italianate palazzo/studio on the Wapper was not without an infant or a toddling child from around 1611 until the early 55 Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 114, 129, 135. 56 Laqueur, Making Sex, 62. 57 Even in the stiff and mannered Annunciation of around 1609–10, which appears to have been Rubens’s first Marian painting for one of Antwerp’s religious orders (the Jesuit-derived Oratory of the Literati), the golden-haired, warm-blooded angel Gabriel, swathed in billowing tangerine silk, is far more convincing and appealing than the marmoreal and anatomically awkward Mary. 58 See the chalk drawings in the Albertina, Vienna: Head of a Young Girl, probably Clara Serena, c.1615; A boy with a Coral Necklace, probably Nicolas, c.1619; Nicolas Rubens, c.1625. See also the full-length portrait of Albert and Nicolas Rubens, c.1626, Sammungen des Fürsten von Liechtenstein, Vaduz.

Making Assumptions

103

1620s. This incursion of family life on high art is borne out in many of Rubens’s contemporaneous history paintings and devotional works from the industrious ten years following his return to Antwerp. Although the connection is not often made, Rubens’s substantial corpus of what might be termed, “lactation imagery” closely corresponds to the decade when his three children would have been nursed and weaned, quite possibly—but not necessarily—by their mother.59 I am not arguing, to be clear, that Rubens was somehow unaware of the figurative, artistic, or scientific significance of lactation before he had children of his own nor, as will shortly be evident, that his use of lactation imagery came “solely from his own familial experience,” but rather, that the presence of a certain kind of lactation—rarely featuring Jesus—comes to the fore in the second decade of the seventeenth century.60 Neither does it seem to me coincidental that many of the splendid garland paintings of the Madonna and Child, often executed by Rubens in collaboration with the exacting painter of flora and fauna, Jan Brueghel, date from this period as well. Freedberg has credibly claimed that Rubens’s children served as models for the apple-cheeked putti he contributed to many of these joyful and meticulously fabricated works.61 As one might expect from an artist recently returned to deeply Catholic, and deeply Marian, Antwerp, scenes of motherly affection and family feeling increasingly appear in Rubens’s compositions. But while it may not seem strange that Rubens’s artistic choices were influenced by the arrival of his children, some of his most explicit nursing and lactation imagery from this period has little to do with mothers and babies. In fact, depictions of the Madonna actively or actually suckling Jesus are wholly absent from his diversified devotional repertoire; in an oeuvre of thousands of works, Rubens portrays Mary expressing milk into the mouth of her infant son only once. The Potsdam Nursing Madonna (Fig. 2.9) can be situated within a group of compositionally related lactation paintings dating from the second decade of the seventeenth century. Executed around 1614–15, it is a small (25 × 20 in./63.5 × 50.8 cm) work presumably intended for private devotions.62 The panel may owe its modest scale and unabashed display of Mary’s breast and nipple to the Flemish diptych tradition of the fifteenth century, with which it also shares the frontal, half-length format. Like 59 As an upper-class wife and mother of financial means, Isabella may also have chosen to send her children to a wet nurse in the country, which was often deemed safer and more beneficial for an infant’s health. Yet the existence of Rubens’s drawings of his children at an early age may also indicate his access to them at home. For early modern breastfeeding practices, see Fildes, Wet Nursing, esp. 79–100. 60 In the author’s uncharitable mischaracterization, my minor point about the role of Rubens’s family life within what I hope is a more complex and nuanced argument is made to eclipse the central claims of the study (with minor revisions here). See Thøfner, “Nursing Paint,” 180 and again, 191. 61 On this point see Freedberg, “Flemish Madonnas in Flower Garlands,” 134. For the collaborative nature of the garland paintings see Woollett et al., Rubens and Brueghel, 116–21. And on the genre itself see Merriam, Seventeenth-Century Flemish Garland Paintings. 62 Many copies were evidently made of this panel; the version discussed here (Sanssouci) is considered autograph by M. Jaffé, Catalogo completo, 200, no. 280.

104 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Fig. 2.9. Peter Paul Rubens, Nursing Madonna, c.1614, Potsdam, Schloss Sanssouci. Photo: Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg.

earlier Netherlandish artists, Rubens has modernized the Virgin, imagining her as a dark-haired, rather serious-looking local girl who bears not a little resemblance to his fine-featured wife, Isabella.63 This Mary awkwardly braces herself over a corpulent charge whose bent-kneed posture echoes the expansively recumbent poses of Michelangelo’s male nudes. Stiffly cradled by a pillow, the baby Jesus reaches not for his mother’s almost imperceptibly lactating breast but for her sweetly solicitous face, as if to acknowledge her adoration and perhaps her foreknowledge as well. In the baby’s supine pose and swaddling linens Rubens may be forecasting the adult Christ’s shrouding and entombment. 63 Compare, for example, Rubens’s likeness of a youthful Isabella portrayed as Glycera or Flora (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts).

Making Assumptions

105

Despite the reciprocity of their body language, Rubens’s baby Jesus makes no physical contact with Mary. Following convention, the painter might easily have portrayed him with his lips at Mary’s nipple. Instead, a seemingly intimate encounter between the Madonna and her holy child is predicated on distance and separation.64 Although Jesus looks to his mother, Rubens expertly redirects our attention to him such that Mary’s focus becomes our focus. Indeed, the painter’s determination not to show a nursing Madonna suggests that he may have been reluctant to portray the Son of God in the middle of so mortal an act as suckling, since this would have underscored his reliance for sustenance on the body of a mere woman. Reluctance on theological grounds to render the Christ child in a position emphasizing his existential vulnerability accords well with Rubens’s tendency to visually prefigure the crucifixion and resurrection by depicting the infant who would become Christ standing unaided on his mother’s lap. Rubens seems to have sought an alternative to the earthier nursing Madonnas shown in the act by his near contemporaries Agostino Carracci, El Greco, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Jusepe de Ribera. This can be seen in his Holy Family, c.1615 (Fig. 2.10), a multifigure painting almost twice the size of the Nursing Madonna, which also dates from just after the birth of the artist’s first son, Albert. Here a sleepy Jesus sweetly chucks his mother’s chin as his only slightly older relative—or possibly, cousin—John, steadies himself on Mary’s knee. His back to the beholder, St. John moves in excitedly to get a look at the baby boy in the manner in which a curious Clara Rubens might have responded to her newborn brother. For medieval and Renaissance artists, as Leo Steinberg argued in his provocative excursus on Christ’s sexuality, the “chin-chuck” was a long-established “sign of erotic communion, either carnal or spiritual.”65 In the conservative spirit of Catholic Reformation, Rubens opts for the ‘spiritual’ by including Mary’s earthly spouse, Joseph, whose presence frustrates, at least to some extent, notions of Christ as Mary’s Heavenly Bridegroom. Like Joseph, Mary is attentive to Jesus’s young precursor, whose posture recalls John 3:29 (Douai-Rheims): “but the friend of the bridegroom, who standeth and heareth him, rejoiceth with joy because of the bridegroom’s voice.” Lowering her eyes to both Jesus and John, Mary has already eased her breast from the constricting bodice of an anachronously seventeenth-century vermilion dress with blue sleeves. Neither her hands nor the baby’s mouth are positioned near the hint of an areola that seems to project a small circle of reflected light onto Jesus’s half-shadowed chest. Again in contrast to the nursing Madonnas by the artists mentioned above, Rubens 64 Literally ‘laid to rest,’ before his adoring Mother, Jesus’s posture resembles that of Bellini’s figurative sleeping and reclining babies. See the Davis Madonna, c.1460 (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art) and the Virgin and Child with Saint John and a Female Saint, before 1504 (Galleria dell’Accademia di Venezia). On the meanings and representation of maternity in Bellini’s Madonnas of this type see the innovative studies by Rona Goffen, “Icon and Vision,” and Kristeva, “Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini.” 65 Steinberg, Sexuality of Christ, 3–5.

106 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Fig. 2.10. Peter Paul Rubens, Holy Family, c.1615, Chicago, Art Institute. Photo: Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, USA, Major Acquisitions Fund/Bridgeman Images.

seems wary of drawing, and drawing attention to, the raw mechanics and pleasurable mutuality of breastfeeding Jesus. Infant and child mortality rates were exceedingly high in seventeenth-century Europe, particularly in the Netherlands, which was repeatedly ravaged by plague. But for a time, Rubens was a fortunate father. Unlike many in his town, he saw each of his children live to reach toddlerhood and was undoubtedly aware of the crucial role of breastfeeding in the growth and survival of his family. Yet lactation evidently held a lofty status for Rubens beyond the familial and maternal. As a life-giving act, nursing was, I want to say, too powerful to associate with the infant Jesus, who might, as we have seen, be figured theologically as Mary’s equal in his capacity to redeem, but never as her subordinate. Rubens thus takes a moral approach to nursing, recasting the

Making Assumptions

107

everyday activity of feeding as a redemptive good work with implications for the life to come. This echoes the outlook of Catholic exegetes for whom nursing symbolizes caritas, or Christian charity. But there may be something further to Rubens’s portrayal of feeding from the breast as a transformative act of sensual, if not sexual, healing. Beyond a visual theology of charity, that is, Rubens’s lactations might suggest an analogous relationship between the creative power of nursing and the creative power of painting. In this sense there was for him, it appears, a useful porousness between feeding the body, feeding the soul, and feeding the eyes; between a woman’s capacity to nourish an infant with a crudely self-generated substance and his own ability to create human forms from colors derived out of equally base or primitive materials. In vividly depicting the female capacity to generate, mediate, and recuperate through milk-making, Rubens displays his parallel abilities as a proudly naturalistic painter fluent in the art of conception and reproduction. It is intriguing that the most fully realized scenes of Rubens’s extramaternal lactation paintings from around 1611–15 involve an attractive young mother and a much older man. Freudian implications aside, the painter’s recurrent re/staging of the subject offers the male artist-as-beholder the best of both worlds: he may imagine himself not only as the titillated male recipient of the salutary milk but also as the creator, or mother, of its beautiful and virtuous female source.

Juno and the Peacock “Neither my mother nor my nurses filled their own breasts with milk,” wrote St. Augustine, whose commentaries are frequently punctuated with the imagery of nursing: “It was you [God] who, through them, gave me the food of my infancy.”66 For the more literal-minded, however, the origin of maternal milk was inevitably the body of a woman, who, as even Aristotle and Aquinas had put it, conceives in herself. Accordingly, this procreative act, for it was nothing if not that, could sometimes ascribe to the nursing woman a degree of agency, power, and self-sufficiency. Typically included among a group of iconographically showy mythological works closely following Rubens’s return to Antwerp, the stunning and peculiar painting known as Juno and Argus (c.1610–11) (Plate 5), bears mentioning in this context, for it characterizes the spectrum of color itself as the co-creation of two female divinities.67 The storm has passed in the bright empyrean realm where the stately and elegant queen of the Gods, Juno, has risen from a gleaming chariot to gather drops of breast milk from her loyal lady-in-waiting. Rather than show the violent encounter between 66 Augustine, Confessions, 1.6, quoted in Miles, Complex Delight, p. x. 67 On Juno and Argus see Geogievska-Shine, Rubens and the Archeology of Myth, 111–51.

108 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

beleaguered Io’s hundred-eyed protector, Argus, and the messenger Mercury, who slays him at Juno’s behest, Rubens’s origin story unfolds sometime after the violent fact. Nearest to the beholder, the headless body of Argus, here a sprawling, classicized nude, has fallen at Juno’s feet like a vanquished Roman warrior—and not dissimilar to the Potsdam nursing Christ already mentioned. On the picture’s honorific left, a glorious pair of peacocks achieve a compositional prominence that far exceeds their rather perfunctory presence in frescoes of Juno by Veronese and Annibale Carracci near the end of the previous century. The fact that nearly half the canvas is allocated to these symbolic avian bodies makes their narrative and symbolic value immediately clear. Thus it is the brilliantly fanned tail of the displaying bird and the leading left-to-right diagonal created by its mate that helps the viewer identify the myth through its characters. Noting that the splendid long-necked birds bracket the watchman’s decapitated head, the seventeenth-century beholder might even have contrasted the goddess’s decollation of Argus with her decoration of the birds’ tail feathers. Yet in the concluding chapter of the first book of Metamorphoses, Ovid is mainly concerned to explain the circumstances leading up to the creative act on which Rubens has chosen to focus: Then he rapidly struck with his sickle-shaped sword at his nodding victim/ just where the head comes close to the neck, and hurled him bleeding/down from the rock to bespatter the cliff in a shower of gore/ Argus was finished. The light that had glittered in all those stars/ was extinguished; a hundred eyes were eclipsed in a single darkness. Juno extracted those eyes and gave them a setting like sparkling jewels in the feathers displayed on the tail of the peacock, her own bird.68

Hence the headless, strangely bloodless, nude and the imposing constellation of tail feathers. But what of the lactating woman? Given the particulars of Ovid’s tale, the representation of Juno essentially milking her bare-breasted companion must be recognized as a startlingly queer conceit in Rubens’s painting. Because she often occupies the role of Juno’s “handmaiden,” Rubens’s golden-haired young woman is generally assumed to be Iris, a hazy mythological character who is at times conflated with the goddess herself.69 Elsewhere in Metamorphoses Ovid briefly mentions Iris, first for her part in the great flood where “Juno’s messenger, decked in her mantle of many colors, Iris the rainbow, sucked up moisture to thicken the clouds.”70 This meteorological reference explains the painting’s residually ominous cloud formations; dark skies are reminders of the radiant rainbow’s dependence on water, gendered feminine in humoral terms. 68 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1.717–26, trans. Raeburn, 41. 69 Georgievska-Shine, Rubens and the Archaeology of Myth, 128. 70 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1.270–71, trans. Raeburn, 275.

Making Assumptions

109

Yet, as Aneta Georgievska-Shine has noted, Iris was not frequently depicted by early modern artists.71 In Juno and Argus, a work viewed by some art historians as a visual-theoretical exposition on vision, sight, and the production of color, Rubens conceives Iris as an alluring young woman swathed not in a coat of many colors but in monochromatic blue. Only the rainbow above her head intimates Iris’s role as the embodiment of insubstantial color, refracted through her being in an almost limitless range of hues.72 Paradoxically, Rubens reifies the beauty and generative capacities of ‘Iris, the rainbow’ by grounding her in human form; his Iris is a vessel of feminine materiality in all its sticky alchemical abundance. When Juno the protector of women takes Iris as a wet nurse, the rainbow’s milk becomes the substrate of the peacock’s resplendent eyes, an embodied doubling of creative vision and representation. Notwithstanding Rubens’s unusual decision to personify Iris in such a sensual and corporeal manner, it is her supposedly allegorical meaning—rather than his employment of lactation—that has formed the basis of most studies of the painting to date. Beginning with investigations of Rubens’s color theory in relation to the optical ideas of one of his Jesuit friends, Aguilonius, Juno and Argus has been viewed almost entirely within the realm of science and philosophy, with little consideration of the role of gender in making it meaningful. As Charles Parkhurst Jr. argued: [W]hat is important is not the detailed understanding of the iconography, but that the subject is fundamentally an optical one dealing with eyes which, significantly, in Ovid’s text are given to the “painted” peacock, pavonibus pictis.73

Absent from the painted scene, as the author goes on to note, are the male actors Jupiter, Pan, and Mercury, a further indication that “history” is not really the artist’s interest. Rubens almost certainly had in mind the pictorial interdependence of color, light, and optics when he took up the origin of the feathered ‘eyes’ of the ‘painted’ bird. But it seems equally true that he sought to assert the natural superiority of color over all else (including, perhaps, a strategically deposed figure of Roman disegno). He meant to show, in other words, the marvelous artistic effects that could be derived from the judicious management of a rainbow of pigments and shades. In the discussion of color mixing in Aguilonius’s Optics (1613), for which Rubens created six accompanying illustrations and a now well-known architectonic titlepage crowned with Juno and her peacock, the Jesuit author writes of a “nearly infinite number” of colors potentially transformed by layering and combination.74 71 Iris does, however, make an important appearance in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which was first performed on 31 October 1611. Iris precedes Juno (and Ceres) in Act 4’s marriage masque, where she refers to Zeus’s consort as her “bounteous sister.” 72 Georgievska-Shine, Rubens and the Archaeology of Myth, 130–33. 73 See Parkhurst, “Aguilonius’ Optics.” 74 Quoted in Parkhurst, “Aguilonius’ Optics,” 48.

110 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

How better to evoke the manifold splendors of color than by suggesting that the iridescent lenses of Argus were originally affixed to the peacock’s tail feathers with drops of breast milk issuing from the mother of color herself? On careful examination, we see that this is exactly what takes place in the painting. For while Iris busies herself with the surgical slicing, or ‘extraction,’ of the eyes, Juno apparently cups Iris’s breast, using her thumb and index finger to gently release a pearly drop of milk into the concave eye slice on her fingertip. Looking closely, one can even perceive a hint of reflected light on the glinting surface of the bead of milk, an apt example of what contemporary Northern art historian, Karel van Mander, designated reflexy-const, or the image-maker’s crucial task of “depicting reflections.”75 The (pseudo) scientific significance of this spectrum-making process may have as much to do with medicine as optics. For it is significant that Rubens’s contemporaries viewed breast milk as a cure-all, with special efficacy for ailments of the eye. Thus the unusually explicit rendering of Juno’s method of adhering severed eye piece to shimmering feather may uphold what many affirmed as the medicinal, even thaumaturgical, qualities of milk. As the English doctor Thomas Muffet wrote in a medical treatise published in 1584: “Neither is women’s milk best only for young and tender infants, but also for men and women of riper years, fallen by age or by sickness […].”76 Muffet’s recommendation indicates that in Rubens’s time the commonplace of Roman charity—of an aged parent sustained by the milk of a nursing daughter—may have been understood in a more pragmatic and quotidian sense than one might first imagine. Art historians have not been quick to correlate milk with vision. Yet, as Marylynn Salmon explains, “reliance on breast milk to treat eye problems may have been extensive” in early modern Europe and the American colonies. The pioneering French obstetrician Jacques Guillemeau advised in 1612: “The Nurse, besides a sufficient quantity for the nourishment of the child, must have some to milke into his eyes, if he should chance to have any imperfections there.”77 The fact that mother’s milk was commonly administered—often directly from the breast to the cornea or pupil, as in Rubens’s painting—was therefore likely to have carried special meaning at the time. In view of this early modern practice, contemporary viewers might also appreciate Rubens’s homey explication of the painted bird’s starry eyes as the product of Iris’s milk, just as that plentiful constellation, the Milky Way, owed its mythological origins to Juno’s breast.78 75 Van Mander’s ideas are discussed in relation to other, more theoretical, aspects of the painting in Georgievska-Shine, Rubens and the Archaeology of Myth, 137. Reflexy-const is described as privileging “descriptive criteria gauging even figures as light-reflective surfaces,” in Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon, 71. 76 Thomas Muffet, Health’s Improvement (1584), quoted in Salmon, “Cultural Significance of Breastfeeding,” 248–49. 77 Jacques Guillemeau, Child-Birth or, The Happy Deliverie of Women (London, 1612), quoted in Salmon, “Cultural Significance of Breastfeeding,” 250. 78 Tintoretto had represented the story c.1575 in his Origin of the Milky Way (London, National Gallery); Rubens would not depict the subject until c.1636–38 (Madrid, Museo del Prado).

Making Assumptions

111

Regarding a related play of word and image, both Georgievska-Shine and Matthias Winner have pointed out the wittily homonymous coincidence of pupilla (eye) and papilla (breast). Georgievska-Shine suggests that Rubens would likely have wished to suggest a “simile between Iris’s breast (gemma) and Argus’s eyes as the ‘starry jewels’ (gemmis stellantibus) by relating them to the contemporary use of gems as paradigmatic examples of the colors of the spectrum.”79 She then goes even further, tentatively proposing Iris as an “aspect of ‘Virgo lactans.’”80 Yet the pursuit of this interesting possibility with respect to Rubens’s perception of maternity and/or breastfeeding, or in comparison with his contemporary Marian imagery, is never explored. Instead Iris’s crucial place in the painting’s narrative action is immediately translated into evidence of the underlying Neoplatonism of Rubens’s “discourse” on cognition. While the painting’s most recent interpreters have also noted, with varying degrees of emphasis, the empirical and Aristotelian underpinnings of the image visà-vis Aguilonius’s optical treatise, they have not made the distinctly Aristotelian connection between the (dangerous) sensuality of color and the moralized gendering of painterly colorito.81 Aristotle investigates the nature of the rainbow in the Meteorologica where he implies the relationship between clouds, rain, and the “trace of rainbow coloring.”82 Elsewhere in his works (De anima 2, De sensu), however, Aristotle establishes color as a superficial accident of (female) matter rather than the substance of seminal (male) form.83 This characteristically dichotomous formula leads in turn to the conjunction of sensuality with femininity—for the perception of color is the specified object of the sense of sight. The devalued notional network of matter, color, sensuality—and by extension, of an art availing itself of unbridled painting (versus cerebral draftsmanship)—is therefore designated womanly or effeminate. Moreover, just as Plato had gendered rhetoric itself as feminine, aligning it with the deceptive stylishness of “beauty culture,” Aristotle and Cicero saw color as an ornamental aspect of rhetoric.84 For the rhetor, color was additive and cosmetic, to be used sparingly and with care. And further, as David Summers explains: Although “color” as a metaphor for the figuration of language in general was central to classical rhetoric in its whole long tradition, its excess was a vice which was

79 Georgievska-Shine, Rubens and the Archaeology of Myth, 130. 80 Georgievska-Shine, Rubens and the Archeology of Myth, 130. The author’s emphasis on the “Neo-Platonic” foundation of the painting as an allegory of the separation of Argus’s soul from his body seems to me at odds with its pointedly empirical, even Aristotelian, appeal to the senses and the experience of the colors of the visible world. 81 In an earlier art historical era Parkhurst’s article inspired a similarly brief flurry of interest (and debate), for which see M. Jaffé, “Rubens and Optics”; Julius Held, “Rubens and Aguilonius.” 82 Aristotle, Meteorologica, 375b, cited in Lee and Fraser, Rainbows in Art, Myth, and Science, 107. 83 See Modrak, “Sensation and Desire,” 312–13. 84 See Plato, Gorgias, quoted in Ede et al., “Border Crossings,” 422.

112 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

often metaphorically sexual and more or less explicitly gendered, the faulty style being “effeminate” or, worse, “wanton” or “seductive.”85

During the Renaissance, ‘natural’ excess and abundance themselves were femininely gendered, though sometimes in positive terms, as Rebecca Zorach has shown.86 Rubens’s painting is animated by each of these overlapping artistic, philosophical, and rhetorical conventions: the elision of nature’s excess and female fecundity; the adversarial relationship of masculine form and feminine matter; the seductive persuasiveness of coloring/painting in and of themselves. Hence, to view Juno and Argus in a manner that admits its gendered valences is, even at the most elementary level, to recognize Rubens’s representation of a duo of female divinities partnered in the creative business of ornamenting nature by means of the uniquely sensual, sensible, material—and womanly—properties of lactation.

Caught Between Lactation imagery figures elsewhere in works dating from Rubens’s first decade back in Antwerp. Widely distributed Flemish prints by the Wiericx brothers depicting Mary as co-redemptrix find analogues in Rubens’s St. Augustine between Christ and the Virgin Mary of c.1615 (Fig. 2.11), a painting based on a phrase inaccurately attributed at the time to the patristic theologian. To the author of the Confessions and The City of God seventeenth-century Catholics also ascribed an uncharacteristic expression of gendered uncertainty: “Hinc pascor a vulnere: hinc lactor ab ubere. Positus in medio, quo me vertam nescio” (“From this source, I gaze at the wound; from this source, I nurse at the breast. Placed in the middle, I do not know where to turn”).87 John Knipping traced the origin of Rubens’s painting not only to the pseudo-Augustinian passage but to his knowledge of a heated but short-lived controversy over a legendary Dutch stained-glass window depicting the same subject. In 1597, according to this story, Gijsbert Masius, the long-suffering Catholic bishop of ’s-Hertogenbosch, had commissioned for the Church of the Holy Cross the aforementioned window— or possibly a painting—representing himself, kneeling in pained indecision between fluid-expressing images of Christ and the Virgin. An anonymous print of 1614, just slightly earlier than Rubens’s painting, purports to represent the historical circumstances.88 A late sixteenth-century painting in Venice’s Museo Correr, possibly by El

85 For the influence of Aristotelian notions of form and matter on the gendering of art and (formalist) art history, see Summers, “Form and Gender,” 254–58 and 269–70, n. 23. See also Reilly, “Taming of the Blue,” 88. 86 Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold, esp. 83–103. 87 See also Knipping, Iconography of the Counter Reformation, II, 275. 88 Knipping, Iconography of the Counter Reformation, II, 275.

Making Assumptions

113

Fig. 2.11. Peter Paul Rubens, St. Augustine between Christ and the Virgin Mary, c.1615, Madrid, Museo de las Bellas Artes de San Fernando. Photo: Heritage Image Partnership/Art Resource, New York.

Greco, also includes a portion of the pseudo-Augustinian phrase, though with a less graphic representation of the blood and milk between which the saint must choose.89 Not surprisingly, local reaction to the image by the Dutch Calvinist majority had resulted in a brief pamphlet war, the details of which are predictable: Despite its supposed patristic/textual origins, the Catholic cleric’s image was deemed idolatrous and the bishop himself was lampooned for his silly and faithless inability to choose. 89 A print by Mario Cartaro (Kartarius) in the Vita di Agostino, Paris,1570, provides another early source for the topos.

114 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

The insinuation of the bishop’s Protestant opponents was that Christ was the obvious figure in whom one should ultimately place one’s faith and trust given the choice between the Son of God and a virtuous but otherwise normal human woman. From the standpoint of Calvinist piety, the brouhaha accompanying the print attests to the dangerous leveling effect of proposed equivalences between Mary’s breast/milk and Christ’s wound/blood. Moreover, the Dutch bishop’s indecision mirrors the devotional quandary—itself an inconstant, inherently female state of mind—in which many seventeenth-century Catholic believers might have found themselves. Flanked by two such powerful co-mediators, to whom was one to look first? No answer is provided by Rubens’s Augustine, who kneels on one of the hefty tomes that often accompany him. Despite the slightly awkward incursion of Mary on his left and Christ on his right, the swarthy and redoubtable African bishop aims his eyes resolutely heavenward. Augustine looks elsewhere even though Rubens is quite explicit about the freshness of Christ’s wound, a dark gash from which rosy streams flow, staining his pristine white garment. Here, recalling the Nursing Madonna of the same year, Rubens treats Mary’s body with the same nipple-baring specificity found in the charitable figure of Pero—and with the same finger-parting gesture seen in Gentileschi and Carracci’s breastfeeding Madonnas. making a ‘V’ around her areola, the mother of God compresses the flesh of a diminutive, improbably high, but realistically full, breast. Matronly and attractive, Mary’s face is rendered in dignified profile. She looks down benevolently on the perplexed St. Augustine as if to assure him that he has but to turn her way to avail himself of spiritual mediation bestowed in the beneficial form of mother’s milk. Rubens emphasizes Mary’s intercessory efficacy in other ways as well. In an unusual reversal of gendered meteorological conditions, the Virgin is bathed in a solar radiance she herself seems to generate while Christ exudes only a faint, lunar luminosity from the depths of a black, tumultuous sky. Perhaps most importantly, the reality and validity of Marian intercession receives Christ’s blessing. With an air of fascination, the willowy Son of God this time directs his gaze, and the beholder’s, to his mother’s breast, watching approvingly as she makes her charitable offering. This bold transformation of a diminutive devotional print into an imposing earthly encounter exemplifies Rubens’s naturalizing impulse. Not only has he depicted his figures life size (the painting measures almost 8 × 5 ft./244 × 152 cm) but the two mediators are presented as living, or at least physical, beings whose bodies occupy the same space as the saint. Using lactation as the signal trope, Rubens proposes a world in which Mary’s equality with Christ, evinced by her embodiment and provision of loving forgiveness, can be safely represented as perceptible, palpable, and full of painterly color and grace. In Flanders, as in France—and Italy, where the falsely Augustinian passage probably originated—there were numerous printed and painted precedents for the display of Mary’s lactating breast. But none possessed the rich color, sensual immediacy and

Making Assumptions

115

ambitious, even heroic, scale of Rubens’s painting.90 Surely beholders familiar with the artist’s earlier works would have been struck by the infantilizing effect of this Junoesque mother on Rubens’s uncharacteristically subdued church father. Perhaps it is not surprising in this respect that the painting, housed today in Madrid’s Museo de las Bellas Artes de San Fernando was intended for a Spanish patron, for whom a jewel-toned Rubensian variation on the Bernardine legend may have been especially appealing. The standing Mary in the Augustine picture wears a periwinkle-lined, ultramarine mantle. Yet her blood red dress and billowing gauze veil echo the crimson gown of Rubens’s somewhat younger-looking and by Petrarchan standards, prettier, lactating Pero. This co-redemptrix Mary also closely resembles Rubens’s right-facing Juno, whose cleavage spills over her bodice—just as the divine Juno relates in turn to the image with which we began, the non-nursing Nursing Madonna of 1614. During the few years surrounding the birth of his first daughter and sons, Rubens sought to express a range of values and capacities through what was apparently for him, the newly familiar efficacy of lactation. He nevertheless stopped short of representing the Virgin Mary—for Catholics the archetype of virtuous mothers and exceptional women—with a suckling Jesus at her breast. Instead, lactating women, and even Mary herself, were assigned other figurative functions where their essentially generative and generous natures, rather than their biological motherhood as such, were emphasized. That these women who offer their breasts, also consistently bow their heads, looking not to the viewer but to the male or males with whom they share the composition, implies, as in other works of this period, a level of ambivalence about female power. Even, or maybe especially, when the powerful woman is the Virgin Mary. Having created a number of alluring mediators, Rubens seems intent on curtailing their engagement of the beholder even as he delights in making them narratively central and invitingly lifelike. Rubens’s rather short-lived valorization of breastfeeding, is not in any case, a seventeenth-century example of art imitating life. With the telling exception of the Nursing Madonna, the genteel mothers he represents are not involved in the nourishment and sustenance of children like his own. In fact, Rubens seems ultimately to have judged the nursing theme prohibitively provocative except in the most profane of subjects (one thinks of the insatiable baby satyrs and their animalistic, balloon-breasted mothers in the Silenus paintings that also largely date from Rubens’s child-rearing years). Mimesis has its dangers. In the hands of a talented colorist, the graphic representation of the act of suckling might unintentionally subordinate the infant Christ or perversely eroticize the Virgin breast. As has often been observed, the difficulty of 90 For a useful survey of musical, visual, and literary treatments of this pseudo-Augustinian text, see Bartel, “Portal of the Skies,” 25–143.

116 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

controlling the effects of painterly naturalism was in direct proportion to its excellence. Going forward, then, Rubens seems to have tempered his desire to paint the virtuously bare nursing breast with a refusal to portray its use or function as a source of life, strength and, potentially, desire and pleasure. In this he may have wished to proclaim Marian exceptionality by ultimately isolating her from the everyday experience of other virtuous of women, such as his own wife. He may also have wished to emphasize Christ’s status as the Son of God rather than the son of Mary. He may even have wished to excite the viewer with unquestionably erotic renderings of a portion of woman’s body not normally on view. Whatever his reasons, Rubens would scarcely return to the subject of the Holy Family and the affective relations between the Virgin mother and child until the time of his second marriage to the teenage Hélène Fourment, with whom he fathered four children between 1632 and 1637. In these paintings, too, however, the baby Jesus stands on the knee of his mother, whose exposed breast is seemingly offered for the visual delight of Rubens’s viewers rather than the feeding of her son.91

Works Cited Augustine, Confessions, ed. James J. O’Donnell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Balass, Golda, “Five Hierarchies of Intercessors for Salvation: The Decoration of the Angels’ Chapel in the Gesù,” Artibus et Historiae, 24 (2003), 183–87. Bartel, Kate, “Portal of the Skies: Four Scenes in the Musical Life of the Virgin Mary, ca. 1500–1650,” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2007. Baudouin, Frans, “Altars and Altarpieces before 1620,” in Rubens Before 1620, ed. John Rupert Martin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 45–91. Belkin, Kristin Lohse, Rubens (London: Phaidon, 1998). Bellori, Giovan Pietro, The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl, notes by Hellmut Wohl, introd. by Tomaso Montanari (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Bialostocki, Jan, “‘The Descent from the Cross’ in Works by Peter Paul Rubens and His Studio,” Art Bulletin, 46 (December 1964), 511–24. Boeckl, Christine, “Plague Imagery as Metaphor for Heresy in Rubens’ The Miracles of Saint Francis Xavier,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 27 (Winter 1996), 979–95. Burckhardt, Jacob, Rubens (1898, rpt. London: Phaidon, 1950). Bynum, Carolyn Walker, Jesus as Mother (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). Cajetan, F. Thomas de Vio, Opuscula: quaestiones et quodlibetá (Venice, 1529). Canisius, St. Peter, De Maria Virgine incomparabili (Ingolstadt, 1577). Clark, Kenneth, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (New York: Doubleday, 1956). Cohen, Sarah R. “Rubens’s France: Gender and Personification in the Marie de Médicis Cycle,” Art Bulletin, 85 (September 2003), 490–522. Daley, John, ed., The Vatican: Spirit and Art of Christian Rome (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1982).

91 A portion of this chapter was previously published as “Full of Grace: Lactation, Expression, and ‘Colorito’ Painting in Some Early Works by Rubens,” in Jutta Gisela Sperling, ed., Medieval and Renaissance Lactations: Images, Rhetorics, Practices (Aldershot/Burlington: Ashgate, 2013), 255–77.

Making Assumptions

117

Ede, Lisa, Cheryl Glenn, and Andrea Lunsford, “Border Crossings: Intersections of Rhetoric and Feminism,” Rhetorica, 13 (Autumn 1995), 401–41. Fildes, Valerie, Wet Nursing (Oxford/New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988). Filipczak, Zirka Z., Hot Dry Men, Cold Wet Women: The Theory of Humors in Western European Art, 1575–1700, exh. cat. (Williamstown: American Federation of the Arts, 1997). Freedberg, David, “On the Origins and Rise of the Flemish Madonnas in Flower Garlands: Decoration and Devotion,” Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, 32 (1981), 115–50. Freedberg, David, Rubens: The Life of Christ after the Passion, CRLB 7 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). Freedberg, David, “A Source for Rubens’s Modello of the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin: a Case Study in the Response to Images,” Burlington Magazine, 120 (July 1978), 432–41. Fromentin, Eugène, The Masters of Past Time, trans. Andrew Boyle (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1913). Georgievska-Shine, Aneta, Rubens and the Archeology of Myth, 1610–1620: Visual and Poetic Memory (New York: Routledge, 2009). Goffen, Rona, “Icon and Vision: Giovanni Bellini’s Half-Length Madonnas,” Art Bulletin, 57 (December 1975), 487–518. Guillemeau, Jacques, Child-Birth or, The Happy Deliverie of Women (London, 1612). Hamburgh, Harvey E., “The Problem of Lo Spasimo of the Virgin in Cinquecento Paintings of the Descent from the Cross,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 12 (Winter 1981), 45–75. Held, Julius, “‘The Holy Women at Christ’s Sepulchre’ by Rubens,” Source: Notes in the History of Art, 8–9 (Summer–Fall 1989), 66–76. Held, Julius, “Rubens and Aguilonius: New Points of Contact,” Art Bulletin, 61 (June 1979), 257–64. Humphrey, Peter, The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). Jaffé, David and Elizabeth McGrath, with Minna Moore Ede, Rubens: A Master in the Making, exh. cat. (London: National Gallery Co., 2005). Jaffé, Michael, “Rubens and Optics: Some Fresh Evidence,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 34 (1971), 362–66.. Jaffé, Michael, Rubens: catalogo completo (Milan: Rizzoli, 1989). Jirousek, Carolyn, “Christ and St. John the Evangelist as a Model of Medieval Mysticism,” Cleveland Studies in the History of Art, 6 (2001), 6–27. Knipping, John, Iconography of the Counter Reformation in the Netherlands: Heaven on Earth, 2 vols. (Nieuwkoop/Leiden: De Graaf & Sijthoff, 1974). Kristeva, Julia, “Motherhood according to Giovanni Bellini,” in Desire in Language, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 237–70. Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). Lee, Raymond and Alistair Fraser, The Rainbow Bridge: Rainbows in Art, Myth, and Science (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001). Leurs, Stan, “Barokkerken te Antwerpen,” Ars Belgica, 3 (Antwerp, 1935), 1–45. Maclean, Ian, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Martin, John Rupert, The Ceiling Paintings for the Jesuit Church in Antwerp, CRLB 1 (London: Phaidon, 1968). Martin, John Rupert, ed., Rubens: The Antwerp Altarpieces (New York: W.W. Norton, 1969). Melion, Walter, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel Van Mander’s Schilder-Boeck (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991). Merriam, Susan, Seventeenth-Century Flemish Garland Paintings: Still Life, Vision and the Devotional Image (Burlington, VT/Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). Miles, Margaret, A Complex Delight: The Secularization of the Breast, 1350–1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). Modrak, Deborah Karen Ward, “Sensation and Desire,” in A Companion to Aristotle, ed. Giorgios Anagnostopoulos (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 310–21. Muir, Carolyn Diskant, “Art and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Antwerp: Van Dyck’s ‘Mystic Marriage of the Blessed Hermann-Joseph,’” Simiolus, 28 (2000–1), 51–69.

118 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Neff, Amy, “The Pain of Compassio: Mary’s Labor at the Foot of the Cross,” Art Bulletin, 80 (June 1998), 254–73. O’Malley, John, The Early Jesuits (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. David Raeburn (London: Penguin, 2004). Pangborn, Cyrus R., “Christian Theology and the Dogma of the Assumption,” Journal of Bible and Religion, 30 (April 1962), 93–100. Parkhurst, Charles, “Aguilonius’ Optics and Rubens’ Color,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 8 (1961), 35–49. Peeters, Natasja, “Rubens’s Altarpieces in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium,” in Rubens at Work: The Works of Peter Paul Rubens in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium Reconsidered/Rubens; L’Atelier du genie, ed. Joost Vander Auwera, exh. cat. (Brussels: Racine Lannoo, 2008), 97–126. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. with introd. by John F. Healy (London/New York: Penguin, 2004). Reilly, Patricia L., “The Taming of the Blue: Writing Out Color in Italian Renaissance Theory,” The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 86–99. Rooses, Max, Rubens, trans. Harold Child (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1904). Rosand, David, Painting in Sixteenth-Century Venice: Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Ruskin, John, Modern Painters, V (1860, rpt. New York: John B. Alden, 1885). Salmon, Marylynn, “The Cultural Significance of Breastfeeding and Infant Care in Early Modern England and America,” Journal of Social History, 28 (Winter 1994), 248–69. Steinberg, Leo, “Pontormo’s Capponi Chapel,” Art Bulletin, 56 (September 1974), 385–99. Steinberg, Leo, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996). Summers, David, “Form and Gender,” New Literary History, 24 (Spring 1993), 243–71. Tamis, Damien, “The Genesis of Albert Cornelis’s ‘Coronation of the Virgin’ in Bruges,” Burlington Magazine, 142 (November 2000), 672–80. Thøfner, Margit, “Nursing Paint: On Rubens, Facture, and Breast Milk,” in Rubens and the Human Body, ed. Cordula van Wyhe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 175–98. Voragine, Jacob de, The Golden Legend, II, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Warburg, Aby, The Revival of Pagan Antiquity, trans. David Britt, with introd. Kurt W. Forster (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999). Wethey, Harold, The Paintings of Titian, I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969). Woollett, Anne T. and Ariane van Suchtelen, with Tiarna Doherty, Mark Leonard, and Jørgen Wadum, Rubens and Brueghel: A Working Friendship, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2006). Zorach, Rebecca, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005).

3. Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia Abstract A diptych of sorts, this chapter’s two sections provide what may be the first comparative approach to Rubens’s most inventive and important, though dramatically different, large-scale programs for female patrons: the relatively secular and mythologically inflected Medici cycle, today in the Louvre, and the lavish ex-voto known as the Eucharist tapestries, housed in Madrid’s royal Poor Clare convent. The commissions were executed consecutively in the mid-1620s for Maria de’ Medici, queen mother of France and Isabel Clara Eugenia, governor general of the Spanish Netherlands. Two of the Thirty Years War’s best-known and embattled female rulers, both women endeavored to portray themselves as divinely appointed sovereign widows, receiving strikingly different artistic and conceptual responses from Rubens. Keywords: Rubens; gender; Maria de’ Medici; Isabel Clara Eugenia; Eucharist; tapestry; Poor Clares

Part 1: Recycling Sovereignty—Maria de’ Medici Hence the ruler ought to have moral virtue in perfection, for his function, taken absolutely, demands a master artificer, and rational principle is such an artificer; the subjects, on the other hand, require only that measure of virtue that is proper to them. Clearly, then, the moral virtue belongs to all of them; but the temperance of a man and of a woman, or the courage and justice of a man and of a woman, are not, as Socrates maintained, the same; the courage of a man is shown in commanding, of a woman in obeying. ‒ Aristotle, Politics 1.13, 1267a1 During the first ten years after his return from Italy Rubens was largely occupied with imagining and executing devotional paintings, secular allegories, and massive altarpieces. But the focus of his artistic production shifted in the following decade. For much of the 1620s Rubens busied himself with two major pictorial programs 1

McKeon, ed., Basic Works of Aristotle, 1144.

Lyon, J.V., Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789463722216_ch03

120 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

commissioned by Catholic Europe’s two illustrious sovereign widows: Maria de’ Medici (1573–1642), queen mother of France and the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia (1566–1633), regent and later governor-general of the Spanish Netherlands. Although the learned Spanish infanta, who had long assisted her father, Philip II, in the oversight of his vast empire, was perhaps the better educated of the two, both women were instilled from an early age with a sophisticated understanding of the arts.2 Isabel had passed her first thirty-three years in Spain among the legendary Habsburg picture galleries at the Pardo, the Alcázar, and the Escorial.3 At Philip’s request, the gifted portraitist Sophonisba Anguissola (1532–1625), had come to the Spanish court in 1559 as a drawing teacher and lady-in-waiting to Isabel’s mother, Queen Isabella of Valois, who had died in 1568.4 As a young woman, the infanta is known to have been privy to her father’s commissions, often accompanying him to the studios of the artists in his employ.5 Maria, descended from one of Italy’s great art-collecting dynasties, was raised along with her sister, Eleonora, in the Pitti palace. Just as Philip had provided Isabel with a highly personal model of cosmopolitan connoisseurship, Maria could look to her grandmother, Eleonora of Toledo, whose patronage of Bronzino and purchase of the Pitti established the Spanish-born noblewoman as an important figure in mannerist circles.6 For her part, Maria studied precious stones, music, and mathematics and, judging from a youthful sketch inscribed with her name, seems to have practiced drawing as well.7 As Maria Fubini Leuzzi has observed, the fact that Rubens was to allegorize Maria’s education in the cycle she commissioned—where the youthful Italian receives instruction from the ancient Graces and gods—may suggest that she was proud of a humanistic formation befitting a Medici.8 Education aside, the two women were possessed of very different personalities. If Maria was quick to anger and naturally combative—“imperious, vindictive, and violent,” in the words of a nineteenth-century French historian—Isabel, the Serene Infanta, was consistently good-natured, kindly, and endowed with both stereotypical Spanish gravity and a lively wit.9 As foreign-born rulers confronted with the volatile 2 In 1584, Matteo Zane, the Venetian envoy to Spain recorded that Isabel spent several hours each day assisting her father in his study with his extensive correspondence. Klingenstein, Great Infanta, p. xiv. 3 Compared to her French and English contemporaries, Elizabeth I and Maria de’ Medici, Isabel has received far less study; for a modern biography see Betegón Díez, Isabel Clara Eugenia. Klingenstein, Great Infanta, remains a better source of information relating to Isabel’s art patronage. For the archdukes’ art collection both before and after Albert’s death (1621), see White, “Rubens and the Archdukes.” See also, El arte en la corte de los archiduques, and the wide-ranging (but remarkably light on Rubens) Van Wyhe, ed., Isabel Clara Eugenia. 4 See, for example, Garrard, “Here’s Looking at Me,” 618. 5 Pérez de Tudela, “Making, Collecting, Displaying,” 63. 6 On Eleonora’s patronage of Bronzino, see, for example, Cox-Rearick, Bronzino’s Chapel for Eleonora di Toledo. 7 For Maria de’ Medici’s education and patronage, see Johnson, “Imagining Images,” 126–27, nos. 1, 2. 8 Leuzzi, “La construzione di una regina,” 192–93. 9 De Bonnechose, Popular History of France, 201.

121

Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia

political circumstances of the Thirty Years War, the two wielded power and faced opposition in radically different ways. While Maria fought a constant barrage of Huguenot and ultra-Catholic criticism from within France, Isabel tirelessly strove to pacify her country’s external Protestant aggressors, especially the English and the Dutch. But the female rulers of France and Flanders were also intermittent friends and political allies who shared a fervent—though far from unquestioning—commitment to the Catholic church and the tenets of absolute sovereignty. Maria had assumed the regency of France following the assassination of her husband, Henri IV, in 1610. Isabel had ruled as co-sovereign of the Spanish Netherlands with her husband, the Archduke Albert, from 1599 until Albert’s death in 1621, after which she became the local representative of the Spanish Habsburg monarchy. Widows theoretically empowered to negotiate foreign and domestic relations, both women recognized the need to cultivate a public image as ideal sovereigns despite and because of the conventionally understood (in)capacities of their sex. Sophisticated pictorial vocabularies of likeness, allegory, and figuration were central to the creation of a baroque visual culture projecting the two women as paragons of virtue whose deeds were anticipated and validated by historical heroic female predecessors duly commemorated by earlier artists and authors. Rubens, as their preferred portraitist and court painter, played the leading role in achieving in visual terms the construction of Isabel’s and Maria’s identities as divinely empowered female sovereigns. *** This chapter’s two sections examine Rubens’s varied, almost antithetical, figuration of royal women who wished to be seen as both pious and powerful, subject to God and ordained to rule their subjects on ‘his’ behalf. For all their cultural differences, Maria and Isabel turned to the visual arts for similarly apologetic purposes and with a similarly new intensity following the deaths of their husbands. Widowed by men who died before the relentlessness and enormity of the Thirty Years War could be imagined, both women assumed tactical and political decision-making responsibilities on a scale their spouses had never faced. Although certain aspects of Maria’s commission, the program known as the Medici cycle, will be discussed in what follows, her far more extensively researched series of paintings will be gestured to here mainly as a precursor to Isabel’s Eucharist tapestries. Inasmuch as the French commission was executed in Antwerp and completed during a period in which Rubens and the Infanta Isabel are known to have been in close communication over matters both artistic and diplomatic it is quite likely that Isabel would have seen and discussed the nature of Rubens’s program for the French queen mother. One can further suppose that as a propagandistic series solicited from and devised by her personal court painter, the controversial Medici cycle may have served as food for thought, if not as a warning, for the governor of the Spanish Netherlands.

122 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Not more than two years prior to the Medici commission—but to no avail— Rubens had openly expressed his desire to garner the prestigious ceiling program at James I’s newly built Palladian Banqueting House in London. The fruits of the ensuing years, these two monumental programs for England’s rival courts, were undoubtedly instrumental in delivering the Whitehall program (the subject of Chapter 4) into Rubens’s eager hands. For all these reasons the commissions by Maria de’ Medici and the Archduchess Isabel are sufficient to rank the two women among Rubens’s most important patrons; their costly and highly inventive series predate the major programmatic commissions of both Charles I (1600–1649) and Philip IV(1605–1665), male monarchs with whom the artist has been most frequently associated by art historians. Undertaken at the midpoint of his career, Rubens’s commissions for Maria and Isabel are risk-taking and conceptually ambitious, qualities which must be attributed no less to his deeply engaged patrons than to the artist himself. Indeed, by lightly disguising a variably costumed Maria as the leading lady in her own transhistorical drama while depicting Isabel as a reincarnated saint on a par with the doctors of the church, Rubens’s artistic solutions depart in bold and inventive ways from established modes of representing female rulership elsewhere or previously in Europe. When, for example, Maria’s Italian predecessor in France, Catherine de’ Medici (1519–1589), is depicted as the devoted widow Artemisia, the ancient warrior-queen is not shown actively wielding power but rather “watches and directs all events from the sidelines.”10 Although Artemisia’s historical circumstances were to be read as paralleling Catherine’s grief over Henri II and her guidance of his heir, Charles IX, Catherine’s features were not seamlessly imposed on her antique exemplar, nor was she directly invoked by her distant Medici relation, Maria. Even so, exploring networks of “matrilineal” dynastic patronage, which often obtained across national and even confessional borders, can shed light on trends in early modern female identity formation. For example, Sheila ffolliott has argued for contemporary association of the ‘French’ Queen Catherine with her Italian family’s peerless reputation as patrons and collectors.11 This legacy was surely not lost on Catherine’s beloved Spanish granddaughter, Isabel Clara Eugenia, with whom she maintained an active correspondence until her death. In Spain, where personifications and allegorical imagery were quite rare in court painting, naturalistic portraiture was the primary means of honoring royal women, typically portrayed alone or with a sibling or servant rather than as members of a larger group or family.12 Neither did Spanish patrons, despite their taste for Northern painting, generally embrace the Flemish convention of depicting lifelike donors in the contemporary presence of 10 ffolliott, “Catherine de’ Medici as Artemisia,” 241. 11 ffolliott, “‘La Florentine’ or ‘La Bonne Françoise,’” 25–26, 32–33. 12 On early modern portraiture in Spain see Portus Pérez et al., Spanish Portrait.

Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia

123

theophanies or sacred conversations.13 Although Isabel’s commission from Rubens seems to have come almost immediately after the completion of Maria’s cycle, Rubens undertook it in a wholly original way. Moving from secular mythology to religious figuration provided him with a new cast of characters just as the textile format and Spanish conventual setting invited fresh solutions to the problem of balancing female power and Catholic doctrine. Maria and Isabel were politically enmeshed allies for whom Rubens seems to have acted as a conduit, intermediary, and ultimately, confidante, even friend. Yet the Medici cycle and the Eucharist tapestries, as complicated multipartite programs whose size, iconographic density, and national origins have generated few comparative studies, invite contrast as well. Here I examine the historical contexts and conceptual machinery animating the two programs by focusing on the portraiture and portrayal of the patron as an artistic response to the exigencies of early modern self-representation unique to female rulers. In viewing the programs as works with similarly defensive rhetorical aims, I will also address the (art) historical commonplace that, with Rubens’s help, Isabel Clara Eugenia ably succeeded in politics where Maria de’ Medici spectacularly failed. Embarking on the infanta’s commission at roughly the same time as he completed the Medici cycle, what might Rubens have learned from his own failure to develop a vision of Maria de’ Medici that effectively advanced her claims? How did this knowledge affect his response to an even more lavish and ostentatious commission—not from a dowager whose brief marriage would produce two queens and a king of France—but from a respected but childless, widowed Spanish princess? A Task for Two Cities Toward this comparative aim, I will not undertake a detailed analysis of the iconographical and compositional details structuring Rubens’s programs for Maria and Isabel. The Medici cycle has long elicited illuminating scholarship in this vein, beginning, most productively, with the archival discoveries of the French art historian Jacques Thuillier and continuing in the feminist studies of the cycle by Geraldine Johnson, Margaret Carroll, Fanny Cosandey, Sarah R. Cohen, and Elizabeth McGrath.14 The Medici paintings remained in situ in Paris at the Luxembourg palace until they were gradually moved to the Louvre at the end of the eighteenth century. Prior to this they were attentively studied by Bellori, de Piles, and Watteau among 13 There are of course exceptions, often by foreign artists, such as El Greco’s Toledo Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586–88) and Titian’s Prado Gloria (1550–51). 14 Thuillier and Foucart, Rubens’ Life of Maria de Medici; Carroll, “Womanliness as Masquerade”; Cosandey, “Représenter une reine de France”; Cohen, “Rubens’s France”; Johnson, “Pictures fit for a Queen”; McGrath, “Tact and Topical Reference.”

124 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

many others. Their availability to artists and scholars has greatly facilitated an experience of the paintings as a coherent program.15 In fact, of all the painter’s projects, the Medici cycle is perhaps the most suitable for interpretation as regards his letters and the relatively ample associated documentary evidence. One can hardly imagine a more different set of circumstances for Isabel’s tapestries. Long cloistered in Madrid, the Eucharist series was largely unseen by art writers until the twentieth century. Only in 1913 did the Spanish scholar Elías Tormo y Monzo receive a papal dispensation to enter the royal convent in order to complete an illustrated four-volume monograph on the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales providing a much needed art historical background for the commission.16 More than half a century later, Charles Scribner’s dissertation and book and Nora De Poorter’s exhaustive and insightful iconographical analysis for the Corpus Rubenianum inspired a relatively small number of anglophone studies as well as valuable edited volumes more generally concerning the “archdukes,” as Isabel and Albert, were known.17 In 2014–15, following the conservation of the Museo del Prado’s incomparable collection of six of Rubens’s painted modelli for the Eucharist series, curators Alejandro Vergara and Anne T. Woollett produced an historic exhibition that united, at last, a selection of the painted sketches with four of the tapestries lent from the Descalzas Reales for a rare exhibition beyond the convent walls.18 Although the tapestries’ sources and original presentation continue to outweigh other cultural and theoretical lines of inquiry, they have also recently been included in technical analyses and discussions of sumptuous textiles within the context of early modern material and display culture.19 In studies that acknowledge Maria’s seeming involvement in and control over her commission, feminist scholars have recognized the Medici cycle as, among other things, a further development—and pointed revision—of previous strategies of narrative or historiated self-fashioning realized by Maria’s Italian predecessor, Catherine de’ Medici, and the artist Antoine Caron.20 Although Isabel’s Eucharist series likewise draws on a tradition of Habsburg female patronage, taking the game of self-aggrandizement via naturalism to a new level of refinement, it has received little consideration as a form of propaganda 15 For the granting of public access to the Medici cycle in the Luxembourg palace during the eighteenth century, see McClellan, “Musée du Louvre as Revolutionary Metaphor,” 300. 16 Tormo y Monzó, En las Descalzas Reales. See also by the same author Los tapices: la apotheosis Eucaristica de Rubens. See too Checa, “Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales,” 21–30. 17 See De Poorter, Eucharist Series; Scribner, 3rd, Triumph of the Eucharist; on the archdukes see Duerloo and Thomas, eds., Albrecht and Isabella. 18 For a comprehensive bibliography see Vergara and Woollett, eds., Spectacular Rubens. 19 See especially Delmarcel, ed., Rubenstextiel/Rubens’s Textiles, 220, 240; Campbell, ed., Tapestry in the Baroque, 105, 229–30. 20 This connection is made by Carroll, “Womanliness as Masquerade,” 102, no. 5. See also Crawford, Perilous Performances, 24–58; For Catherine as patron and subject of the Valois tapestries (today in on deposit in the Pitti palace from the Uffizi, Florence), see Bertrand, “Interpreting the Valois Tapestries.”

Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia

125

intended to shore up Isabel’s image as a female sovereign. Nor has the daring historical-theological, and figurative nature of Rubens’s representation of Isabel been sufficiently acknowledged, a situation I hope to redress at least partially here. Staging Success: Themes and Settings For Maria, Rubens was called to envision a contemporary queen in a secular, largely mythological, setting. While for Isabel—and presumably in consultation with her— he decided to portray a living ruler as a medieval saint, typologically personifying, or figuring, one historical subject with the symbolic attributes of another. Both programs contain multiple linked or interdependent images: twenty-four in Maria’s case, twenty in Isabel’s. Maria’s quasi-biographical cycle is set not only in modern-day Florence and the countryside and seaports of France but also in a sunny utopia co-inhabited by ancient gods and goddesses, genii, animals, and allegorical personifications of various virtues and vices. Isabel’s tapestries unfold in a less particularized and locatable reality where even landscape, ground, and sky are in some cases fragmentary and non finito and the structural notions of tapestry border or compositional window, staged proscenium, and/or real-world architecture are summoned forth by an elaborately illusionistic framework of columns and architraves. The tapestries’ indeterminate, temple-like setting is largely populated by male and female saints from across time. These holy figures are placed in the company of personified doctrines, historical rulers and persons, docile animals, and a seemingly innumerable band of industrious putti, at once infusing the curtain-like textiles with a theatrical feel and a metaphysical flavor. Both women’s programs advance their multiple meanings through the slippages of time and repetitions of history required by allegorical or figurative imagery. But the operative role of the royal heroine in this process is altered decisively from one program and patron to the next. In the French canvases, Maria is variously cast as herself, Juno, Bellona, and Justice, to name her most securely identifiable alter egos. In the Madrid tapestries, however, the Infanta Isabel is arguably never merely her historical self but is always also St. Clare of Assisi, the namesake with whom, like Elizabeth of Hungary, she was often associated throughout her life.21 Rubens had painted large, closely observed likenesses of both women (Fig. 3.1 and Plate 6) prior to executing the programs. In both commissions he brings to bear his acumen as a portraitist. Accordingly, perhaps, the two women maintain their individual physiognomies throughout their series, though markers of Maria’s age—gray hair, added weight, colorless cheeks—seem to shift back and forth in a way that is not always consistent with what would have been her actual age at the time of the depicted events. 21 See Rubens’s San Ildefonso Altarpiece, 1631–32, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.

126 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Fig. 3.1. Peter Paul Rubens, Maria de' Medici, c.1622, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: ©Boltin Picture Library/ Bridgeman Images.

Indeed, in the Medici cycle, Maria’s ubiquity, made apparent by Rubens’s consistent presentation of her recognizable face, with its vacant gaze, arched brows, fine nose, and pasty, fleshy squarishness, is at times disarming. Making his or her way to the far end of Maria’s lengthy Luxembourg palace gallery, for example, an invited visitor would have met one of the larger canvases, the sprawling Death of Henri IV and the Proclamation of the Regency (Fig. 3.2). Reading left to right across this picture’s horizontal format, the eye is drawn to an aged Maria who—made virtually shapeless in her black cocoon of widow’s weeds—sits immobile on the throne, her hands softly arched over her chest in a gesture of humility. Turning the corner to proceed down the long wall, however, a very different Maria would have emerged

Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia

127

Fig. 3.2. Peter Paul Rubens, Death of Henri IV with the Proclamation of the Regency, c.1621–25, Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: Louvre, Paris, France/Bridgeman Images.

from the commanding Triumph at Juliers (Plate 7). Here the dowager queen, outfitted in an elaborate plumed helmet and spotless white gown embroidered with golden fleurs-de-lis, boldly doubles Rubens’s much earlier equestrian portrait of the duke of Lerma, even including a minute military action in the background, in this case the surrender at recently conquered Juliers. Elsewhere in the gallery, from a confident and aggressive warrior queen on horseback, Maria is subsequently transformed into the seated Justice-like figure in the Felicity of the Regency (Fig. 3.3). Her right hand raising a scale, her left hand resting a scepter on the globe, this Junoesque queen is perhaps the most Veronesian of Rubens’s personifications. Redistributing the same attributes and amplifying the female participants, he has proliferated the Italian artist’s three-figure allegory of Justice in the Venetian ducal palace (see Fig. 4.7), maintaining the composition’s companionable tone of female homosociality. But then, in the very next canvas, The Coming of Age of Louis XIII, Maria is returned to her humble status as grieving royal widow. Here her breasts are decorously covered. While she reaches for/gestures to the rudder of the ship of state, her young son now grasps the scepter she herself had wielded in the previous picture in what can only seem an awkward if not unjust transfer of power. The scene’s retrograde rather than celebratory flavor owes something to the unhappily resigned expressions of the muscular female rowers who struggle against monstrous dolphins and choppy seas as the regent sets her jaw in silent protest. After a series of further ‘biographical’ scenes from the history of France/Maria— the Escape from Blois and the Full Reconciliation among them—the beholder is met again, at the place of honor at the end of the gallery with the Queen Triumphant.

128 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Fig. 3.3. Peter Paul Rubens, Felicity of the Regency, c.1621–25, Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: Louvre, Paris, France/ Bridgeman Images.

Offered to courtly insiders as the outcome of Maria’s earlier exploits over several years, the image presents a more youthful and vital-looking woman, still easily recognizable as Maria, now clad in exuberant swathes of blue, gold, and crimson with the defiant exception of her pearly arms, shoulder, and militantly exposed right breast. Depicting Maria with a bare breast was a calculated risk which, as Geraldine Johnson has shown, could have evoked Delilahesque lasciviousness just as easily as Marian nurture.22 In this case, however, Rubens seems to suggest a robust and paradigmatic Amazonian Bellona, for his monumental Maria tramples on gleaming spoils of war, 22 Johnson, “Pictures fit for a Queen,” 451–53.

Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia

129

crowned by a pair of laurel-bearing horae. The viewer is left to decide—potentially at his or her own political peril—whether this last is the truest image of the queen mother, represented by Rubens as something of a chameleon, if not a chimera, throughout the previous assemblage of paintings. In line with a profoundly different representational strategy, Isabel Clara Eugenia is portrayed in the multiple crowd scenes of the Eucharist tapestries (see the Ringling cartoon, Plate 8) only once. There, in a striking departure from the starched ruffs and opulent court dress dripping with jewels in which she had been portrayed for most of her life, she wears somber monochromatic garb, displaying a self-possessed though subdued expression. In the tapestries, the infanta is dressed in the nondescript robes of a Poor Clare nun, the habit she had taken upon entering the Third Order of Franciscans in 1622, shortly after the death of her husband. Never in the tapestries is the Spanish infanta represented so splendidly as the French queen mother, nor is she re/ imagined as anything or anyone mythological. She solely appears as the elision or convergence of her own identity with a canonized, and long deceased, historical woman. The very different display contexts for the two series offer a possible or partial explanation for these almost polar opposite assertions of female power and piety: integral to the Luxembourg palace’s courtly grammar of art and splendor, the Medici cycle was part of a consolidated political program designed to advance an ideal vision of Maria by Maria as queen mother par excellence and Henri IV’s divinely appointed successor. But what, precisely, was the audience for these polemical pictorial claims? Against a long held, if unproven, assumption about the Medici cycle’s accessibility to a variety of domestic and international courtiers, the architectural historian, Sara Galletti, has demonstrated that the “elite within the elite” for whom Rubens and Maria envisioned the gallery were “separated from the outside world, even the world of the court, by a closed door and a degree of silence.”23 This is to say that, primarily accessible via Maria’s private rooms, the gallery was seen mainly by vetted intimates of the queen mother who could be counted on for their sympathy to Rubens’s ideological constructions. Galletti’s research therefore complicates enduring notions that the cycle’s heavy-handed ambiguity necessarily had a direct and deleterious effect on the queen’s wider reputation as a result of her own naiveté. Against such claims, Galletti asserts that the difficulty of ‘access’ for viewers was precisely what guaranteed the Medici cycle’s possible success as “a form of intellectual exclusion that doubled the queen’s control over the accessibility of her gallery.”24 By comparison, Isabel’s tapestries were designed to be more openly displayed within the less controlled setting of solemn liturgical occasions, no more than a few times each year, though not only to a congregation of courtly insiders and elite visitors but ultimately anyone passing the convent’s facade, on which the tapestries were 23 Galletti, “Life of Maria de’ Medici,” 905. 24 Galletti, “Life of Maria de’ Medici,” 903.

130 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

sometimes hung.25 At least initially, however, it seems they were to be exclusively draped in the small church and cloister attached to the royal convent of the Spanish Poor Clares (Descalzas Reales). The tapestries were therefore meant to be integrated into the fabric of a pre-existing institution whose art collection and collective display culture represented the eclectic tastes of several generations of Spanish (as well as Austrian) Habsburg noblewomen and the relatives who provided their dowries. Unlike Maria’s cycle, the overtly theological/doctrinal Eucharist tapestries were not officially presented as an explication of the politics and personal beliefs of the patron who commissioned and displayed them. The Eucharist tapestries are not mentioned in any of Rubens’s extant letters, nor does a contract exist for them. It is important to recall that the painter was far less familiar with the Descalzas Reales than the Luxembourg palace. At the time of their commission, it is possible he had never viewed the intended setting for the Eucharist tapestries (we do not know whether he visited the convent during his first Spanish stay in 1603–4, when the court had been temporarily removed from Madrid to Valladolid). Paintings for the Palace: Rubens in Paris Maria de’ Medici invited Rubens to Paris shortly after the expiration of the truce between Spain and the Provinces of Holland. Peace had prevailed from 1609 until 1621, but by the following year the renewal of hostilities between the English, Dutch, and Spanish seemed likely. By that time, Isabel had shrewdly recognized the diplomatic utility of embedding her learned, impeccably mannered painter in a foreign court; once in place Rubens seems to have relayed the infanta’s political wishes to the relevant parties while keeping her abreast of the state of affairs between Maria and her son. In a long letter to the infanta composed during his return to Paris three years later, in 1625 (to install the completed Medici cycle), Rubens describes numerous cloak-and-dagger dealings in a kingdom that “lies at present in the hands of the Queen mother and Cardinal Richelieu.”26 With his characteristically boastful humility, he writes to the infanta: “I beg permission of your Highness to state my opinion plainly, since Your Highness has already on other occasions done me the honor of consulting me on this same subject,” an indication of the closeness of their relationship and Rubens’s established advisory role in affairs of state.27 Rubens’s visits to the French court in the 1620s are well-documented in his letters. Yet during these years nothing in the written record attests to any level of affinity or friendship between the artist and Maria de’ Medici, a patron who may be said to 25 García Sanz, “Tapestries of the Triumph of the Eucharist,” 34. 26 Rubens to the Infanta Isabel, Paris, 15 March 1626, in Magurn, ed. and trans., Letters, no. 61, p. 105. 27 Rubens to the Infanta Isabel, Paris, 15 March 1626, in Magurn, ed. and trans., Letters, no. 61, p. 105. Presumably as a result of the negotiations with the Dutch in 1624.

Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia

131

have solidified his reputation in Europe. Of the completed twenty-four-canvas cycle, Rubens noted somewhat defensively to his friend and liaison to the court, the French savant and astronomer, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc: “I am certain the Queen mother is very well satisfied with my work, as she has many times told me with her own lips, and has also repeated it to everyone.” This, only to complain later in the same letter: “In short, I am tired of this Court, and unless they give me prompt satisfaction, comparable to the punctuality I have shown in the service of the Queen mother, it may be (this is said in confidence, entre nous) that I will not readily return.”28 Rubens did not, in fact, return to France for four years, and then, only briefly. On his way home following a nine-month stay in Spain in 1629, he spent a day in Paris at the Luxembourg palace. It was the last time he would experience that city under Maria’s governance. The ideal society and felicitous familial relations projected by the Medici cycle had failed to manifest themselves in Richelieu’s France. In 1631, just six years after the unveiling of the Medici cycle during the Paris wedding of Maria’s daughter Henriette-Marie to England’s Charles I, Maria herself was exiled from France. Definitively vanquished by her former devotee, Cardinal Richelieu, the long-suffering queen fled Paris with her son Gaston d’Orleans, known as ‘Monsieur,’ seeking asylum in the Spanish Netherlands under the official protection of Philip IV. By then, it was clear to Rubens that Maria was in trouble and in need, ironically, of the kind of diplomatic assistance only her former painter could provide. His letter of August 1631 to the Spanish king’s hawkish favorite, the conde-duque of Olivares, demonstrates Rubens’s somewhat guarded loyalty to Maria and all she stood for as a Catholic queen: Great is the news from France. The Queen mother has come to throw herself in the arms of Her Highness [the Infanta Isabel], cast out by the violence of Cardinal Richelieu. He has no regard for the fact that he is her creature and that she not only raised him from the dirt but placed him in the eminent position from which he now hurls against her the thunderbolts of his ingratitude. If this were only a question of the interests of a private person, I should be in doubt what to do; but considering that the great princes have to base their reasons of state upon their reputation and the good opinion of the world, I do not see how, in this regard, one could desire more than this: that the mother and mother-in-law of so many kings should come, with such confidence, to place her person under the arbitration of his His Catholic Majesty […].29

These are prefatory words for the meat of Rubens’s letter, which was a petition on Isabel’s behalf for military and financial assistance from the Spanish crown in support 28 Rubens to Claude Fabri Pieresc, Paris, 13 May 1625, in Magurn, ed. and trans., Letters, no. 62, p. 110. 29 Rubens to the Count Duke Olivares, Mons, 1 August, in Magurn, ed. and trans., Letters, no. 221, p. 374.

132 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Fig. 3.4. Cornelis Galle I after follower of Rubens, Histoire Curieuse, c.1632, engraved frontispiece, acquired with funds donated by Stephen D. and Susan W. Paine, 1982.97. Photo: courtesy of the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts.

of the fugitive French queen and her son. Devastatingly for Maria, the unsympathetic Philip IV refused to help his own mother-in-law, fearing, probably accurately, reprisals from Louis XIII and his ever more bellicose cardinal. A frontispiece (Fig. 3.4)

Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia

133

designed the following year by one of Rubens’s followers, Cornelis Galle, for Puget de la Serre’s francocentric relation of the “curious history” of the queen mother’s entry into the Low Countries, gives a rather misleading impression of the power dynamic between the two women. While in the print an upstanding Maria offers a shoulder to a rather pathetic looking Isabel, in truth, it was the Spanish infanta who graciously, and not without risk, opened her arms to the humiliated French queen mother following her expulsion. Forcibly severed from her daughters—queens by then, of England and Spain—Maria de’ Medici quietly ended her days as a destitute and peregrinating house guest. By a curious twist of fate, the queen mother of France would die in Cologne in the same house in which Rubens had spent a portion of his childhood before his family returned to Antwerp.30 This tragic turn of events in the life of a one-time sovereign underscores the fateful interconnectedness of Rubens, Maria, and Isabel—of the two royal women and the man they helped make “prince of painters and painter of princes,” just as Titian had been hailed in the previous century. Embodying the Christian Prince In a period when Machiavellian statecraft was losing adherents and female rule would reach its zenith in Europe, the masculinized image of the prince was only tentatively and occasionally appropriated by a female ruler.31 Addressing the troops at Tilbury in the Armada year of 1588, Elizabeth I had audaciously usurped her father’s princely status in the best-known instance of her gender-bending self-fashioning: “I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman,” the armored queen is said to have declared, “but I have the heart and stomach of a king.” Elizabeth was described by Lionel Sharpe, an eyewitness recorder of the speech, as having valiantly entered the military camps as “Armed Pallas.”32 Visual imagery of the English “Virgin” queen both before and after this clever formulation of manly femininity can be said to grapple with just these representational and ontological gender troubles, increasingly tending to the figurative and allegorical in a way that English royal portraiture of previous generations had not.33 Although the lengthy reign of the Tudor queen (1558–1603) intersected but briefly with the ascendancy of Isabel Clara Eugenia and Maria de’ Medici, the younger women—as well as their portraitists—would have been well aware of their Protestant counterpart’s personal symbolism. They would also have registered the ways in which Elizabeth’s unmarried status and successful military 30 Pacht et al., ed., Maria de Médicis, 94. 31 Dixon, ed., Women Who Ruled, 27–34. 32 As transcribed by Sharpe and published in 1634; cited in Prior, ed., Elizabeth I, her Life in Letters, 99. 33 The bibliography on Elizabethan portraiture continues to grow, but among the most incisive studies, see for example, Montrose, Subject of Elizabeth; Wilson, “Queen Elizabeth I as Urania”; Fischlin, “‘Rainbow Portrait’ of Queen Elizabeth I.”; Hearn, ed., Dynasties.

134 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

campaigns, in particular, had been imagined and received by contemporaries.34 That Isabel and Elizabeth shared the same name seems especially to have piqued the infanta. As Magdalena S. Sánchez has shown, Isabel referred disparagingly to her English Protestant rival as “that lady” in her letters to the duke of Lerma. Writing in 1603, the infanta commented that she imagined the news of Elizabeth’s death would not be bad for him or anyone else concerned.35 Despite their differences, these ruling women and those who depicted them recognized the value of analogizing the warrior queen and the Christian soldier. A comparison of Rubens’s equestrian portrait of Maria, The Triumph at Juliers, with a contemporaneous English engraving, Truth Presents the Queen with a Lance (Fig. 3.5) by Thomas Cecill, is instructive where the use of masculine, martial imagery is concerned. Cecill’s posthumous tribute to Elizabeth is interestingly dated around 1625, the same year the Medici canvases were completed. Also, perhaps not coincidentally, the year James Stuart died and Charles Stuart, soon to marry Henriette-Marie of France, succeeded him to the throne. In a manner suggestive of his familiarity with the Medici cycle, Cecill portrays the English queen in a military mode that seems to combine the Medici cycle’s Bellona-like Maria, specifically, the trampled bits of armor, with his depiction of the queen on horseback.36 Conventional femininity is simultaneously effaced and emphasized in the English print. As in Rubens’s rendition of a Lerma-esque Maria at the site of the surrender at Juliers, Elizabeth’s own breasts remain covered while her femaleness is anatomically doubled by a semi-nude allegorical twin personifying enlightenment. In this seventeenth-century image of Elizabeth—who like Maria rides femininely side-saddle—the queen’s feathery helmet, modestly encasing cuirass, shield, and ample skirt provide her with a performatively androgynous mien suggestive of plotting Athenian savvy rather than hands-on Amazonian might. With her triumphant victory against the Spanish Armada transpiring on the rough seascape in the distance, Cecill’s youthful Elizabeth receives a mighty lance from a bare-breasted woman who emerges from a cave. Bearing a book labeled ‘Truth’ the personification reminds the viewer that Elizabeth waged a successful battle against religious heresy, embodied by the dragon beneath the queen’s steed. Deceptively current, the print additionally underscores historically English and Protestant (Elizabeth can also be read as England’s dragon-slaying patron, St. George) vigilance in response to the impending coronation of a French queen of 34 In fact, for several years around 1570–80, when the succession was of particular concern, Elizabeth I and the then-unmarried Infanta Isabel were simultaneously advanced as possible queens of France—contingent on a strategic marriage with the duke of Anjou. On this subject see Zim, “Dialogue and Discretion.” 35 “No pienso serán [las nuevas] malas para vos la muerte de la Reyna de Ingalaterra, ni lo han sido para nayde”; in Rodríguez Villa, ed., La Correspondencia de la Infanta Archiduquesa, 416. The passage is paraphrased in Sánchez, “Memories and Affection,” 213, 224, n. 63. 36 Kromm, “Bellona Factor,” 180–81.

Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia

135

Fig. 3.5. Thomas Cecill, Truth Presents the Queen with a Lance, c.1625, London, British Museum. Photo: ©Trustees of the British Museum.

England.37 Like Maria de’ Medici, Henriette-Marie was a loyal Catholic; along with the Franciscan monks who accompanied her to London she introduced the spirit of Catholic renewal associated with the Neoplatonic préciosité of her mother’s court.38 Indeed, to recognize the Medici cycle’s imaginary as predominantly mythological or political is not to ignore the fact that Maria was elsewhere clearly interested in presenting herself as a supremely devout ruler and a convinced Catholic.39 After Henry’s murder in 1610, for instance, Maria had had a private pavilion built inside the (ostensibly) enclosed, or cloistered, Convent of the Incarnation, to which she, like many aristocratic female donors, made frequent extended visits.40 Maria had even 37 See Dixon, ed., Women Who Ruled, where this image is reproduced as cat. no. 3. See also Corbett and Norton, Engravings in England, 33. 38 Veevers, Images of Love and Religion. 39 Marrow, Art Patronage of Maria de’ Medici; see also, Millen and Wolf, Heroic Deeds and Mystic Figures. 40 Diefendorf, “Contradictions of the Century of Saints,” 482. See also by the same author: From Penitence to Charity. On the feminization of the French Counter-Reformation see the classic study by Rapley, Dévotes.

136 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

presented the Protestant James I (sponsor of the biblical translation in his name, first published in 1611) with a jeweled copy of the spiritual director, François de Sales’s (1567–1622) courtly best-seller, the Introduction to the Devout Life, which appeared in 1613.41 De Sales’s popular ‘bouquet’ of religious maxims was a key text in the formulation of seventeenth-century French piety. Pragmatically rigorous, effusive, charitable—and unapologetically feminized—Salesian devotion and pedagogy urged the worldliest of believers to cease living “as if they believe themselves created only to build houses, plant trees, pile up wealth and do frivolous things.”42 For the gens de qualité who were not themselves nuns or clerics, doing and commissioning good works was imperative as a way of being in the world but not of it.43 As if in response to Salesian spiritual counsel, Maria countered the completion and decoration of her own lavish ‘house’—the palace and grounds modeled on her Florentine childhood home with its formal Boboli gardens—by aiding in the construction of convents for Paris’s growing population of nuns.44 A prodigious underwriter, she helped establish the houses of the Carmelites (1603); the Discalced Carmelites (1613); the Discalced Augustinians (1617), the Daughters of Calvary (1625), and the Sisters of St. Elizabeth (1628).45 Sponsored by wealthy women and shaped by the controversial Parisian followers of Teresa of Ávila, Vincent de Paul, and determined innovators such as Jeanne de Chantal (co-founder with François de Sales of the Order of the Visitation), French Counter-Reformation spirituality differentiated itself from that of Italy and Spain in its worldly emphasis on the Catholic ‘apostolate’ of education as well as action. As a rich and influential widow willing to resist her enemies, defend her political and religious beliefs, and cultivate networks of like-minded followers, Maria de’ Medici anticipated, and quite possibly empowered, the kinds of subversive Catholic women who would change the face of French Catholicism under Louis XIII and his son in the wake of Richelieu. In a way that even the more familiar, though less culturally authoritative, eighteenth-century salonnière would not, erudite elite French women formed a variety of politically influential constituencies beyond courtly spheres.46 For several decades following Maria’s exile, learned aristocrats and ascetical religious women were to constitute the rigidly Augustinian, proto-feminist circles of Jansenist Port Royal, for example, while at the other end of the spectrum, ‘over educated’ women continued to fill the refined ranks of the taste-making précieuses.47 41 Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life, 19. 42 Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life, 55. 43 Rapley, Dévotes, 76. 44 For Maria’s construction of the Luxembourg palace based in part on the Pitti, see Johnson, “Imagining Images,” 141–42. 45 Johnson, “Imagining Images,” 134. 46 Beasley, Creation of Seventeenth-Century France, 182. 47 On gender and the Jansenist controversy see Kostroun, “Formula for Disobedience.” On the literary and historiographical roots of the notion of the précieuse in contrast to préciosité see, for example, Stanton, “Fiction of Préciosité.” For the distinctive nature of these facets of French Catholicism in this period see also Bergin, Church, Society, and Religious Change in France, 366–94.

Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia

137

But although Marian subtexts and imagery may be present in the Medici cycle, they cannot, I think, be said to figure Maria as Mary in any but a secondary or even tertiary sense.48 Given Maria’s antagonistic and volatile relationship with her son, Louis XIII, the queen’s maternity was not easily or believably associated with the Virgin’s function as tender caretaker and protective, compassionate mother—much less as a just judge. Nor was Maria linked in the minds of the people and the visual language of the court with saintly namesakes or defenders of the Catholic faith in as potent and clear-cut a manner as her Spanish counterpart, Isabel Clara Eugenia. Keeping in mind Maria’s desired reputation as a dévote—and the public-private expression of her religious piety in religious foundations—it seems strange that Rubens did not argue for, or introduce, her portrayal through more transparently religious imagery. In fact, neither the overwhelmingly secular imagery of the Medici cycle nor its classicizing mythologies can be positively attributed to Rubens; for it seems Maria had cast herself as Juno and Henri IV as Jupiter from the start. The Baluze memoire, a manuscript which likely dates from 1622, discovered only in the last century by Jacques Thuillier, provides detailed prescriptions of the desired content of nineteen of the eventual Medici paintings.49 The extent to which Maria de’ Medici was personally responsible for the specific imagery of her cycle has yet to be determined. But it is clear that she was deeply involved, possibly with Cardinal Richelieu and others in addition to Rubens, in devising its apologetic, highly secular tone and glorifying rhetoric. Cardinal Richelieu was challenged during the 1620s by Catholic reformers such as the Oratorian diplomat and theologian, Cardinal Bérulle, for the worldliness of what was clearly a political agenda in which church and state were absolutely interdependent. Conversely, at the time Maria returned to Paris to negotiate the rule of France with her son, her reputation as a good Catholic was essentially beyond reproach. Maria’s clever and far-sighted matchmaking with the heirs to the crowns of England and Spain was rightly admired as a tactic of Catholic expansionism, particularly in the case of the Stuarts. Where her reputation had suffered, however, was in the related but, for women, decidedly exclusive realm of French politics. The death of Henri IV created a power vacuum that Maria had sought to fill less as the queen mother in charge of guiding and guarding the future king than as an omnipotent and omnipresent de facto monarch. An early indication of the mixed reception of the Medici cycle is found in another of Rubens’s letters to his friend Peiresc. Referring to the exuberant Felicity of the Regency (see Fig. 3.3) Rubens describes the figure of Maria not precisely as an 48 For the presence of Marian imagery see, for example, Berger, “Rubens and Caravaggio.” 49 The manuscript is transcribed in Thuillier, “La ‘Galerie de Médicis’ de Rubens et sa genèse: un document inédit.” Given that the Baluze manuscript is undated, questions remain as to whether it prescribes or describes the content of Rubens’s first bozzetti, which date from shortly after the signing of a contract in February of 1622 and in which the content of nineteen paintings was already specified. The contract is reproduced in Thuiller and Foucart, Rubens’ Life of Maria de Medici, 95–96.

138 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

allegory of Justice but, intriguingly, as a kind of portrait of “Her Majesty, who sits upon a shining throne and holds a scale in her hands, keeping the world in equilibrium by her prudence and equity.” Referring to one of the few canvases whose content was not spelled out in the Baluze manuscript, Rubens goes on to say that the painting has “evoked much pleasure” observing that “if the other subjects had been entrusted entirely to us, they would have passed, as far as the Court is concerned, without any scandal or murmur.”50 We know very little about derogatory gossip of this sort, though Rubens adds in a marginal note in the letter cited above that Richelieu had not initially grasped the intended message of the Felicity and was “annoyed to see that the new subjects were taken amiss.”51 This is Rubensian casuistry at its best. For if a scandal had been created by the painter’s bare-breasted image of Maria in the Felicity (where he himself appears to have wished her to be seen not as an ‘allegory’ of Justice but rather figured as a portrait of the actual dowager queen of France), the fault—and the original composition—were at least partly his. More surprising still is Rubens’s undoubtedly untruthful claim earlier in the same letter that the image “does not touch upon the raison d’etat of this reign, or apply to any individual.” One might surmise by this contention that the incendiary painting was, in fact, read by its early beholders in just that way, as Rubens, were he being honest, might have admitted was his intent.52 It would in any case be enlightening to know in exactly what manner the enthroned Maria was taken amiss—whether for her unseemly Amazonian nudity, the presumption of her righteous rule, or for the implication that she had directed her country, unlike her revered and pacific husband, away from peace and toward war. Regardless of the size and politics of its intimate audience—and it is, again, worth contemplating that it was under- rather than overexposed to the court—the Medici cycle might be best understood as a brilliantly calculated, if ultimately disastrous, attempt at political self-fashioning that did a great deal more to advance the fame of the queen mother’s Flemish painter—and consequently, that of ‘French’ art—than to secure her divine right to rule.

50 Rubens to Pieresc, Paris, 13 May 1625, in Magurn, ed. and trans., Letters, no. 62, p. 109 (italics mine). 51 Rubens to Pieresc, Paris, 13 May 1625, in Magurn, ed. and trans., Letters, no. 62, p. 109. 52 Rubens’s ambiguous visual rhetoric as a response to the creative, conceptual, (and political) challenges presented by his unique patron is explicated in McGrath, “Tact and Topical Reference,” 15–16.

Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia

139

Part 2: Figuring Faith and Female Power—Isabel Clara Eugenia Nature often makes a woman shrewd, hard work makes her learned, upbringing makes her pious, and experience makes her wise. What, therefore, prevents women from playing a full part in public affairs? If one is born free, why should she obey? If one is heiress to a kingdom, why should she not reign? Divine law, the history of nations, ancient institutions, and examples drawn from Holy Writ all support such arguments. ‒ John Case, Sphaera civitatis (Oxford, 1588)53 Much has been written about Rubens’s patronage by Philip IV.54 Attention has also been paid to his lesser-known Spanish collectors such as the duke of Lerma and the acquisitive cousin of the conde-duque of Olivares, the marques de Leganés, whom Rubens believed could be counted “among the greatest connoisseurs of this art in the world.”55 Rubens’s patronage by elite Spanish/Habsburg women has received substantially less attention. In fact, however, the Flemish painter’s astonishing rise in stature during his second visit to Madrid might be seen as part of a trend initiated not by the king of Spain, but by its French-born queen, Isabella de Bourbon (1604– 1644). The result of years of planning and negotiation, Maria de’ Medici’s daughter, Isabella, had married Philip IV in 1615. The same year, in agreement with the associated treaty between France and Spain, Philip’s sister, Anne of Austria, had married Isabella’s brother, Louis XIII.56 In 1623, after eight years in her adopted court, the nineteen-year-old queen of Spain had arranged for a large collection of all-Flemish seventeenth-century paintings to be sent to her from Brussels.57 Nearly thirty in all, the paintings were originally intended for the queen’s apartments (torre de la reyna) on an upper floor of one of the palace’s towers. By the time of Rubens’s second visit to Spain, queen Isabella’s noteworthy collection of Flemish paintings had been transferred downstairs to the king’s more spacious supper room in the quarto bajo of his summer palace. There, it was made the heart of an almost unimaginably distinguished collection of predominantly seventeenth-century Flemish and cinquecento Venetian art.58 Subsumed by her husband’s much remarked 53 Quoted in Maclean, Renaissance Notion of Woman, 61. 54 For Rubens’s Spanish commissions see also Vergara, Rubens and his Spanish Patrons; Alpers, Torre de la Parada; Georgievska-Shine and Silver, Rubens, Velázquez. 55 Magurn, ed. and trans., Letters, no. 145, p. 234; also cited by Volk, “Marquis of Leganés,” 256, 261. At the time of his death in 1655, the marquis owned nineteen paintings by Rubens, along with some eleven works by Titian. 56 For the possibility that Rubens commemorated/allegorized this important example of early modern diplomacy via dynastic marriage, see Carroll, “Erotics of Absolutism.” 57 Volk, “King’s Summer Apartments,” 520. 58 In addition to Rubens’s Diana as Huntress (Prado), and Ceres and Pan (Prado) the room included allegories of the senses by Jan Brueghel (Prado) and a garland painting by Rubens and Frans Snyders; for the inventories of the picture galleries in the palace made in 1626 and 1636, the former by Cassiano dal Pozzo, see Volk, “King’s Summer Apartments,” apps. 1 and 2, p. 526.

140 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

upon transnational gallery, Isabella’s avant-garde display of contemporary Flemish painting en masse is rarely conceived of as her own curatorial invention. The collapse of a queen’s sophisticated collecting tastes into those of her husband, son, or brother exemplifies the modern reluctance to recognize Flemish paintings and textiles as arts importantly patronized by Habsburg women. The tradition began in earnest with the great Mary of Hungary (1505–1558), sister of Charles V, to whom her grand-niece the widowed, hunt-loving, Isabel Clara Eugenia, bears many similarities.59 Sheer scholarly chauvinism may explain the relative dearth of research on Isabel as Rubens’s most loyal and, one imagines, most appreciated patron. As co-sovereign then governor-general of the Spanish Netherlands, the Spanish archduchess was Rubens’s benefactor and partner in peacemaking for more than a decade. Isabel Clara Eugenia’s sixty-seven years were nearly exactly divided between Spain, where the stages of her life had been documented in illusionistic yet masterfully mimetic dynastic portraiture, and the Spanish Netherlands, where she was portrayed, almost from the time of her arrival, in Rubens’s more painterly and lifelike style.60 Having married at age thirty-two, quite late in life by early modern standards, she was deeply saddened never to see her Spanish homeland again once she left to wed then-Cardinal Albert in 1598. No contract exists for the commission of the Eucharist tapestries, nor are their precise dates of production known; it is fairly certain, however, that the first textiles had arrived in Madrid in a shipment sent by “chariot” well before Rubens himself entered the city, in August of 1628.61 It is also generally accepted that the tapestries were conceived by the Infanta Isabel as an ex-voto, or votive offering to God, in gratitude for the pivotal Spanish victory at the Dutch city of Breda in June of 1625.62 On Spain’s behalf, the veteran Genoese general, Ambrogio Spinola, had laid siege to the Protestant town, known as the gateway to Holland, some nine months earlier. In the end Spinola had successfully subdued Breda’s subjects with the threat of starvation but minimal bloodshed. The capture of the Dutch city was a watershed in the Thirty Years War. It was viewed as a miraculous turning point in Spain’s fortunes against its Calvinist enemies in the Netherlands as well as their supporters in England and Huguenot France. Varying degrees of Protestant animosity toward the eucharistic doctrine of transubstantiation remained at the center of the religious wars; it is not therefore surprising that the subject of Isabel’s tapestry commission is Catholic 59 See Kerkhoff, Maria van Hongarije en haar hof; but see also the patronage of Mary’s Burgundian predecessor, Margaret of Austria, in Eichberger and Beaven, “Family Members and Political Allies.” 60 For a comprehensive and elucidating account of Isabel’s Spanish life in pictures, see Van Wyhe, “Piety, Play, and Power.” 61 Chifflet notes that in July of 1628 Isabel had sent two “chariots qu’elle facit passer en Espagne chargez de tapisseries, de toilles et de chartes géographiqes et de quelques peintures.” A modern curator of the Descalzas Reales has recently discovered an archival document suggesting that the tapestries arrived in Madrid in successive shipments between 1628 and 1633, rather than all at once in 1628 as had previously been believed. See García Sanz, “Nuevas aproximaciones en la serie El triunfo de la Eucaristía,” 111. 62 This opinion was expressed in the wall texts accompanying six oil sketches (modelli) made by Rubens for the Eucharist tapestries and housed in the Museo del Prado, Madrid (2009).

Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia

141

Fig. 3.6. Diego Velázquez, Surrender of Breda, c.1632, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York.

triumph in the material form of the Holy Sacrament, a theme which Rubens figures in the classicizing language of Petrarchan procession, Old Testament typology, sacra conversazione, and dynastic donor portraiture. Most unexpected, given the widely and painstakingly documented military victory at Breda, is the tapestries’ lack of martial imagery and topographical, site-specific references.63 (That previous Spanish clerics deemed military subjects appropriate to religious settings is demonstrated by the liturgical display of the sixteenth-century tapestries known as the Conquest of Tunis—about which more will be said.) Asked to memorialize the victory at Breda some seven years later, for example, Philip IV’s court painter Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), took a seemingly more literal approach in his Surrender of Breda (Fig. 3.6). The Spanish painter’s strikingly neutral tribute to the “Hollanders’” providential downfall at Breda downplays the conquest while remaining highly attentive to the location and appearance of the surrendered battlefield. Velázquez also famously portrays the elegant Spinola and the defeated but 63 For contemporary literary accounts and visual representation of the Siege of Breda, see Vosters, La rendicion de Bredá, 8–48.

142 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

genteel general, Justin of Nassau, performing a fictitious and even-handed encounter before their troops. In Velázquez’s painting, the dual protagonists are bracketed on either side by an individualized entourage of at-ease soldiers and officers (not to mention the smartly dressed artist himself at the far right margin) who look on in admiration. Behind this pantomime of surrender—although the victory was Spain’s, the handing over of a key did not actually occur—the sprawling countryside of Breda is conveyed with picturesque precision. Unlike Rubens, who was familiar with Breda’s environs from previous diplomatic endeavors, Velázquez had never been to the Netherlands; his journalistic landscape was made possible by the infanta’s commission, shortly after the siege’s conclusion, of a large-format series of commemorative historiated maps by the vastly talented French printmaker and social critic, Jacques Callot (1592–1635). With its all-male cast of characters and intricate, almost fetishistic depiction of the trappings of men at war—the motley gallantry of their rumpled boots and riveted armor, the beauty of a tireless and majestic Spanish steed—Velázquez’s rendition of Breda leaves little room for the infanta’s presence.64 Where Isabel’s ex-voto is concerned, the same might be said of Rubens’s friend and patron, Spinola, who is conspicuously absent from the tapestry series instigated by the greatest military conquest of his distinguished career. Nor do Rubens’s Eucharist tapestries make a pretense to historical accuracy as Velázquez would. There is little to evoke the specificities of time and place in the illusionistic spaces of the painterly textiles with the exception of a group of remarkably precise woven portraits. Recognizable by their attributes and from previous prints and paintings, these historical figures are represented in the tapestries’ pendant panels as the members of the secular and ecclesiastical hierarchies who kneel in adoration of the Eucharist. Secular in this case refers to Habsburg royalty, namely, the emperor Ferdinand II (r. 1616–37), King Philip IV, Queen Isabella of Bourbon, and a woman in a Franciscan habit who is, I believe, rightly recognized by Nora De Poorter as the “Infanta of the Descalzas,” Archduke Albert’s sister and Isabel’s dear friend and correspondent, Sor Margarita de la Cruz (1567–1633).65 Opposite this convergence of Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs, a somewhat contrived combination which may represent Isabel’s support for the political goals of her influential Viennese relatives, Rubens positioned the leaders of the Catholic church. The tapestries’ Ecclesiastical Hierarchy is composed of the pope, who has placed his tiara behind him on a cushion; an unknown cardinal clutching his tasseled hat to his breast; a member of the Order of Preachers who aptly exclaims as he raises his arms in awe—as well as several additional clerics or religious placed in charge of a triple cross and bishop’s crosier. Their gazes guided by hovering cherubs, the men look upward, doubling their royal peers in stunned adoration of the Blessed 64 The infanta’s role could, however, be implied by the presence of her standard, the blue and white (her colors) checkered flag of St. Andrew. 65 De Poorter, Eucharist Series, cat. no. 5, pp. 275–76.

Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia

143

Fig. 3.7. Peter Paul Rubens, Adoration of the Eucharist, c.1625–26, oil sketch, Chicago, Art Institute. Photo: Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, USA/Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection/Bridgeman Images.

Sacrament housed in a gilded, cylindrical monstrance. Although Rubens ultimately made several changes in the gestures and arrangement of the figures in these narrow panels, their essential schematic relationship is seemingly suggested (in reverse) by the small but invaluable oil sketch today in Chicago (Fig. 3.7), which may have been composed based on the infanta’s recollection of the convent church’s interior.66 From the vantage point of their patron, these kneeling and standing figures are one of the most nostalgic and self-consciously appropriative aspects of Rubens’s tapestries. As has often been noted, the presentation of the royal and clerical personages largely in profile, their attention directed to a mystical vision that is both available yet unavailable to the beholder, derives from Leone and Pompeo Leoni’s fifteen majestic 66 Held, Oil Sketches, 159.

144 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Fig. 3.8. Leone Leoni and Pompeo Leoni, Philip II and his family, Capilla Major, c.1598, San Lorenzo de El Escorial, El Escorial. Photo: Foto Marburg/Art Resource, New York.

gilt-bronze sculptural portraits for the Capilla Major of the Basilica of the Escorial (Fig. 3.8). According to Almudena Pérez de Tudela, Isabel counseled Philip III on the placement of these prayerful commemorative figures in a letter of 1598, the year of their father’s death.67 Having recently returned from Spain and perhaps calling to mind the same artistic and dynastic trope, Rubens had employed the formula much earlier in his career. The same figural composition appears in the (later cut down and dispersed) altarpiece known as the Gonzaga Trinity (c.1604–5) commissioned, like the Nancy Transfiguration previously discussed, for the Jesuit church in Mantua. There, too, the Austrian branch of the Habsburgs is represented in the figure of Eleonora of Austria (1534–1591), Eleonora de’ Medici’s mother-in-law and the daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I.68 67 Pérez de Tudela, “Making, Collecting, Displaying,” 63. 68 Rubens will adhere to this “Mantua” format very closely in the San Ildefonso altarpiece of 1631–32, completed for the infanta in honor of Albert, who founded the Ildefonso brotherhood at St. Jacob’s, Brussels. The triptych was removed to Vienna in 1777. See Huemer, “Observations on Rubens’ Mantua Altarpiece.”

Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia

145

The Leonis’ naturalistic arrangement of royal priants would have been intimately familiar to Isabel. It is a fascinating feature of the Basilica of the Escorial that the presbytery is directly accessible from the royal apartments adjacent to the high altar. These luxurious lodgings within the royal church were once occupied, on opposite sides, by the infanta and her father. From altar-facing windows in their apartments, both princess and king were therefore able to comfortably observe the liturgy of the high mass at a private remove. While she lived in the Escorial, it must have been especially meaningful to Isabel to worship in the material ‘company’ of the founder of the Descalzas Reales, her aunt, Princess Juana of Portugal (1535–1573), whose finely cast likeness accompanies that of Philip and his three deceased wives, including Isabel’s late mother, Queen Isabella of Valois. Despite the Eucharist tapestries’ conspicuous lack of battlefield imagery, Isabel’s appeal to dynastic precedents set by her Habsburg relatives is further evinced by her choice to commission a series linked, at least associatively, to a major military victory. Drawing on Burgundian models of courtly splendor, tapestry had become a central and importantly portable component of Habsburg display culture during the reign of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who was born in the Flemish city of Ghent. In 1531, on the occasion of the installation of his younger sister, Mary of Hungary, as regent and governess of the Netherlands, Charles’s collection received the first textile series known to depict contemporary events, in this instance the Habsburg victory over the French in the Battle of Pavia tapestries (today in the Neapolitan Museo e Gallerie Nazionali di Capodimonte). Although the tapestries were officially a gift from the city of Brussels to the emperor, they seem to have been quickly incorporated into the large and refined art collections of the new female ruler. At Mary’s death in 1558, Don Carlos, the Infanta Isabel’s ill-fated half-brother, had inherited the Pavia series, later given as a gift to the marquis of Pescara.69 Yet the lion’s share of Mary’s tapestry collection—including some twenty multipartite series—was bequeathed to her niece, the aforementioned foundress of the Descalzas Reales, the Infanta Juana. In 1556, as the widowed princess of Portugal, Juana commandeered the use of a former banker’s palace near the Alcázar to house her newly founded order of royal Poor Clares. It is likely that the inherited tapestry collection accompanied Juana to her apartments in the Madrid convent, where it would have remained until her death in 1573. Among the jewels in Juana’s immensely valuable trove of textiles was the violent battle chronicle known as the Conquest of Tunis, a twelve-panel program designed by the court artist, Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen. The design and production of the Tunis series, a monumental commemoration of the defeat of the ‘infidel’ Barbarossa by imperial forces in 1532, may have been overseen at least in part by Mary of Hungary. 69 For the Pavia series and relevant bibliography concerning Mary of Hungary’s tapestry collection see Buchanan, “Battle of Pavia”, 346, 347, nos. 26, 27. See also González García, ed., Los inventarios de Carlos V.

146 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Upon completion, the tapestries passed to Charles V, who saw them as a necessary justification of the gratuitous violence perpetrated by his troops well after the north African battle was won.70 Like the Pavia series, the Conquest of Tunis represents a conceptual shift among Habsburg tapestry designers from moralizing personification allegories such as the splendid Los Honores program, to a more journalistic approach (Vermeyen had himself witnessed the events in Tunis) in which Habsburg glory is ‘realistically’ constructed at the expense of a conquered heretic rival.71 As David Kunzle relates, neither Charles’s bloody—as many as 30,000 Moors were slain—and arguably futile battle nor Vermeyen’s, at times underhandedly critical, depiction of war were received by contemporaries as unimpeachable victories.72 Even so, the editio princeps of the series, and a somewhat smaller version commissioned by Mary of Hungary, accompanied Habsburg rulers on at least seventeen important ceremonial occasions throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—including the marriages of Philip II to Mary Tudor in 1554 and Louis XIII to Anne of Austria in 1615.73 During Isabel’s childhood in late sixteenth-century Castile, the tapestries were a prominent feature of the religious ceremonies celebrated in the Descalzas Reales on Good Friday and Corpus Christi. Royal textiles underscored genealogical as well as aesthetic connections since Juana of Portugal was insistent that her proprietary tapestry series play a liturgical role in the life of her royal Clarisian order, many of whose members claimed Habsburg ancestry. According to Juan Carillo, whose Relacion historica de la Real Fundacion del Monasterio de las Descalças de S. Clara (1616) provides much useful information about the daily activities at the convent, Juana bequeathed the tapestries to her brother Philip II on the condition that he lend them to the royal Poor Clares for display in their convent on feast days.74 The Infanta Isabel spent extended portions of her childhood at the Descalzas, a palacio de ausencia for the royal family when the monarch was away from Madrid. Hispano-Flemish legacies of art custody and patronage among Habsburg royal women, the esteem in which Vermeyen’s tapestries were held by previous generations of her family, and quite possibly the questionable appropriateness of their use in religious ceremonial seem to have suggested to Isabel the need for a magnificent textile series tailored to the special charism of the royal Poor Clares and custom-fitted to the spaces of their church. A commission of this kind would have seemed especially appropriate as the first decade of the Thirty Years War drew to a close. Isabel’s triumph over the Dutch, like Philip II’s victory against Turkish forces and Charles V’s Tunisian conquest, was viewed by Catholic theologians in eschatological or anagogical terms, as both a sign of Godly favor and an indication of progress across time 70 See Horn, Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen, 111–15. 71 Buchanan, “Battle of Pavia,” 346. 72 Kunzle, From Criminal to Courtier, 67. 73 Kunzle, From Criminal to Courtier, 69 (the date of the latter marriage is erroneously given as 1612). 74 De Poorter, Eucharist Series, 48.

Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia

147

toward the fulfillment of the heavenly kingdom on earth by combat against heresy. Just as her father and grandfather before her had commissioned works of art from foreign artists to mark their military achievements as Habsburg defenders of the faith, so too would the Spanish infanta. The Isabelline Image Within the context of Habsburg patronage, it is significant that Isabel’s nephew, King Philip IV, followed her example with his own glorification of the military only after her death in 1633. Even then, however, the idea for a gallery devoted to Herculean fortitude and contemporary war imagery was that of the king’s favorite, Olivares, aided it seems by Velázquez.75 The decoration of the Hall of Realms, a grand theater and gallery in Philip’s hunting lodge, the Buen Retiro, was completed in spring in of 1635. In it Velázquez’s Surrender of Breda was displayed as one of twelve detailed historical narratives representing victories won by Philip IV’s armies “in every quarter of his worldwide empire.”76 Philip’s two-tiered assemblage of multiple historic battle scenes surmounted by allegories might thus be seen as an emulation of his aunt’s material commemoration of Habsburg might, albeit in her case, as a quasi-public thank offering to God rather than a decorative program to be viewed by visitors to his private hunting lodge. Rubens and Isabel had seen enough battles to know that earthly triumph was as fleeting as the reversals of war were common. And in any case, as one who claimed to wage just war, the infanta was frequently submitted to very real tests of Christian charity, some of which even she may have failed. Rubens describes the hazardous situation of Spanish naval forces near Dunkirk in a letter from 1626, when he would have been engaged in the design and/or early production of the tapestries: It is criminal cruelty on the part of the Hollanders to refuse to give quarter in these waters; for I can testify that, in spite of the thoroughly good treatment which the Most Serene Infanta has shown their prisoners, they, on the contrary, have mercilessly thrown into the sea all of ours who have fallen into their hands. The result is that Her Highness, after having vainly persevered for a long time in her merciful treatment, has finally been forced to take reprisals and pay them in their own coin.77

However merciful to the Dutch Isabel had apparently wished to be, she felt compelled by the circumstances of war to exact her pound of flesh. This rational and 75 Velázquez’s early allegorical triumph, the lost Expulsion of the Moors (1627), is exceptional in this respect, although it pays tribute to a ‘triumph of the faith’ accomplished during the reign of Philip III, rather than the painting’s patron, Philip IV. 76 For the construction of the Hall of Realms see Brown and Elliott, Palace for a King, 150ff. 77 Rubens to Jacques Dupuy, Antwerp, 22 October 1626, in Magurn, ed. and trans., Letters, no. 92, p. 148.

148 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

hard-hearted side of the infanta is not always acknowledged by scholars. In her lifetime, however, Isabel’s ability to make painful sacrifices and difficult decisions was widely recognized by domestic and foreign admirers as part of her female exceptionality. For example, Guido Bentivoglio, the papal nuncio to Brussels from 1607 to 1615, praised Isabel for both personal strength and the power to subject herself to Albert, writing: “the Infanta particularly deserves the highest praise, that being the Princess of these lands and showing a manly spirit and a resolution even greater than the Archduke, she has wished for all that to subordinate herself so exactly to the laws of her husband.”78 Rather differently, Rubens linked Isabel’s unencumbered rule with the well-being of the Spanish Netherlands. As he wrote to his friend Dupuy, “I think that if Her Highness, with the help of the Marquis [Spinola], could govern in her own way, et sponte sua componere curas [and regulate affairs according to her wishes], everything would turn out very happily and one would see the greatest change, not only among us, but everywhere.”79 Another close observer of Isabel’s conduct, Spinola’s own mestre de camp général, the Irish military historian, Gerrat Barry, attests to her reputation in the prefatory remarks to his English translation of the Obsidio Bredana. Written by the Jesuit Hermann Hugo and first published in Latin in 1626, this detailed and surprisingly equivocal treatise is the most extensive and chronologically recent account of the circumstances of the siege. In it, Hermann Hugo’s Isabel is a “pearl of the world,” whose “very enemies approve of her just, deserved and undeniable praises, being such indeed, as hardly any mortal can set them forth as they deserve.”80 As her enemies in Protestant England knew, Isabel was a woman of action, zealously committed to her cause, a fact she demonstrated from the first years of her joint reign by leaving the safety of her palace in Brussels to inspire and review the troops near Ghent. Riding from camp to camp, the infanta encouraged the troops with speeches; in a vow that would be repeated at Breda, she also pledged to pawn her jewels to provide pay and rations for the soldiers if it would secure a victory. Echoing the portrayal of Elizabeth I as Pallas, Isabel was described by the admiring Bentivoglio as “a second Agrippina.”81 According to one popular anecdote from this period—meant to extol the infanta’s remarkable grace under the pressures of war as well as her unfeminine disregard for personal appearance—Isabel vowed to wear the same linens until the victory at Ostend was finally assured. Though ultimately successful, Spinola’s bloody three-year siege of that city was a costly one during which Isabel spent much time with the soldiers. It was said—though the veracity of the legend has often been challenged—that to pay homage to her hygienic abstinence 78 Quoted in Esteban Estríngana, “What a princess, good God!,” 420. 79 Rubens to Jacques Dupuy, Antwerp, 20 July 1628, in Magurn, ed. and trans., Letters, no. 176, p. 277; according to Magurn, the citation is from the Aeneid, 4.340. 80 Hugo, Siege of Breda, trans. Barry, no pag., epistle dedicatory. 81 Bentivoglio, quoted in Klingenstein, Great Infanta, 106.

149

Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia

after the victory was declared in 1604, the peculiarly pleasing yellow-gray hue of dirty silk—and horses—was henceforth designated “couleur isabelle,” or, Isabelline.82 Capable of tempering sumptuousness with austerity, this illustrious female sovereign was the woman Rubens came to know and represent. She was the Serene Infanta of whom he once wrote, in a show of his Neostoic affinities: “our Princess shows neither hate nor excessive love, but is benevolent to all.”83 *** As his letters to and about Isabel endearingly reveal, Rubens was never merely a loyal functionary or socially ambitious courtier to the widowed governor of the Spanish Netherlands. Rather, he was her champion, her proxy in foreign courts, and at times, effectively, her publicist. As recently as Burckhardt’s time, the little-seen Eucharist series was wrongly thought to have been commissioned by Philip IV.84 Although no iconographical guide such as Maria’s Baluze manuscript exists for the tapestries, a high level of collaboration between Rubens and his true patron seems inevitable. In the first place, the artist lacked the infanta’s intimate knowledge of the convent for which the tapestries were created. Perhaps more importantly, Isabel seems to have understood her own place in the providential outcome of Breda—and Breda’s place in the anagogical drama of Spanish foreign policy—in very specific terms which only she could conceive. Rubens and Isabel surely discussed the many differences and few similarities between her commission and the self-congratulatory series he had just completed for Maria de’ Medici. Between two such knowledgeable and compatible art lovers, conversations about the tapestries’ subjects, their appearance, and underlying message must have been highly personal, even intimate, but one can also assume that the future project was envisioned in relation to Rubens’s works to date. As Isabel would have known, Rubens had designed multipanel tapestry programs before, most recently the sedately archeological Achilles series (1625), which was likely commissioned by Louis XIII. Earlier in his career, for the ceiling panels of the Jesuit church of Antwerp (1622) he had explored the possibilities of a typological format in which images from the Old Testament and New Testament were placed in visual dialogue across space. During his first visit to Spain, moreover, he had studied Titian’s monumental multigenerational portrait of Isabel’s Habsburg relatives adoring the Trinity, the Gloria, as well as the Venetian artist’s allegory of Spain’s victory at Lepanto. The intended audience in Madrid, an international cohort of kings, queens, privados, validos, meninas, courtiers, noblewomen, and cultured and aristocratic nuns would pass hours among the tapestries during the prolonged, multisensory 82 Klingenstein, Great Infanta, 129. But see, for example, a description recorded in 1701 of a diplomatic gift of a “Cheval de couleur isabelle” in Cassidy-Geiger and Vötsch, “Documents of Court Gifts,” app., p. 137. 83 Rubens to Pierre Dupuy, Antwerp, 1 October 1626, in Magurn, ed. and trans., Letters, no. 89, p. 142. 84 For earlier literature expressing this opinion, see De Poorter, Eucharist Series, 19.

150 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

religious ceremonies for which Spain was known. Several among this worldly coterie shared the artist’s familiarity with antique as well as modern art; in many cases they were also possessed of a detailed knowledge of military affairs and diplomatic undertakings at home and abroad. How, then, to construct a series of images in which Catholic faith is figured not as a ruthless and mindlessly violent army but rather as a shining beacon of absolute truth and benevolence in a time of ceaseless barbarism and uncertainty? And, more problematically, how to associate the Habsburg’s militant brand of Catholicism with the pious deeds and pacific political strategies of a living female ruler? Clearly, there was no point in rehearsing the visual strategies of Vermeyen’s Tunis tapestries, where the gambling, pillaging, and gratuitous victimization perpetrated by imperial soldiers might be mistaken for the same amoral godlessness Habsburg forces had sought to conquer. Nor, despite their ongoing and decisive roles in the victory, were the real-world tactics of Spinola, the vigilant commander, and Isabel, the strategizing governor, to be represented in a documentary style. Rather the solution, as Rubens and Isabel saw it, was to represent a Catholic military victory over Protestant heretics in terms both metaphorical and metaphysical, though never entirely abstract. If in the end a dominant, even optimistic, mood of mystical transcendence replaces the dissonant battles and merciless warfare animating previous Habsburg tapestry series, Rubens in no way eschews triumphalist, even graphically violent, visual rhetoric. Although the subjects of the Eucharist tapestries are situated and performed in deliberately liminal and unfinished realms—in changeable spaces and places as unrecognizable as Maria’s feminized and utopian France—patron and artist are no less committed to the aim of indoctrination and conversion in the here and now. The ahistorical multivalence of Rubens’s imagery only reinforces the futility of physical or spiritual resistance to the inescapable and continuously re-enacted Catholic truth made flesh in transubstantiation. Pious ‘Captaine’: Isabel’s Image-Making after Breda The Eucharist series combines portraits of living and deceased Habsburg rulers with representations of Old Testament stories, other-worldly visions, and processional carriages. Due to what had become a typical preponderance in Rubens’s works of infant putti and female allegories, the territory in which these genres play out remains a largely feminized realm. Within the supple and colorful fluctuations of a picture world where kairos folds future and past, the earthy attributes of contemporary military conflicts, however generalized or denatured, would seem somehow out of place. As an alternative to the conventionally masculinized repertoire of war imagery, Rubens turned then to allegories of love as this Platonic theme had been figuratively Christianized—and gendered—by Titian and Van Veen.

Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia

151

While Vergara describes the general composition of the Eucharist series as “based on images of Roman Triumphs,” it is also possible that the framework was further inspired by Petrarch, a more recent humanist source for whom the reconciliation of secular and sacred was of primary import.85 Petrarch’s versified Triumphs include those of Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Divinity. The first artistic depictions of the Trionfi date to mid-fourteenth-century Italy. In the following century, an illustrated theological manuscript called the Chemin de paradis (1461), originating at the Brussels court of Isabelle of Portugal, serves as an early example of Burgundian courtly uses of Petrarchan themes in devotional art.86 The earliest Brussels-made tapestry programs displaying Petrarchan Triumphs may have appeared around 1490 and would probably have been known to Rubens, if only from factory cartoons.87 Following Titian’s designs some two decades later, an Italian printmaker executed a chariot-themed woodcut series depicting the Triumph of the Faith (c.1510–11).88 With these precedents very probably in mind, Rubens’s teacher Van Veen would produce a painted Triumph of the Church around 1615–20. Also at this time, the Antwerp-based artist Frans Francken (1581–1642) evidently looked to Petrarch for a Triumph picture known as the Misdeeds of Love, where, alongside many ill-fated couples, including Hercules and Omphale, the painting represents a chariot driven by Cupid.89 As Titian, Van Veen, and tapestry designers before them had realized, the Petrarchan motif of rolling wheels is a visceral metaphor for Christianity’s inexorable progress as well as the Catholic church’s intent to crush those heretics who might obstruct the way of the faithful to paradise.90 In the Eucharist tapestry known as The Triumph of the Church, the power of chariot imagery was not lost on Rubens, who represents snake-haired and other miserable furies about to be rolled over by the unyielding machinery of orthodoxy. The driver of the chariot-church, in the process of being be crowned with a papal tiara, is a female personification of the church who holds a monstrance aloft with both hands. In Catholic quarters, the victory at Breda was understood as similarly deserved and inevitable. Pope Urban VIII (Barberini), who had been elected in 1623, viewed the result of the siege as ordained by God; as its instigator, Isabel had clearly served as a divine instrument for the Spanish triumph. “The right hand of the omnipotent is glorified in you,” the Pope wrote to the infanta shortly after the capture of the rebel stronghold, “triumphing with joye for the noble victory of conquered Breda.” 85 Vergara, “High and Passionate Songs,” 56–57. 86 Relationships between fifteenth-century Italian Triumphs and their Flemish or Burgundian equivalents have not yet received much scholarship, but see Lyon, “Wheel within the wheel.” 87 Campbell, “New Evidence on ‘Triumphs of Petrarch’ Tapestries,” 379. 88 See Panofsky, Problems in Titian, 58–63. 89 On Van Veen’s Triumph of the Church (1615–20) Geissmar, “Geometrical Order of the World”; for the painting by Francken (and a useful summary of Trionfi imagery), see Wyss, “‘Triumph of Love’ by Frans Francken.” 90 De Poorter, Eucharist Series, 323–24.

152 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

But from the Vatican’s perspective, Spain’s unlikely capture of an Orangist outpost was more than a military success. Extolling the exceptional prowess of his spiritual daughter, Urban VIII interpreted the conflict in anagogical terms as a microcosmic battle of virtue and vice prefiguring the Parousia, or second coming: We speak of your Nobilitie, who having surpassed the praises of a woman’s virtu, prosperously turned the forces of the Austriacall power, for the defence of the orthodox faith. The band of the heavenlie armie fought in your campes; and the constancie of warlike fortitude, hath taught noble nations, inhabiting by the spectacle of so singular a siege, no hould in earth to be fortified with so strong helpes, and defences, which the power of a camp armed with celestiall helpes, doth not vanquish. You have combated with an enimie conteining of perils, and with a cunning artificer of unheard of terror, […] But the wicked hath fallen into the ditch which they digged, and our Lord hath raigned.91

Not unlike Paul V’s nuncio, Bentivoglio, the new pope constructed an image of Isabel as a virtuous woman warrior, a sovereign whose constancy and fortitude render her a worthy Christian soldier in a nearly literal sense. Comparing the time spent by Elizabeth I, Maria de’ Medici, and the Infanta Isabel on the battlegrounds among their respective soldiers—the instances when the women placed themselves squarely in the midst of appalling conditions and ongoing fighting—one realizes that Isabel Clara Eugenia, who rode to the troops at Ostend and Breda, Fleurus, and Bergen-op-Zoom and built battle ships at Dunkirk alongside her general, Spinola, was the likeliest Athena of the three. To invert the enigma of the Medici cycle: Rubens’s failure to include overt depictions of Maria de’ Medici as Mary, the Queen of Heaven, it is equally perplexing that Rubens was never to depict Isabel, even allegorically, as the military heroine and well-regarded hunter and horsewoman she truly was.92 In contrast to Maria in her cycle, the infanta is portrayed neither riding nor surveying the battleground, for her almost routine activities. She appears in the Eucharist tapestries only in the habit of an earthbound nun, her gray frieze robes cinctured by the triple-knotted Franciscan cord signifying poverty, chastity, and obedience. Yet as a Tertiary member of the order, she is never portrayed displaying the forth knot adopted by Poor Clares to indicate their vow of enclosure. It might be argued that Rubens painted Isabel in this manner simply because she had conspicuously adopted the habit of a Poor Clare immediately upon the death of “mi primo,” as she fondly referred to her husband, also her cousin, the Archduke Albert. But the infanta’s ties to the Franciscan order were close and well established; unlike many 91 The pope’s letter is reprinted in Hugo, Siege of Breda, 147. 92 In Flanders, the infanta was probably best known in this respect for having shot down the popinjay in 1615, after which she was proclaimed “queen of the guild of crossbowmen.” See Thomas, “Isabel Clara Eugenia and the Pacification,” 186.

Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia

153

of her Austrian royal counterparts, even those in Madrid—who maintained Jesuit confessors—Isabel was served in this capacity by the Castilian Andrés de Soto, the commissioner general of Franciscans in the Netherlands, Germany, England, and Ireland.93 De Soto died in 1625, around the time Isabel may have commissioned the tapestries, and one wonders what if any role he may have played in the development of their imagery. A member of the strict and ascetical Observant Franciscans, de Soto was known as a paragon of abstinence and self-discipline who refused to enter the physical spaces of Isabel’s gynocentric court—despite its conservative reputation and, following Albert’s death, its stultifying Spanish etiquette. And yet, as Cordula van Wyhe has shown, when de Soto died, Isabel blatantly ignored the friar minor’s previous request for a simple marker for his grave. She chose instead an ornate marble tablet for which she also commissioned a dedicatory inscription describing herself as “Sanctissima Atque Optima Principum,” or “the most holy and best of leaders.”94 This defiance of her confessor’s wishes seems particularly revealing of Isabel’s willingness to forego obedience, and even humility, in defense of her expert strategies of oblique or associative identity construction.95 In the year of de Soto’s death, Rubens’s painted portrait of the Clarisian infanta was also completed. This sober depiction of the middle-aged Isabel as an imposing and dignified Poor Clare was to define and describe her for the rest of her life—as it arguably still does today (Plate 6). Although the infanta had officially professed her vows to the Third Order in 1622, she did not commission the somber three-quarterlength portrayal in what had become her only form of attire, until three years later. Rubens had painted several portraits of the archduchess prior to this one. Comparing the sedate Franciscan Isabel to the younger, more cheerful-looking figure in the earlier images charts the impact of her dwindling hopes for peace and the realization that children and therefore a role in Habsburg dynastic continuity were not to be her lot in life.96 The widowed governor’s piercing gaze, hint of a raised eyebrow, and slightly compressed lips, features intensified in this painted likeness executed in her fifty-ninth year, suggest an attitude of knowing self-containment echoed by the graceful framing of her hands around the black Franciscan veil tethered to her girdle. Still, the kindly, authoritative, and perceptive eyes found in Rubens’s earlier portraits remain, their conveyance of Isabel’s foresight undoubtedly enhanced by the mystical radiance she now seems to exude. 93 For the reciprocal and mutually self-fashioning relationship of the infanta and her Spanish confessor see Van Wyhe, “Court and Convent.” 94 Van Wyhe, “Court and Convent,” 442. 95 Isabel demonstrated visible—and arguably, strategic—humility in other public contexts, however, as when the impressive new canal being built in the late 1620s was to be named the ‘Fossa Eugenia.’ Isabel rejected the dedication and changed the name to the ‘Fossa Mariana or Notre Dame’ in honor of the Virgin Mary. Rubens describes the circumstances in a letter, see Rubens to Pierre Dupuy, 13 May 1627, in Magurn, ed. and trans., Letters, no. 108, p. 180. 96 On the portraits see, Vlieghe, Portraits; see also Jaffé, “Rubens’s Portraits of the Archduke Albert and the Infanta Isabella,” 194–95; Jaffé incorrectly identifies Isabel as the niece of Philip II.

154 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Fig. 3.9. Diego Velázquez, Jerónima de la Fuente, c.1620, Madrid, Museo del Prado, Photo: copyright of the image Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, New York.

One cannot help but contrast the noble piety and spiritual intensity with which Rubens imbues this pampered, though frequently self-denying, elite woman to the combative pose and fiery, take-no-prisoners gaze of Madre Jerónima de la Fuente (1555–1630). The intimidating figure of this even older Franciscan nun (she was sixty-six at the time) was memorialized by Velázquez a few years earlier, in 1620

Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia

155

(Fig. 3.9).97 Madre Jerónima’s likeness, one of two full-length versions painted by the youthful Velázquez while still in Seville, commemorates the appearance of the nun just before she was dispatched on a mission to the Philippines. Little is known of the motivation for Isabel’s formally similar portrait, which shares Velázquez’s dark, indeterminate background, imparting its solitary subject with a timeless, almost ghostly, presence. Perhaps like the earlier portrait, Rubens’s portrayal of Isabel is meant to resemble images of the epitome of Spanish holy women, Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582), who had been recently canonized; Isabel counted Teresa’s former companion and aide, Ana de San Bartolomé (1550–1626), as a close friend and spiritual adviser.98 Based in large part on Hermann Hugo’s claim that while in Antwerp Isabel was “drawn by the pencil of Rubens,” it is generally accepted that the portrait was painted shortly after the conclusion of the siege of Breda while Isabel was en route to Brussels having visited the surrendered town. But a close reading of the full passage in Hugo links the sitting not to the oil portrait of the infanta but to the print engraved after it. “Being graven with an instrument in brasse,” Hugo writes, “she saw herself crowned with a garland of oake, in an imperiall table. Worthie to be pictured after that noble triumphe, nor by another hand than by that of Apelles.”99 The publication of Hugo’s Latin text in 1626 thus provides a terminus ante quem for the print. It may also indicate the speed with which the infanta progressed in securing the completion and distribution of what Vergara has termed her “official image.”100 If this is so, the timing would have been especially right for Isabel to visually reify her popular (and papally affirmed) reputation as a chastely heroic defender of the faith, endowed with a special, characteristically Habsburg, devotion to the Eucharist. As the Jesuit Hugo relates, Isabel, having “resolved her selfe to goe in person to the cittie that was wonne, and to visit the soldiers that had overcome,” spent several days actively re-Catholicizing formerly Calvinist Breda.101 Indeed, the infanta had made something of a triumphal entry into the city, passing through its gates with a “triple discharging of canons [sic]” and accompanied, since Antwerp, by an escort of nearly all her assembled horsemen and several squadrons of footmen. Joyfully received by some, at least, Isabel forbade the lighting of bonfires until she had attended recaptured Breda’s first Catholic mass. The following day, an emissary from Spain, the cardinal of Cueva, arrived to celebrate the Eucharist with Isabel, her ladies in waiting, “and all the people being present.” Only then did she make a tour of the church, which had fallen victim to numerous acts of iconoclasm, in order to “behould (if any were left) of the oulde monuments of religion.”102 97 On this painting see Tiffany, Diego Velázquez’s Early Paintings, 49–76; Brown, Velázquez: Painter and Courtier, 32–34. 98 Olmedo Ramos, “Isabel Clara Eugenia and Literature,” 248. 99 Hugo, Siege of Breda, 153. 100 Vergara, Rubens and his Spanish Patrons, 43. 101 Hugo, Siege of Breda, 146. 102 Hugo, Siege of Breda, 147

156 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

The mass celebrated and her survey complete, the infanta departed the church and gave permission for an “innumerable number of lanterns and fires” to be lit in the town, providing a spectacle that was “seen to burne even from Holland.”103 As a member of the Society of Jesus, the witness to these events, Hermann Hugo, is careful to note that during her visit Isabel was the source of generous gifts to the city’s imperiled Franciscan Capuchins, Jesuits, and an abbey of Carmelite nuns. “It was the common voice of all,” he writes: that the Infanta by her perpetual prayers and those of her court and of other places by there continual prayers in the fortie houre prayers to be made in all the Churches, and by powring out her almes amongst the miserable, wonne Breda, and not with weapons.104

The belief that Isabel had, in other words, peaceably won the capture of Breda by the power of prayer and acts of charity cast her in venerable light; elevated beyond the stature of a ruler divinely appointed according to tradition, she is rendered by Hugo as a Christian heroine whose petitions received God’s favor as a result of her faithfulness. A further passage explicitly figures Isabel through a scriptural exemplum. There, Hugo implies a comparison of pious Isabel to Judith, the Old Testament widow who vanquished the enemy general Holofernes, decapitating him as he slept: For to whom shall we refer this benefit received, but to her so well knowen pietie, to whom we may rightly proclaime that saying: One woman hath wrought confusion in the house of Nabuchodonosor [Nebuchadnezzar]. Isabella therefore came into the cittie as a restorer of the ancient religion; into the campes to bestow in those days, the gifts and guerdons of a Captaine. She ordained the Anniversarie Masse, in honor of the dreadful Sacrament (who began first in the eve of the rendring of Breda, and the garrison went out on the octave).105

The author’s use of a passage from the Deuterocanonical book of Judith, an apocryphal text not recognized by the Protestants, supplies a vision of Isabel as a restorer of the ancient, that is, Catholic, faith. Like Judith, the infanta courageously entered the masculine domain of an army camp. Unlike Judith, however, she relied on charity and prayer rather than her femininity to defeat the enemy. She remains, as a result, a ‘Captaine’ whose chaste spiritual warfare successfully brought down the House of Orange. *** 103 Hugo, Siege of Breda, 148. 104 Hugo, Siege of Breda, 148. 105 Hugo, Siege of Breda, 149. The citation is from Judith 14:18.

Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia

157

Fig. 3.10. Jacques Callot, Siege of Breda, c.1628, London, British Museum. Photo: ©Trustees of the British Museum.

The origins of the Eucharist tapestries are contained in the passage quoted above, which advances the notion that the first day of the octave of Corpus Christi—the ‘Anniversarie Masse, in honor of the dreadful Sacrament’—corresponded with the surrender of Breda, and that the garrison of soldiers went out of Breda on the last night of the eucharistic festival. In 1625, Corpus Christi, which is celebrated the first Thursday following Trinity Sunday, fell on 29 May. That year, the truce of Breda was indeed signed almost eight days later on 5 June. This fortuitous correspondence, which Isabel seems to have used to her advantage in planning her visit, helped to seal the association of the surrender of a Protestant town with the reinstitution of a centuries-old Catholic feast honoring the mystical body of Christ. In addition to commissioning Rubens’s engraving and the portrait/s on which it was based, Isabel pursued other visual strategies of pious self-promotion in the wake of Breda. As early as the summer of 1625 (in other words, very shortly after the siege was concluded) she solicited from Callot a large, six-sheet map depicting the topography and siege works at Breda (Fig. 3.10).106 Simone Zurawski has demonstrated that since Callot did not visit Breda until at least 1627 (if at all), he was to depend heavily on Hugo’s elaborately illustrated history, the allegorical frontispiece of which was designed by Rubens (Fig. 3.11). Hugo’s Obsidio Bredana was translated into Spanish 106 Zurawski, “New Sources for Jacques Callot’s Map,” 623.

158 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Fig. 3.11. Cornelis Galle I after Peter Paul Rubens, Obsidio Bredana, Antwerp, c.1626, engraved frontispiece. Photo: courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

and published in English in 1627. Completed by 1628, Callot’s detailed, panoramic etchings, accompanied by a description of Breda’s events written by Alonso Ladrón de Guevara—and translated into four languages—were subsequently sent by the infanta to the major European courts.107 The map thus formed part of a multilingual, 107 Zurawski, “New Sources for Jacques Callot’s Map,” 623.

Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia

159

Fig. 3.12. Peeter Snayers, Isabel Clara Eugenia en Route to Breda, c.1628, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Prado, Madrid, Spain/Bridgeman Images.

multigenre, propaganda campaign orchestrated by Isabel on a pan-European scale. The infanta’s desire to associate herself with the outcome of the siege is evidenced by the prominent place Callot allocates to her entry into Breda. In the map’s final, that is, lower right, corner scene, a mounted Spinola watches from a high hill as the archducal carriage under heavy escort conducts its royal passenger, attired in her Franciscan habit, into the lands of the conquered Protestant enemy. A contemporary work by the Fleming, Peeter Snayers (1592–1667) neatly codifies Isabel’s representational strategies to date (Fig. 3.12). Executed around 1628, the painting is first documented in the Spanish collection in 1636 (suggesting that it, too, may have helped Velázquez create a recognizable Breda in his canvas for Philip IV). In the corner of Snayers’s painting, as in the print, the infanta peers out of a carriage, accompanied by Spinola mounted on a rearing horse. Even amidst a cast of hundreds, Isabel Clara Eugenia is clearly recognizable to the viewer owing to the signature Franciscan habit which has already come to establish her identity far more handily than fancy dress or a straw hat ever did. Rolling into Breda in her modern-day triumphal chariot, the figure of the infanta parallels any one of Rubens’s progressing female personifications in the Eucharist tapestries—whether faith, divine love, or the Catholic church herself.

160 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Doctoring the Church: Isabel and the Defenders of the Eucharist To take full measure of Isabel’s figurative self-fashioning in conjunction with her military victory in the North, however, it is necessary to return to the moment early in June when she first learned that Breda, held by the Dutch since 1590, would again fall under Spanish dominion. Isabel received the astounding news from the nobleman-engineer, Giovanni de’ Medici, through whom she may also have been introduced to Callot.108 She then made an immediate decision to visit the troops, arriving in Breda on 12 June 1625 in time to personally mandate the exceedingly generous payment of two month’s wages to her men for services rendered. A contemporary journalist, Abraham Verhoeven, gave the following account of the infanta’s arrival in the Nieuwe Tijdinghen (New tidings), the first newspaper published in the Spanish Netherlands: [On] the 12 June 1625 at 6 in the morning the illustrious Duchess drove from Antwerp to the army at Breda, and entered Breda with all the court that same evening, and before she entered the town the whole army stood in battle order in open field, the first she passed being 8 regiments of foot, who fired 3 salvoes./ Then there stood 140 companies of horse, who also fired 3 salvoes, and the town fired 3 salvoes with all the batteries, and the field guns, so that the earth shook. The Marquis Spinola came to meet the most serene Infanta with many lords and princes, which was a sight to see. That night there were triumphal celebrations in Breda, and they lasted for 3 days.109

According to the Obsidio Bredana, the next day the infanta made a very public appearance at a “long mass.” Hugo provides ardent commentary on Isabel’s eucharistic devotion in the conclusion of his history. As elsewhere in the text, he subtly reveals the ideological tensions between Isabel, the peace-minded governor of the Spanish Netherlands, and her nephew, the king of Spain, at the time an impatient, untested, and hawkish young ruler who showed little concern for the well-being of his long-suffering Flemish subjects. Even as the aforementioned Giovanni de’ Medici greeted Isabel with news of the victory, Hugo asserts, pamphleteers were tirelessly lambasting her policies and critical letters from the doubtful Philip IV continued to arrive at her doorstep. According to Hugo, Philip’s faith in Ambrogio Spinola had wavered to such an extent that “Isabella was admonished, that she should consider againe and againe, whether it were not more to the purpose, to recall Spinola from so long and doubtful a siege.”110 108 Zurawski, “New Sources for Jacques Callot’s Map,” 623, no. 10. In 1612, the Nancy-born Callot had moved to Florence where, as Zurawski notes, he designed festivals for the Medici. 109 Cited in Arblaster, “Abraham Verhoeven and the Brussels Court,” 310. 110 Hugo, Siege of Breda, 146.

Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia

161

In the very next paragraph, as if to demonstrate his benefactor’s response to Philip’s antagonism and infuriating lack of support, Hugo records what had been Isabel’s “resolve” to go to Breda, in effect, to uphold and make clear the success of her own strategies against those of the Spanish king. Within days of the peaceful conclusion of the siege, therefore, it seems the infanta had determined to make Breda her Lepanto. Procuring the services of a respected cleric-theologian, a talented draftsman, and the greatest visual propagandist of the age, she endeavored to secure, once and for all, her complex legacy as peaceable war hero and beneficent defender of the faith. With Rubens’s help, the archduchess ingeniously repackaged a modern, ultimately inconclusive, military victory as a timeless allegory of Catholic triumph. By their conspicuous collaboration, the patron and her painter gloriously asserted Isabel’s dual cultural citizenship and attentiveness to both her Spanish origins and the Flemish people in her care. The infanta’s instrumental goals were achieved by combining elements of distinctively ‘Hispano’ military history and familiarly Flemish tapestry vernacular into a monument of Habsburg sacramental devotion. Hugo’s treatise and Callot’s map conveyed Breda’s momentous circumstances to Isabel’s European counterparts under the pretense of supplying cartographic data and current events—what was considered at the time as news. Quite differently, as if to augment and even transcend the map and text, the Eucharist tapestries articulated Isabel’s triumph at Breda in a figurative manner, converting letter to spirit with an expressive force and conceptual complexity unprecedented even in Rubens’s own works to date. Isabel’s Canonical Image Following Nora De Poorter, the extant panels of the Eucharist tapestries can be loosely grouped according to their themes and iconography, namely the Adoration of the Eucharist; King David Playing the Harp; the eleven large tapestries which comprise the Old Testament prefigurations (4); the Triumphs (3); the Defenders of the Eucharist (1); the Four Evangelists (1), and the remaining scenes of the Eucharist Overcoming Pagan Sacrifice and Victory of Truth over Heresy. A further group contains allegorical personifications.111 The panel in which Isabel’s portrait appears, and the focus of the remainder of this chapter, is the group of saints and theologians known as the Defenders of the Eucharist. Rubens made smaller-scale preparatory oil sketches, modelli and bozzetti, as well as large painted cartoons from which he diverged to varying degrees in the 111 For an exhaustive iconographical survey of the content of these images see De Poorter, Eucharist Series, 188–212. Vergara and Woollett, eds., Spectacular Rubens, 19, give the count as nineteen: eleven large and eight smaller textiles.

162 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

final tapestry designs. In the case of the Defenders, however, his cartoon is highly finished and differs little from the textile version. Because it offers a greater level of clarity on an identical scale, the Ringling Museum’s painted canvas (Plate 8) provides a vivid entry to the conception underlying Rubens’s portrayal of his patron in its tapestry analogue. Rubens’s assemblage of eucharistic defenders is composed as a sacra conversazione. In many respects it resembles the two-story theophanies of Raphael’s Ecstasy of St. Cecilia and Disputa where doctrinally relevant saints dwell before, or more precisely, below, a mystical manifestation to which they respond often according to their imagined personalities. As De Poorter reminds us, the quartet of the Latin doctors, along with the four evangelists, are often included in illustrated Petrarchan Triumphs, the same visual tradition in which Rubens’s tapestries baroquely participate.112 But the old-fashioned genre and familiar cast belie the audacious claim of Rubens’s saintly gathering. His new approach is signaled by the asymmetrical arrangement of the Latin doctors, or Fathers of the church. The four figures are unevenly distributed, with Pope Gregory the Great and the mitered bishops Augustine and Ambrose on the privileged ‘gospel’ side and the traditionally if anachronously dressed (there was no rank of cardinal in the fifth century) Jerome, immersed in a book on the ‘epistle’ side. The skewed placement of the church doctors is formally balanced by three additional figures, whose presence among them encourages their placement on a doctrinal or devotional par with the fathers—if only as regards the Eucharist. Thus, the gesturing Thomas Aquinas, the lone female saint, Clare/Clara Eugenia, and the long-mysterious figure clad in white, likely the Premonstratensian, St. Norbert, seem intended as embodiments of medieval scholasticism and monastic piety, themselves the seeds of Tridentine orthodoxy planted in the teachings of the early church.113 Viewed as instrumental imagery, Rubens’s program as a whole is meant to bolster the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation and relatedly, the ‘real presence’ of Christ, which asserts the paradoxically corporal-material and sacramental-mystical nature of the Host. The Eucharist tapestries’ unifying compositional device is an architectonic border—either Solomonic or classical—from which illusionistic tapestries, attended by numerous cherubs or putti, are being mounted or taken down. The prevailing conceit is therefore that of the church’s ongoing revelation of the inward truth beneath or within outward substance, a circumstance doubled in the Eucharist where “by the consecration of the bread and wine a change is brought about.”114 Rubens’s dynamic framework of unfolding fabric and processional vehicles makes manifest, quite literally, Tridentine assurances that those who take frequent 112 De Poorter, Eucharist Series, 362. 113 De Poorter, Eucharist Series, 361, no. 15, describes this panel as part of the Triumphal “cortege,” reading the figures as “proceeding across a landscape.” That it is equally possible to view the saints as turning inward and/ or moving forward is further evidence of Rubens’s compositional ambiguity/complexity. 114 Schroeder, trans., Canons and Decrees, sess. 13, 1551, p. 73.

Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia

163

communion “arrive in their heavenly country there to eat, without any veil, the same bread of angels which they now eat under sacred veils.”115 The monstrance centered by the saints is likewise a kind of veil. Yet the ostensory practice of displaying the Host in an elaborate, usually crystal or glass container for the purposes of reverence arose some 600 years after Gregory’s death. Indeed, the ceremonial use of a monstrance was first recorded in the Low Countries, near Liège, an undoubtedly significant origin for both patron and painter. As is the fact that the incorporation of the practice into Corpus Christi processions is historically credited to a woman. As the story is told, in 1209, an Augustinian nun named Juliana of Mont-Cornillon (also known as Juliana of Liège) had a vision of the dark side of the moon. Juliana interpreted the experience allegorically as a sign that the veneration of the Sacrament should be added to the liturgical calendar; she then related her vision to Jacques Pantaleon, the archdeacon of Liège. The Feast of Corpus Christi was first celebrated in 1246 and extended throughout the church by Pantaleon, then Pope Urban IV, in 1264.116 The first monstrance used at Corpus Christi is thought to be that of the church of St. Quentin, Hasselt (a municipality added to the bishopric of Liège by the early fourteenth century), for which it was executed in 1286.117 A charismatic spiritual leader, Juliana of Liège (d. 1258), was at the heart of a twelfthand thirteenth-century mystical movement in which women, especially high-born women, were central to the establishment of new religious practices and communities.118 But although women’s mysticism can be said to have reached its heights in northern Europe—especially in Belgium, France, and Germany—an Italian counterpart to Juliana can be recognized in the more famous Clare of Assisi (1194–1253), the Umbrian co-foundress of the Poor Clare Order and legendary protector of the Holy Sacrament. One of the most colorful narratives associated with the headstrong Clare, daughter of a nobleman and devoted adherent to Francis’s radical call to poverty and simplicity, is that of her fierce custody of the consecrated Host. In 1234, Clare’s convent at San Damiano came under attack by the army of Frederick II, whose troops thought to terrorize the nuns by night. Clare, it is said, rose from her bed and took the ciborium containing the Blessed Sacrament from its place in an adjacent room before rushing to an open window where soldiers could be seen scaling the walls from below. In the face of the enemy, Clare brandished the sacred vessel and the soldiers, astonished by the sight, fell back to the ground and retreated. For this reason—though again, ahistorically, given the use of ostensories—Clare is sometimes portrayed by early modern artists with a monstrance as her attribute.119 115 Schroeder, trans., Canons and Decrees, sess. 13, 1551, p. 79. 116 Mathiesen, “Office of the New Feast of Corpus Christi,” 21. See also Rubin, Corpus Christi. 117 See Oman, “Early Flemish Monstrance,” 41. 118 See Dor et al., ed., New Trends in Feminine Spirituality. For the Beguine roots of Brabantine female mysticism see Oliver, “‘Gothic’ Women.” 119 Robinson, “St. Clare of Assisi.”

164 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

The radical acts and providential visions of holy women such as Juliana and Clare surely resonated for the infanta, who was baptized ‘Isabel’ for her mother and grandmother, as well as for Isabel the Catholic, her father’s great grandmother. She was called ‘Clara’ for the saint’s day on which she was born, and ‘Eugenia,’ owing to a vow her mother had made to St. Eugen, should she have a healthy child.120 Just as her namesake Clare had defeated the enemy by upholding the veneration of the Holy Sacrament, and Juliana, a native of her adopted country, had instituted the Feast in its honor, Isabel defended the Eucharist, and with her tapestries, glorified its celebration at Corpus Christi and Good Friday. Centuries before Isabel’s time, devotion to the Eucharist was recognized as a feature of pietas Austriaca, the elaborately performative politico-religious expression of Austro-Hispanic Habsburg Catholicism.121 It was the first Habsburg Holy Emperor, Rudolf I (1273–1313) who, following recent precedents set by Clare and Juliana, had concretized the liturgical use of the displayed Host and the royal reverence for the Sacrament. While still a count, Rudolf had supposedly given one of his own horses to a priest he found walking on foot with the viaticum on a muddy and rutted road. As he was hurrying to provide last rites to a dying peasant, the priest accepted the horse and the emperor-to-be dismounted in order that the Host might receive the honor that was its due.122 Rubens, in collaboration with the landscape painter Jan Wildens, had himself painted this very subject—which he composed as a genre-like, even ludic, triumphal procession with a greatly reduced cast—sometime between 1625 and 1636, when it is first documented in the Spanish Alcázar. Philip IV was apparently very attached to the painting, which hung in his bedroom until the time of his death some thirty years later.123 Rubens included neither the emperor Rudolf nor Juliana of Liège in his trio of eucharistic defenders, however. Though once a prioress, Juliana was not a canonized saint at the time. (In fact, her mystical leanings and eventual expulsion from the Augustinian order might have made her too revolutionary to honor.) In Rubens’s designs the Flemish roots of eucharistic devotion are represented by the less controversial figure of St. Norbert (c.1080–1134). A gifted preacher dubbed by St. Bernard “a celestial flute” and the founder of the order of Premonstratensians, Norbert had arrived in Antwerp in 1123 expressly charged with staunching the heretical teachings being spread by an anticlerical mystic called Tankelin. A semi-nude figure who may represent the deposed Tankelin appears, along with the trampled ‘heretics’ Calvin and Luther, in the Eucharist tapestry panel known as The Victory of Truth over Heresy; placed closest to the viewer, the dead or dying Tankelin can be seen gripping an ornate, and presumably stolen, monstrance.124 Although he is less familiar to many 120 Klingenstein, Great Infanta, 8. 121 See Coreth, Pietas Austriaca, 13–23. 122 Knipping, Iconography of the Counter Reformation, 305. 123 See Vergara, Rubens and his Spanish Patrons, 116. See also Coreth, Pietas Austriaca, 13–15. 124 Vergara and Woollett, eds., Spectacular Rubens, cat. nos. 4, 5, pp. 68–71.

Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia

165

readers and beholders today, Norbert’s hagiography was well-known in the seventeenth century; he appears, for example, in the Triunfos divinos (1625) of the Spanish playwright, Lope de Vega (1562–1635), a poetic exultation of transubstantiation with many similarities to Rubens’s tapestry series—and a probable shared source in Petrarch.125 A less obvious and more tantalizing counterpart to Isabel—and even to the eucharistic defender Clare of Assisi with whom she is conflated—is Thomas Aquinas. After Trent, St. Thomas was generally espoused as a fifth doctor of the church. In addition to explicating the doctrine of transubstantiation in the Summa theologiae, the Summa contra Gentiles, and elsewhere, Thomas is credited with the authorship of the Office of Corpus Christi.126 That he is a Dominican saint, and thus a follower of the Spaniard Dominic Guzman, further endeared Thomas to the Spanish Habsburgs. Yet St. Clare, rather than St. Thomas, was the founder of the religious order for which Isabel’s tapestries were intended. Rubens accordingly presents the learned Aquinas in a fairly standard and even humble manner, as a man of the book, whose pointing heavenward echoes that of the figure closest to the monstrance in Raphael’s Disputa. In the large-scale painted cartoon for the tapestries to which we have been referring, the earnest-looking Thomas is positioned just ahead of the infanta yet also in the less honorific space to her left. In compositional if not theological terms the two form part of a triad, the third member of which is the Holy Spirit hovering overhead in the form of a blazing dove. Thomas’s raised arm and extended finger, like the finial of Isabel/Clare’s monstrance, thus delimit the radiant pyramid of light bestowed by the Paraclete in their midst. As in her painted and printed Clarisian portrait, Isabel is surrounded by a faint but discernible nimbus in this image, a glowing halo which Thomas—as well as the other male saints—notably lack. As a rhetorical device employed to establish the subjects’ status or historical/ doctrinal importance as well as to draw the viewer in, the play of glances among these eucharistic defenders is worth considering. Isabel/Clare, whose central position already assures her importance, is one of only two figures to confront the viewer directly. The other is the dark-bearded Augustine, whose identity can be deduced from his youth relative to his teacher Ambrose, and the three-dimensional heart (his traditional attribute) appended to his miter.127 Augustine thus looks to the beholder rather than at the focal point, which is clearly the monstrance in the process of being displayed both internally to the gathered saints, and externally, to those gathered for 125 De Poorter, Eucharist Series, 364. 126 Thomas is referred to as the author of the Office of Corpus Christi in the acts of the Dominican chapter; see Polzer, “Andrea di Bonaiuto’s Via Veritatis.” 127 Presumably basing the figure’s identity on the Prado oil sketch (which lacks the heart appended to his miter in the cartoon), Vergara and Woollett, eds., Spectacular Rubens, 62, designate Augustine as the episcopal figure at left with his back to the viewer. This seems unlikely as the flaming heart is a traditional attribute of Augustine; see, for example, Philippe de Champaigne, St. Augustine, 1650, Los Angeles County Museum.

166 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

the liturgies and, during them, the parallel celebration of the Eucharist. Interestingly, Ambrose, his exquisitely embroidered cope decorated with a scene of Christ’s resurrection, is viewed only from the back, though his posture and profil perdu assure us that he is in awe of all that he sees before him. Likewise, the strong-featured Gregory appears transfixed by the luminous Sacrament, whose reflected catchlights glisten in his pupils. The rather bland-looking Norbert also stares at the monstrance, while Jerome, as if about to cite himself, pauses on a page in his big book (possibly his Vulgate translation), his stance and pose also recalling the figure in Raphael’s sacred disputation. Confronted with the infanta’s frontal presentation, the spectator has no choice but to meet her somber brown eyes and consider the identity conveyed by her placid yet particularized features and body, merged with St. Clare of Assisi. Isabel’s brightly lit face and intelligently serene expression contrast with that of the sullen-looking Augustine, who, being nearly pushed out of the frame, seems to glower at the viewer from the shadows at left. On the matter of transubstantiation, the Bishop of Hippo was a controversial figure in eucharistic theology from the Middle Ages through the Counter-Reformation and beyond. For his emphasis of the “nonidentity of the bread and wine and the body and blood of Christ,” Augustine was frequently cited as a patristic counter-proof by medieval skeptics as well as Protestant Reformers.128 For example, the title page of The Fortres of the Fathers and Ruine of the Romish Masse, an anonymous anti-Catholic text which likely dates from the last quarter of the sixteenth century, includes two quotations from Augustine. The first, “You shalt not eate this bodie that you see nor drink that Bloude which they shalte shede which shall crusifie me,” is taken from Augustine’s commentary on Psalm 99; the second, “Why preparest thou thi touth and thy belly? Believe and thoue hast eaten,” derives from his homily 25 on John 6.129 As J.R. Brink states, both citations are standard commonplaces in Calvinist arguments against the doctrine of transubstantiation. According to Ana García Sanz, long-time curator of the Descalzas Reales, the Defenders of the Eucharist tapestry may have originally been displayed just beneath that of the Four Evangelists.130 In the latter composition, the authors of the synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke are somewhat set apart from what we have now come to recognize as a modest and soft-featured John, who extends a chalice toward the interested eagle above him. Were this tapestry to be hung directly above the Defenders, St. Thomas’s pointed finger below would lead the eye upward to St. John and his cup. One could then understand the feminized John as a eucharistic complement to Isabel, united with her ‘bread’ by his ‘wine.’ In any case, it was Ambrose, Augustine’s mentor, who was cited as authoritative by the proponents of a dogma of 128 McCue, “Doctrine of Transubstantiation,” 386. 129 Brink, “Fortres of Fathers.” 130 García Sanz, “Tapestries of the Triumph of the Eucharist,” 41.

Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia

167

real presence.131 In view of the tapestries’ conventual home, Jerome, as the patristic champion of chaste virginity, would similarly have warranted his placement.132 Could it be that Rubens and the infanta, cognizant of Augustine’s (supposedly) questionable stance on the ontology of the eucharistic species, have relegated Augustine to the margins of the composition in order to slyly underscore the theologian’s diminished role as a true defender of the Holy Sacrament? If the placement and interaction of the figures can be read as clues to their importance and participation in the defense of the Eucharist and the orthodox celebration of Corpus Christi, positioning Isabel not only in the presence of the fathers but in a place of honor—holding the monstrance and in a direct line of descent from the Holy Spirit—makes a formal argument that she be seen not only as a pious woman ruler but as a modern-day eucharistic saint. Given Urban VIII’s praise for the infanta, it is far from inconceivable that Rubens would have imagined an eventual campaign to canonize Isabel Clara Eugenia. Nor would it be the first time the Flemish painter’s hagiographic imagery may have strengthened such a case prior to its official outcome. In 1607–8, near the end of his Italian journey, Rubens had superimposed the features of the Oratorian Filippo Neri onto the figure of St. Gregory the Great in both designs for the high altar of the Roman church of Santa Maria in Vallicella (Chiesa Nuova). As Ruth S. Noyes has explained, Rubens’s pictorial strategy was in direct conflict with post-Tridentine guidelines by, for example, Charles Borromeo, warning artists “to not deliberately reproduce the portrait of another man living or dead” when depicting saints.133 Apparently undeterred, Rubens had produced two astounding altarpieces testifying to miracles associated with the ‘twin’ Jesuit saints Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier some five years before their canonization, along with Teresa of Ávila, Isidore the Ploughman, and Neri, in 1622.134 As Thomas Dandelet argues, announced under the brief papacy of Gregory XV (Ludovisi), the canonization of no fewer than four Spaniards at one time was a high point in Habsburg aggrandizement and identity construction in the papal city. Celebrations and monuments to follow infused the city’s churches and ceremonial with “powerful symbols of Iberian honor, reputation, and heavenly patronage that was at the heart of their purpose in Rome for most of the previous six decades.”135 Undoubtedly aware of the growing supremacy of Spain in the Roman Catholic ambit, Rubens had good reason to compose an iconic, transposable image of a woman who might stand a chance at sainthood. Around 1625/26, at the time of the battle 131 McCue, “Doctrine of Transubstantiation,” 387. 132 Jerome’s ‘Letter to Eustochium’ was often mobilized in defense of early modern female celibacy, see, for example, Laven, “Sex and Celibacy,” 867. Compare Zurbarán’s Saint Jerome with Saint Paula and Saint Eustochium, c.1640/50 in the National Gallery, Washington, DC. 133 Noyes, “Rubens’s Chiesa Nuova,” 185. 134 See Boeckl, “Plague Imagery as Metaphor,” 982. 135 Dandelet, “Spanish Conquest and Colonization,” 511.

168 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

against the English at Cadiz and still prior to Isabel’s death in 1633, the Spanish Mercedarian and playwright Tirso de Molina has his Don Juan assure a countryman: Rome may tread beneath its foot the apostate neck that Spain subdues […] A bastard Isabel [Elizabeth I] sowed poison in her country; it looks to another Isabel, Spanish, legitimate, to restore the faith whose sacred flags already fly; so that, banished by one Isabel, and restored by another, the persecuted sacraments may return and the wounds of one Isabel may be healed by another Isabel.136

The Spanish infanta is thus exalted as the Catholic, if not thaumaturgical, antidote to Elizabethan and English Protestantism, a role Isabel also seems to have envisioned for herself.137 Beyond Madrid: Patronage, Prints, and Posterity Already in 1672, when Giovan Pietro Bellori trained his ekphrastic powers on Rubens’s Eucharist tapestries, their provenance as a commission sent to Spain by the female governor of the Spanish Netherlands had been lost or ignored. Bellori’s account, the earliest description of the tapestries, is rendered somewhat less valuable in that he had never actually seen the textiles or the cartoons on which they were based. He seems to have relied on an abridged series of engravings executed by Schelte à Bolswert between 1648 and 1652.138 Neither his remove nor his lack of accurate information stops Bellori from situating the Spanish commission in his flawed chronology of Rubens’s works. While in the service of “King Philip,” Bellori writes, Rubens “made the pictures and cartoons for a set of tapestries woven in Flanders, with sacred subjects, namely, the Triumphs of the new Law of the Church, Idolatry Overthrown, and the Truth of the Gospel.”139 The Italian critic fails to note (or notice) the tapestries’ eucharistic theme. Even our panel, known today as The Defenders of the Eucharist is lumped into Bellori’s overly general, even misleading heading, “The Truth of the Gospel.” His description of the scene is useful as much for what it gets right as what it gets wrong:

136 No hay peor sordo, 3.7, cited in Olmedo Ramos, “Isabel Clara Eugenia and Literature,” 250. 137 The infanta’s endorsement around this time of Mary Ward (1585–1645), the radical English nun, educator, and Latinist who fought to establish a female branch of the Jesuits, attests to her maverick side. Isabel even managed to procure a letter addressed to the pope on Ward’s behalf from Philip IV. While her efforts met harsh opposition as much from secular priests and certain Jesuits as, ultimately, from Urban VIII, Ward succeeded in establishing the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary. See my MA thesis, “Toward a Historiography of Mary Ward”, 28. 138 Bellori, Lives, 209, no. 65. 139 Bellori, Lives, 199.

Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia

169

[T]he Doctors of the Church follow: Saint Ambrose with the crosier, wearing bishop’s robes, Pope Saint Gregory with the miter and cross, and between them St. Augustine is seen from the back, also in Bishop’s robes, and with the Episcopal miter. Saint Thomas Aquinas is next, carrying a book and holding up a finger in a gesture of debate, and Saint Clare, who is the Archduchess Isabella Clara Eugenia, accompanies him, holding the sacramental custodia. Next comes Saint Bonaventura, a portrait of the Cardinal-Infante with the red biretta, and lastly Saint Jerome, also in cardinal’s robes and hat […].140

The fact that he was working from black-and-white engravings explains to some extent Bellori’s misidentification of some participants in the sacred conversation/ revelation that is Rubens’s subject. For one, the Italian writer seems to wrongly label the bishops, designating Augustine, rather than Ambrose, as the figure whose back is turned to us.141 He then speculates on the identity of the white-robed figure read by De Poorter as St. Norbert, labeling him “Saint Bonaventura.” A contemporary of St. Thomas, Bonaventure (1218–1274) was second only to St. Francis in the early development and administration of the Franciscans; it would not have been entirely surprising to find him in an image destined for a convent of Franciscan women. More peculiar is Bellori’s claim that Rubens has replaced Bonaventure’s features with those of the infante Ferdinand I who, though officially a cardinal, was never ordained a priest, and was not to become ruler of the Spanish Netherlands until after Isabel’s death. Bellori nonetheless inadvertently draws our attention to the fact that only St. Clare is truly figured by Rubens with the features of a living person; Norbert (not Bonaventure) is merely presented as himself—not a portrait of Ferdinand—which makes Rubens’s image of Isabel/Clare that much more striking and exceptional. Nether a personification allegory nor a depiction of a well-known saint, Isabel/Clare becomes/is presented as an alternative ontological possibility.142 Accordingly, not only is the archduchess understood by Bellori as Isabel Clara Eugenia, she is St. Clare. Familiar as he was with the works of Van Dyck who, like Rubens, had painted carefully observed portraits of the cardinal infante, it seems unlikely that Bellori could have imagined the jowly middle-aged Norbert as in any way resembling the fair-haired, mustachioed military hero, Ferdinand.143 Bellori’s assumption that the saint with the 140 Bellori, Lives, 199. 141 A more cautious De Poorter writes: “Apart from dress, the Doctors of the Church have no distinguishing attributes.” (“Eucharistic Series,” I, 363.) This is not entirely the case for, as I have noted, Augustine (354–430) studied in Milan with the older Ambrose (340–397); it stands to reason that Rubens would have portrayed the latter as a gray eminence who is appreciably older than his feisty student. 142 As a species of figura, she defies the dichotomous constraints of (personification) allegory/(historical) saint described in Thøfner’s “Allegorical Dialogue,” 157–58. 143 See Rubens’s Equestrian portrait of the Cardinal Infante at the Battle of Nordlingen, c.1636, Museo del Prado; Anthony van Dyck, The Cardinal Infante, 1634, Museo del Prado. Velázquez had also painted the young cardinal in hunting attire around this time; see the full-length portrait of The Cardinal Infante Ferdinand, c.1632–36, Museo del Prado.

170 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

“red” biretta is also a “portrait” of someone else, suggests that Rubens’s treatment of the infanta stood out to him, perhaps leading to the deduction that being the only non-canonized and female figure in the scene, Isabel’s portrait must have been balanced by that of a secular, male companion similarly portrayed. More than an indication of Rubens’s talents as a religious painter, however, Bellori’s characterization is a testament to the success of Isabel’s visual self-promotion. In other words, less than fifty years after the Eucharist tapestries reached Spain, when the international art world maintained an interest in Rubens even though it had forgotten the avant-garde patronage of his most loyal patron, the Archduchess Isabel was still easily recognized. For Bellori in Rome she was the St. Clare of Flanders, easily identified by her distinctive physiognomy and habitual Franciscan robes. This necessarily static image of the widowed Spanish infanta responds to the project of pious female identity construction in a manner that is completely opposed to Maria de’ Medici’s allegorical program: where Maria was ever-changing, ever metamorphosing into another type of heroic amazon, vengeful goddess, or virtuous widow, following the death of the archduke, Isabel remains always the same. In truth, of the two sovereigns, the Spanish archduchess was the one who surveyed the battlefield, meted out justice to her people and their enemies, and perhaps most crucially, submitted herself to the will of a king who understood all too well her value as a prudent and experienced ruler deeply beloved by his and her own foreign subjects. Isabel did these and many other things, enacting domestic and foreign policy on courtly as well as civic stages. Yet Rubens portrayed neither her achievements nor her disappointments over the course of some three decades of rule. Instead, and by all indications at her request, the painter represented the infanta of Spain and ruler of the Spanish Netherlands, as figura made flesh. The contemporary Isabel is a Christian antitype of a Jewish Judith; a post-Tridentine Catholic for whom the medieval St. Clare is the prototype. She is a powerful woman anticipated in the very figures on whom her glory reflects. Commemorated in and exalted by the Eucharist tapestries, Isabel Clara Eugenia is at once ostentatious and undemonstrative; not only the embodiment of Counter-Reformation faith but its restorer, defender, and custodian.

Works Cited Alpers, Svetlana, The Decoration of the Torre de la Parada, CRLB 9 (London: Phaidon, 1971). Arblaster, Paul, “Abraham Verhoeven and the Brussels Court,” in Isabel Clara Eugenia: Female Sovereignty in the Courts of Madrid and Brussels, ed. Cordula van Wyhe (Madrid/London: Paul Holberton, 2011), 280–305. Beasley, Faith E., Salons, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France (Aldershot/Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006). Bellori, Giovan Pietro, “Life of Peter Paul Rubens,” in The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl, with notes by Hellmut Wohl, introd. by Tomaso Montanari (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 191–211.

Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia

171

Berger, Robert W., “Rubens and Caravaggio: A Source for a Painting from the Medici Cycle,” Art Bulletin, 54 (December 1972), 473–77. Bergin, Joseph, Church, Society, and Religious Change in France, 1580–1730 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Bertrand, Pascal-François, “A New Method of Interpreting the Valois Tapestries, through a History of Catherine de Médicis,” Studies in the Decorative Arts, 14 (Fall–Winter 2006/7), 27–52. Betegón Díez, Ruth, Isabel Clara Eugenia Infanta de España y Soberana de Flandes, ed. Isabel Belmonte López (Barcelona: Plaza Janés, 2004). Boeckl, Christine, “Plague Imagery as Metaphor for Heresy in Rubens’ The Miracles of Saint Francis Xavier,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 27 (Winter 1996), 975–99. Brink, J.R., “‘Fortres of Fathers’: An Unpublished Sixteenth-Century Manuscript Relating to Patristic Writing on the Eucharist,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 10 (Spring 1979), 83–88. Brown, Johnathan, Velázquez: Painter and Courtier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). Brown, Johnathan and John H. Elliott, A Palace for a King: The Buen Retiro and the Court of Philip IV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). Buchanan, Iain, “The ‘Battle of Pavia’ and the Tapestry Collection of Don Carlos: New Documentation,” Burlington Magazine, 144 (June 2002), 345–51. Buchanan, Iain, “Designers, Weavers and Entrepreneurs: Sixteenth-Century Flemish Tapestries in the Patrimonio Nacional,” Burlington Magazine, 134 (June 1992), 380–84. Campbell, Thomas P., “New Evidence on ‘Triumphs of Petrarch’ Tapestries in the Early Sixteenth Century, pt. 1: The French Court,” Burlington Magazine, 146 (June 2004), 376–385. Campbell, Thomas P., ed., Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Carroll, Margaret, “Erotics of Absolutism, Rubens and the Mystification of Sexual Violence,” in Painting and Politics in Northern Europe: Van Eyck, Bruegel, Rubens and their Contemporaries (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press), 96–101. Carroll, Margaret, “Womanliness as Masquerade,” in Painting and Politics in Northern Europe: Van Eyck, Bruegel, Rubens and their Contemporaries (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 102–61. Cassidy-Geiger, Maureen and Jochen Vötsch, “Documents of Court Gifts Collected by Johann von Besser (1654–1729),” Studies in the Decorative Arts, 15 (Fall–Winter 2007–8), 114–77. Checa, Fernando, “Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales: origenes de su colección artística,” Reales Sitios, 102 (1989), 21–30. Cohen, Sarah. R. “Rubens’s France: Gender and Personification in the Marie des Médicis Cycle,” Art Bulletin, 85 (September 2003), 490–522. Corbett, Margery and Michael Norton, Engravings in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964). Coreth, Anna, Pietas Austriaca, trans. William D. Bowman and Anna Maria Leitgeb (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2004). Cosandey, Fanny, “Représenter une reine de France: Marie de Médicis et le cycle de Rubens au palais du Luxembourg,” Clio, no. 19 (2004), 2–12. Cox-Rearick, Janet, Bronzino’s Chapel for Eleonora di Toledo in the Palazzo Vecchio (Berkeley/London: University of California Press, 1993). Crawford, Katherine, Perilous Performances: Gender and Regency in Early Modern France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). Dandelet, Thomas, “Spanish Conquest and Colonization at the Center of the Old World: The Spanish Nation in Rome,” Journal of Modern History, 69 (September 1997), 497–511. De Bonnechose, Emile, A Popular History of France, cond. and rev. by H.W. Dulcken (London: Ward, Lock & Co., n.d.). Delmarcel, Guy, Flemish Tapestry from the 15th to the 18th Century (Tielt: Lanoo, 1999).

172 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Delmarcel, Guy, ed., Rubenstextiel/Rubens’s Textiles (Antwerp: Luc Denys, 1997). De Poorter, Nora, The Eucharist Series, CRLB 2 (New York: Phaidon,1978). Diefendorf, Barbara B., “Contradictions of the Century of Saints: Aristocratic Patronage and the Convents of Counter-Reformation Paris,” French Historical Studies, 24 (Summer 2001), 469–99. Diefendorf, Barbara B., From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Dixon, Annette, ed., Women Who Ruled: Queens, Goddesses, Amazons in Renaissance and Baroque Art, exh. cat. (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2002). Dor, Juliette, Lesley Johnson, and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, eds., New Trends in Feminine Spirituality: The Holy Women of Liège and their Impact (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999). Duerloo, Luc and Werner Thomas, eds., Albrecht and Isabella, 1598–1621: Catalogus, exh. cat., Leuven: Koninklijk Musea voor Kunst en Geschiedenis (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998). Eichberger, Dagmar and Lisa Beaven, “Family Members and Political Allies: The Portrait Collection of Margaret of Austria,” Art Bulletin, 77 (June 1995), 225–48. El arte en la corte de los archiduques Alberto de Austria e Isabel Clara Eugenia: un reino imaginado, exh. cat., Palacio Real (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal para la Commemoración de los Centenarios de Felipe II y Carlos V and Patrimonio Nacional, 2000). Esteban Estríngana, Alicia, “‘What a princess, good God!’: The Heritage and Legacy of the Infanta Isabel,” in Isabel Clara Eugenia: Female Sovereignty in the Courts of Madrid and Brussels, ed. Cordula van Wyhe (Madrid/London: Paul Holberton, 2011), 414–43. ffolliott, Sheila, “Catherine de’ Medici as Artemisia: Figuring the Powerful Widow,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), 227–41. ffolliott, Sheila, “‘La Florentine’ or ‘La Bonne Françoise,’” in Medici Women as Cultural Mediators, ed. Christina Strunck (Milan: Silvano Editoriale, 2011), 17–37. Fischlin, Daniel, “Political Allegory, Absolutist Ideology, and the ‘Rainbow Portrait’ of Queen Elizabeth I,” Renaissance Quarterly, 50 (Spring 1997), 175–206. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life, ed. and trans, with introd. by John K Ryan (New York: Doubleday, 1989). Galletti, Sara, “Rubens’s Life of Maria de’ Medici: Dissimulation and the Politics of Art in Early SeventeenthCentury France,” Renaissance Quarterly 67 (2014), 878–916. García Sanz, Ana, “Nuevas aproximaciones en la serie El triunfo de la Eucaristía,” in El arte en la corte de los archiduques Alberto de Austria e Isabel Clara Eugenia: un reino imaginado, exh. cat., Palacio Real (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal para la Commemoración de los Centenarios de Felipe II y Carlos V and Patrimonio Nacional, 2000), 108–17. García Sanz, Ana, “Tapestries of the Triumph of the Eucharist,” in Spectacular Rubens: The Triumph of the Eucharist, ed. Alejandro Vergara and Anne T. Woollett, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2014), 31–48. Gardner, J., “Andrea di Bonaiuto and the Chapterhouse Frescoes in Santa Maria Novella,” Art History (1979), 107–38. Garrard, Mary, “Here’s Looking at Me: Sofonisba Anguissola and the Problem of the Woman Artist,” Renaissance Quarterly, 47 (Autumn 1994), 556–622. Geissmar, Christoph, “The Geometrical Order of the World: Otto van Veen’s Physicae et theologicae conclusiones,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 56 (1993), 175–77. Georgievska-Shine, Aneta and Larry Silver, Rubens, Velázquez, and the King of Spain (New York: Routledge, 2016). González García, Juan Luis, ed., Los inventarios de Carlos V y la Familia Imperial, 3 vols. (Madrid: Fernando Villaverde Ediciones, 2010). Hearn, Karen, ed., Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England (London: Tate Publishing, 1995). Held, Julius S., The Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia

173

Horn, Hendrik J., Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen: Painter of Charles V and his Conquest of Tunis; Paintings, Etchings, Drawings, Cartoons and Tapestries, 2 vols. (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1989). Huemer, Frances, “Some Observations on Rubens’ Mantua Altarpiece,” Art Bulletin, 48 (March 1966), 84–85. Hugo, Hermann, The Siege of Breda, trans. Gerrat Barry (Louvain, 1627). Jaffé, Michael, “Rubens’s Portraits of the Archduke Albert and the Infanta Isabella,” Burlington Magazine, 139 (March 1997), 194–95. Jameson, Anna, Legends of the Monastic Orders as Represented in the Fine Arts (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1850). Johnson, Geraldine A., “Imagining Images of Powerful Women: Marie de’ Medici’s Patronage of Art and Architecture,” in Women and Art in Early Modern Europe: Patrons, Collectors, and Connoisseurs, ed. Cynthia Lawrence (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 126–53. Johnson, Geraldine A., “Pictures fit for a Queen: Peter Paul Rubens and the Marie de’ Medici Cycle,” Art History, 16 (September 1993), 447–69. Kerkhoff, Jacqueline, Maria van Hongarije en haar hof (1505–1558): tot plichtsbetrachting uitverkoren (Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, 2008). Klingenstein, L., The Great Infanta Isabel: Sovereign of the Netherlands, with introd. by Edward Armstrong (London: Methuen & Co., 1910). Knipping, John B., Iconography of the Counter Reformation in the Netherlands (Leiden: A.W. Sijthoff/ Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1974). Kostroun, Daniela, “A Formula for Disobedience: Jansenism, Gender, and the Feminist Paradox,” Journal of Modern History, 75 (September 2003), 483–522. Kromm, Jane, “The Bellona Factor: Political Allegories and Conflicting Claims of Martial Imagery,” in Early Modern Allegory, Embodying Meaning, ed. Cristelle Baskins and Lisa Rosenthal (Aldershot/Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 175–95. Kunzle, David, From Criminal to Courtier: The Soldier in Netherlandish Art, 1550–1672 (Leiden: Brill, 2002). Laven, Mary, “Sex and Celibacy in Early Modern Venice,” Historical Journal, 44 (December 2001), 865–88. Leuzzi, Maria Fubini, “Maria de’ Medici: la construzione di una regina,” in Medici Women as Cultural Mediators (1533–1743), ed. Christina Strunck (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2011), 183–206. Lyon, J. Vanessa, “Toward a Historiography of Mary Ward: Situating a Reforming Catholic Nun in Early Modern Studies,” MA thesis, Iliff School of Theology, 2004. Lyon, J. Vanessa, “‘The wheel within the wheel’: Reading Margaret of York’s Burgundian Miniatures according to the Fourfold Exegesis of Scripture,” Word & Image, 24 (2008), 139–51. McClellan, Andrew L., “The Musée du Louvre as Revolutionary Metaphor during the Terror,” Art Bulletin, 70 (June 1988), 300–13. McCue, James F., “The Doctrine of Transubstantiation from Berengar through Trent: The Point at Issue,” Harvard Theological Review, 61 (July 1968), 385–430. McGrath, Elizabeth, “Tact and Topical Reference in Rubens’s ‘Medici Cycle,’” Oxford Art Journal, 3 (October 1980), 11–17. McKeon, Richard, ed., The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Modern Library, 2009). Maclean, Ian, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Magurn, Ruth, ed. and trans., The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1955). Marrow, Deborah, The Art Patronage of Maria de’ Medici (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1982). Mathiesen, Thomas J., “The Office of the New Feast of Corpus Christi,” in the Regimen Animarum at Brigham Young University,” Journal of Musicology, 2 (Winter 1983), 13–44. Millen, Ronald Forsyth and Robert Erich Wolf, Heroic Deeds and Mystic Figures: A New Reading of Rubens’ Life of Maria de’ Medici (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Montrose, Louis, The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender and Representation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006). Noyes, Ruth S., “Rubens’s Chiesa Nuova Altarpiece and the Question of Counter-Reformation Iconoclasm,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 67–68 (2016–17), 177–92.

174 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Oliver, Judith, “‘Gothic’ Women and Merovingian Desert Mother,” Gesta, 32 (1993), 124–34. Olmedo Ramos, Jaime, “Isabel Clara Eugenia and Literature,” in Isabel Clara Eugenia: Female Sovereignty in the Courts of Madrid and Brussels, ed. Cordula van Wyhe (Madrid/London: Paul Holberton, 2011), 226–57. Oman, C.C., “A Fragment of an Early Flemish Monstrance,” Burlington Magazine, 56 (Jan. 1930), 38–41. Pacht, Paola Bassani et al., ed., Maria de Médicis: un gouvernement par les arts, exh. cat. (Paris: Somogy, 2003). Panofsky, Erwin, Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic (New York: New York University Press, 1969). Pérez de Tudela, Almudena, “Making, Collecting, Displaying and Exchanging Objects (1566–99): Archival Sources Relating to the Infanta Isabel’s Personal Possessions,” in Isabel Clara Eugenia: Female Sovereignty in the Courts of Madrid and Brussels, ed. Cordula van Wyhe (Madrid/London: Paul Holberton, 2011), 60–87. Petit, François, Spirituality of the Premonstratensians: The Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, trans. Victor Szczurek, ed. with a foreword by Carol Neel (Collegeville, MN: Trappist Press, 2011). Polzer, Joseph, “Andrea di Bonaiuto’s Via Veritatis and Dominican Thought in Late Medieval Italy,” Art Bulletin, 77 (June 1995), 262–89. Portus Pérez, Javier, et al., The Spanish Portrait: From El Greco to Picasso, exh. cat. (London: Scala, 2004). Prior, Felix, ed., Elizabeth I, her Life in Letters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Rapley, Elizabeth, The Dévotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France (Montreal/Buffalo: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1990). Robinson, P., “St. Clare of Assisi,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Co., 1908), www. newadvent.org/cathen/04004a.htm (accessed 15 October 2019). Rodríguez Villa, A., La Correspondencia de la Infanta Archiduquesa Doña Isabel Clara Eugenia de Austria con el Duque de Lerma y otros personajes, in Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 47 (1905). Rubin, Miri, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Rybrook, Gregory G., “St. Norbert and the Tankelin Heresy,” Catholic Historical Review, 10 (July 1924), 246–51. Sánchez, Magdalena S., “Memories and Affection: The Correspondence of Isabel Clara Eugenia with the Duke of Lerma,” in Isabel Clara Eugenia: Female Sovereignty in the Courts of Madrid and Brussels, ed. Cordula van Wyhe (Madrid/London: Paul Holberton, 2011), 202–25. Schroeder, H.J., trans., The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (Charlotte, NC: Tan Books, 1978). Scribner, Charles, 3rd, The Triumph of the Eucharist Tapestries Designed by Rubens (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1982). Stanton, Domna, “The Fiction of Préciosité and the Fear of Women,” Yale French Studies, no. 62 (1981), 107–34. Thøfner, Margit, “An Allegorical Dialogue between the City of Antwerp and the Court of Brussels,” in Early Modern Allegory, Embodying Meaning, ed. Cristelle Baskins and Lisa Rosenthal (Aldershot/Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 155–74. Thomas, Werner, “Isabel Clara Eugenia and the Pacification of the Southern Netherlands,” in Isabel Clara Eugenia: Female Sovereignty in the Courts of Madrid and Brussels, ed. Cordula van Wyhe (Madrid/London: Paul Holberton, 2011), 180–201. Thuillier, Jacques, “La ‘Galerie de Médicis’ de Rubens et sa genèse: un document inédit,” Revue de l’Art, 4 (1969), 52–62. Thuillier, Jacques and Jacques Foucart, Rubens’ Life of Maria de Medici, ed. Paolo Lecaldano, trans. Robert Eric Wolf (New York: Harry Abrams, 1970). Tiffany, Tanya J., Diego Velázquez’s Early Paintings and the Culture of Seventeenth-Century Seville (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012). Tormo y Monzó, Elías, En las Descalzas Reales: estudios históricos, iconográficos y artísticos, 4 vols. (Madrid: Blass y Cia, 1917–57). Tormo y Monzó, Elías, Los tapices: la apotheosis Eucaristica de Rubens (Madrid: Blass, 1944). Van Wyhe, Cordula, “Court and Convent: The Infanta Isabella and her Franciscan Confessor Andrés de Soto,” Sixteenth-Century Journal, 35 (2004), 411–45.

Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia

175

Van Wyhe, Cordula, “Piety, Play, and Power: Constructing the Ideal Sovereign Body in Early Portraits of Isabel Clara Eugenia (1586–1603),” in Isabel Clara Eugenia: Female Sovereignty in the Courts of Madrid and Brussels, Cordula van Wyhe (Madrid/London: Paul Holberton, 2011), 89–129. Van Wyhe, Cordula, ed., Isabel Clara Eugenia: Female Sovereignty in the Courts of Madrid and Brussels (Madrid/London: Paul Holberton, 2011). Veevers, Erica, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainment (Cambridge, York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Vergara, Alejandro, “High and Passionate Songs: Thoughts on Rubens’s Pictorial Language,” in Spectacular Rubens: The Triumph of the Eucharist, ed. Alejandro Vergara and Anne T. Woollett, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2014), 49–60. Vergara, Alejandro, Rubens and his Spanish Patrons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Vergara, Alejandro and Anne T. Woollett, eds., Spectacular Rubens: The Triumph of the Eucharist, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2014). Vlieghe, Hans, Portraits: Identified Sitters painted in Antwerp, CRLB 19 (London: Phaidon, 1987). Volk, Mary Crawford, “New Light on a Seventeenth-Century Collector: The Marquis of Leganés,” Art Bulletin, 62 (June 1980), 256–68. Volk, Mary Crawford, “Rubens in Madrid and the Decoration of the King’s Summer Apartments,” Burlington Magazine, 123 (September 1981), 513–29. Vosters, Simon A., La rendición de Bredá en la literatura y el arte de España (London: Tamesis, 1973). White, Christopher, “Rubens and the Archdukes,” in Albert and Isabella: Essays, ed. Werner Thomas and Luc Duerloo (Leuven: Brepols, 1998), 121–28. Wilson, Jean, “Queen Elizabeth I as Urania,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 69 (2006), 151–73. Wyss, Edith, “‘Triumph of Love’ by Frans Francken the Younger; From Allegory to Narrative,” Artibus et Historiae, 19 (1998), 43–60. Zim, Rivkah, “Dialogue and Discretion: Thomas Sackville, Catherine de Medici and the Anjou Marriage Proposal, 1571,” Historical Journal, 40 (June 1997), 287–310. Zurawski, Simone, “New Sources for Jacques Callot’s Map of the Siege of Breda,” Art Bulletin, 70 (December 1988), 621–39.

4. Peace Embraces Plenty

Queering Female Virtue at Whitehall Abstract Art historians have long interpreted the intimate coupling of Rubens’s Peace Embracing Plenty, a figural group in one of the ceiling canvases of the Whitehall Palace Banqueting House in London, as a representational paraphrase of “Righteousness kissing Peace” (Ps. 85). This chapter’s case study offers a more likely and appropriate biblical source for the allegory by placing Rubens’s amorous female personifications within the context of Caroline divine-right rhetoric, a quintessential sermon by William Laud, and changing approaches to allegorical representation at the English court. It argues that the scriptural meeting and kissing of virtues provided Rubens with both a notional narrative and an authoritative justification for representing female affection, even same-sex desire, in a political and morally positive light. Keywords: Rubens; gender; queer; Laud; King James; Queen Elizabeth

I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the LORD. Our feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem. Jerusalem is builded as a city that is compact together: Whither the tribes go up, the tribes of the LORD, unto the testimony of Israel, to give thanks unto the name of the LORD. For there are set thrones of judgment, the thrones of the house of David. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love thee. Peace be within thy walls, and ­prosperity within thy palaces. For my brethren and companions’ sakes, I will now say, Peace be within thee. Because of the house of the LORD our God I will seek thy good. ‒ Psalm 122, KJV In the early 1630s Rubens produced nine large canvases for the ceiling of the Whitehall Palace Banqueting House in London (Fig. 4.1). The bustling composition known as the Peaceful Reign of King James I (Fig. 4.2) would have hung directly over the enthroned monarch, Rubens’s patron, Charles I.1 Thus the two Stuart sovereigns, 1 The canvas has traditionally been known as The Peaceful Reign of King James I. Compare G. Martin, Ceiling Decoration of the Banqueting Hall, 101, who recently rechristened it the “Wise Rule of King James I.” Martin views Rubens’s depiction of King James as more active, authoritative, and explicitly prudent than Lyon, J.V., Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789463722216_ch04

178 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Fig. 4.1. Peter Paul Rubens, Whitehall Banqueting House ceiling, c.1632–34, London, Whitehall, Banqueting House, interior of the main hall. Photo: Banqueting House, Whitehall, London, UK/Bridgeman Images.

past and present, appeared to visitors from a distance as they entered the cavernous rectangular stateroom, or presence chamber, for an audience with the king.2 Within the Peaceful Reign the two embracing female figures at left have long been recognized as keys to the proper interpretation of both the scene in which they appear and Rubens’s animated allegorical program as a whole. That these sensual female previous scholars have suggested: “Rubens depicts him as the vigorous epitome of a divinely ordained ruler […] while he exerts his prerogative for the public good […] thus the canvas should be seen as an allegorical depiction of the triumph of the wise King.” 2 Three of the Whitehall canvases (excluding the Peaceful Reign) were subsequently reinstalled to reflect an arrangement suggested by Held, “Rubens’s Glynde Sketch and the Installation of the Whitehall Ceiling.”

Peace Embraces Plent y

179

Fig. 4.2 . Peter Paul Rubens, The Peaceful Reign of King James I, c.1632–34, London, Whitehall, Banqueting House. Photo: Banqueting House, Whitehall, London, UK/Bridgeman Images.

personifications should be portrayed in so intimate a coupling has been explained, and explained away, by means of a popular figuration of paired ‘Christian’ virtues found in the Old Testament. Susan B. Shapiro was evidently the first to suggest a specific textual source for the women’s affectionate encounter. Referring in 1967 to the remarkable Yale oil sketch on which the figures are based (Plate 9), Shapiro observed that the arrangement of Peace and Plenty “clearly paraphrases the passage ‘righteousness and peace have kissed each other’ in the 85th Psalm, a passage often illustrated in similar terms.”3 Yet despite the fact that Rubens’s painted women appear not (yet) to have kissed nor, more importantly, do they embody the precise combination of virtues named by the psalmist, scholars have generally accepted this as the most likely reason for their presence at Whitehall.4 Although the use of female forms as carriers of abstract ideas or moral qualities was ubiquitous by Rubens’s time, art historical methods have only recently begun to accommodate what Cristelle Baskins and Lisa Rosenthal describe as the “dynamic 3 Psalm 85:9–10 (KJV): “Surely his salvation is nigh them that fear him; that glory may dwell in our land/ Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” See Shapiro’s catalog description of the Yale Center for British Art’s oil sketch of Peace Embracing Plenty, in Wittkower et al., Masters of the Loaded Brush,67, cat. no. 49. 4 Shapiro’s theory is accepted, for example, by Held, Oil Sketches,196, and provisionally by Sutton et al., Drawn by the Brush, 225. G. Martin, Ceiling Decoration of the Banqueting Hall, 156, agrees that the “general source for the motif may well connect with that described in Psalm LXXXIV [os]” or possibly Psalm 71 (os), that is, Psalms 85 and 72 (KJV).

180 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

force which arises specifically from the unruly, less readily controlled bodily meanings that figura mobilizes.”5 Beyond merely paraphrasing or personifying an isolated virtue or vice, the meeting and kissing described in the eighty-fifth psalm—the subject of extensive commentary in the Middle Ages, as will be discussed below—provided an authoritative justification for presenting female affection, even same-sex desire, in a morally positive light. For example, Allied Virtues (c.1578–82), an allegorical four-part series of eroticized female twosomes engraved by the Dutch late mannerist, Hendrick Goltzius, parallels the psalm’s gendered theme and may have inspired Rubens, who admired the older artist’s boldly drawn figures.6 Like Goltzius, Rubens would employ the visual conceit of scantily clad, warmly affectionate women in a secular context. Home in beleaguered Antwerp, where the Whitehall canvases were executed, Rubens and his studio converged homoerotic desire and the desire for civic peace in another painting that features suggestively embracing female-bodied virtues (Fig. 4.3). In the oil sketch today in Besançon, allegorical lovemaking-as-peacemaking encroaches on historical time and space. The scene consists of two flirtatious female figures, nearly nude from the waist up, whose handholding and courting transpires on a pile of contemporary armor, shields, pikes, and other instruments of war. Behind them, an architectural screen, prettily adorned with strapwork, putti, and garlands in the modern taste, reveals the neatly rendered citadel of Antwerp, a contested symbol of Spanish presence and siege warfare since its completion in 1572. The site-specific oil sketch may have been executed for the entry of the incoming ruler of the Spanish Netherlands, the aforementioned cardinal-infante Ferdinand, who arrived in 1635. In an implicit acknowledgement of their Sapphic character, Julius Held suggested the two embracing women in Rubens’s composition could be understood as “emblematically expressing the idea that Fortune favors the bold”—in this case evidently a bare-breasted, helmet-wearing figure often identified as Bellona, the Roman goddess of war.7 Whatever the precise identities and meanings of the female figures populating his civic allegories, however, Rubens tacitly implies their status as timelessly universal, abstract personifications through classicized military and mythological dress and stock attributes. The women’s animated union throws the regimented fortress into perspective; fortunate indeed is the city that artfully distracts the goddess of war from her belligerent ways. 5 See the long-overdue Baskins and Rosenthal, eds., Early Modern Allegory: Embodying Meaning, 4. 6 For the fresco lunettes at the Little Castle at Bolsover, Derbyshire, based on Goltzius’s designs, see Raylor, “Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue,” 421. Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, 161–63, examines the homoerotic nature of the series, notably executed between 1620 and 1630, and viewed by Charles I and Henrietta Maria in 1634. 7 Two embracing female personifications, “one peaceful, one martial,” are depicted in Rubens’s Besançon Allegory with the Citadel of Antwerp, interpreted more broadly as an allegorical enactment of “Union” by Held, “Some Allegorical Sketches by Rubens,” 228. See also, Van der Stock, ed., Antwerp: Story of a Metropolis, 310. My thanks to Ghislaine Courtet, of the Musée des beaux-arts et d’archéologie, Besançon, for help in obtaining this image.

Peace Embraces Plent y

181

Fig. 4.3. Peter Paul Rubens, Allegory with the Citadel of Antwerp, c.1622, Besançon, Musée des beaux-arts et d’archéologie. Photo: ©Musée des beaux-arts et d’archéologie, Besançon/Charles Choffet.

For the increasingly cosmopolitan London court, Rubens would marry levels of reality in a comparatively less straightforward manner than he had in the Spanish Netherlands. In form and content alike, the Banqueting House ceiling exploits the rhetorical potential of a mature, consciously appropriative, artistic practice. There, at the peak of his powers, Rubens combined Titian’s dazzling painterliness and Michelangelo’s conceptual ingenuity with the scholarly humanism of the most sophisticated northern European courtiers and contemporary art collectors. In Whitehall’s warm-blooded sketches and canvases the artist paints in a naturalistic manner capable of troubling the distinction between literal and figurative, flesh and spirit. Updating and invigorating an allegorical tradition previously dominated by mannered and

182 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

impersonal, if not indifferent, personifications, Rubens, stages his lifelike symbols as distinctive but interdependent actors motivated by human psychology and emotions.8 Ironically, as a result, abstractions like Peace and Plenty invigorate the subplots that add iconographical complexity to so many of the Flemish painter’s figurations and allegories, whether religious, civic, secular, or a combination thereof. Rubens had begun to mix genres (and visual metaphors) in his major courtly programs of the 1620s including the Medici cycle—where, as discussed in the previous chapter, the dowager queen of France appears as both timeless Bellona and matronly seicento widow—and the Eucharist tapestry series, whose visual premise of feigned textiles on real textiles combines biblical narratives, theological emblems, and contemporary portraits. It may be no coincidence, as Mark Roskill has argued, that by the 1630s what the previous century saw as an antagonistic aesthetic binary of ideal versus natural had been ingeniously reconciled in the late portraits of Rubens’s onetime assistant, Anthony van Dyck. According to Roskill, following Van Dyck’s return to London from Antwerp in 1635, the prolific painter seems to have settled on two modes of elite portraiture: either symbolic and theatrical or, as an alternative, “synecdochically” allusive, a style which Roskill considers more in line with the changeable cultural and political character of the English court. In what Roskill terms his “masque portraits,” Van Dyck’s costumed sitters display signifying attributes and perform allegorical roles. In the painter’s “allusive” likenesses, by contrast, qualities of the subjects’ character, status, and even confessional identity are suggested through their represented comportment, that is, by “the way in which, in a state of preparation for conflict or an atmosphere of peaceful and familial contentment, they carry out their roles of self-assertion and definition.”9 Roskill contrasts the “more self-consciously directed” and open-ended quality of Van Dyck’s allusive portraits with the propagandistic and less imaginative, context-based, allegories of Titian and Rubens.10 Yet in his London allegories, Rubens might be said to have achieved a harmonization of aesthetic binaries within a single program by combining Van Dyck’s two discrete modes. At Whitehall, a ruggedly aged, natural-looking king (rather than an allegorically costumed or historiated likeness) inhabits an other-worldly realm where mythological personages abound but symbolic props are neither required nor forbidden. Masque-like characters such as Peace are themselves gesturally allusive, while an unidealized, real-world James I is shown actively witnessing an unfolding allegorization of war. In this respect, it is useful to recall that, however briefly, the ceiling echoed the costumed aristocratic spectacles occurring directly beneath it. Those who performed in and watched the Caroline court’s “gynocentric theatricals” would have been well accustomed not only to costumed male courtiers cast in the roles of 8 For the distinctly theatrical comportment of his female personifications, see Cohen, “Rubens’s France,”492. 9 Roskill, “Van Dyck at the English Court,”190. 10 Roskill, “Van Dyck at the English Court,” 198–99.

Peace Embraces Plent y

183

gods and kings but, more scandalously, to fantastically dressed female actors with speaking parts.11 In Tempe Restored, a masque created by Inigo Jones and Aurelian Townsend and performed in 1632, Henriette-Marie herself personified Divine Virtue, while her foil, the evil queen Circe, appeared in a “sumptuous palace” seated in a “chair of state.”12 For viewers of what, by mid-seventeenth-century courtly standards, were the believably everyday attitudes and appearances conjured in their midst by a gifted colorist-draftsman like Rubens, the seductive rhetorical powers of embodied abstractions must have been hard to resist. Rubens thus takes the beholder’s willingness to conflate real and ideal as a given, trusting (perhaps wrongly) that the visual exegete will initially confront his art at a superficial and visceral level only to arrive, albeit via the pleasures of painted flesh, at a figurative understanding of the biblical text it purports to represent.13 That the viewer of the Peaceful Reign should have the Psalms in mind is of course crucial to appreciating the boldness and originality of Rubens’s complex conceptual project. In addition to exploring a virtuosic confluence of secular allegory and exegetical figuration in a single Rubensian project, this chapter argues that the amorous virtues at Whitehall derive not from Psalm 85 but from the more politically and ecclesiologically apt Psalm 122, specifically the passage excerpted above. In drawing on the latter psalm, Rubens’s painted allegory of good government uses healthy female bodies to invoke Old Testament prescriptions for royal city-making and kingship, a style of sovereignty signally exemplified by David’s son and King James’s prototype, Solomon, builder of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.

A Flemish Catholic in the Caroline Court At a Protestant court where church and state were stridently conjoined by a monarch who was seen to encompass them both, the bible was constantly mined for types and prefigurations of divinely ordained royal prerogative. In view of its supposed authorship by the musically inclined King David, the Book of Psalms was considered an especially appropriate source for semi-liturgical ceremonies such as coronations. Psalm 84, which begins: “Save me, O God, by thy name, and judge me by thy strength,” was used for the procession at the coronation of James I in 1603. However, the entrance music was changed for the crowning of James’s son, Charles I, in 1625/26. Thereafter, Laetatus sum, or “I was glad,” as settings of Psalm 122 are known, has accompanied 11 Sanders, “Caroline Salon Culture and Female Agency,” 450. 12 Gough, “‘Not as Myself”: The Queen’s Voice in Tempe Restored,” 52. 13 When employing the “fourfold method” of scriptural exegesis the interpreter moves successively through literal/historical, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical levels of meaning. For a concise explanation of these hermeneutical strategies see Caplan, “Four Senses of Scriptural Interpretation.” See Jacobs, “Rubens and the Northern Past,” 302–3.

184 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

the entrance to Westminster Abbey of every soon-to-be-crowned British monarch (including Elizabeth II), establishing this psalm as a scriptural source for celebrations of English sovereignty.14 In his dual role as diplomat and court artist, Rubens was necessarily familiar with the personal devices and ceremonial tastes of his noble and royal patrons. It therefore seems likely that the artist would have been aware of the change in ceremonial music for Charles I, a change presumably owed to the new king’s affinity for Psalm 122, a text that he and his court would have associated with the reign of his father, the rex pacificus, King James.15 In 1621, Rubens wrote a famous letter to William Trumbull, James I’s agent in Brussels, angling for an important commission from the king. With characteristic foresight, Rubens simultaneously attempted to curry favor with Trumbull’s superior, the staunchly Calvinist lord ambassador in the Hague, Dudley Carleton, and secure the decoration of Inigo Jones’s “hall in the New Palace” in London. As Rubens had learned, James was already looking ahead to the commemoration of his reign on the ceiling of the banqueting hall. In the following year, 1622, Jones’s magnificently classicized addition to the royal apartments at Whitehall was largely completed, with the exception of the interior decoration.16 It was perhaps through the acquisitive Carleton, to whom he had provided a substantial number of paintings in 1618, that Rubens had gained some degree of familiarity with the proposed site and even the style of art the London court had in mind for one of the period’s most coveted projects.17 Hence the painter’s immodest but seemingly warranted claim that “my talent is such that no undertaking, however vast in size or diversified in subject, has ever surpassed my courage.”18 Rubens had executed a number of vast works by this time, including the (now lost) typological ceiling panels at the Jesuit church in Antwerp and several of his bestknown triptychs including the Raising of the Cross and the Descent. His indomitable self-confidence is nonetheless impressive given that it predates the most monumental of his compositionally complex, programmatic commissions for the grandest of royal spaces in Maria de’ Medici’s Luxembourg Palace and Isabel’s Descalzas Reales. Considerable time was to elapse between Rubens’s first inklings of the Whitehall Banqueting House commission as envisioned by then King James in the early 1620s and the eventual installation of the canvases under the patronage of Charles I in 14 See Range, Music and Ceremonial at British Coronations, 281–88 (apps. C and D). 15 Although the Latin catchwords for the psalms (undoubtedly known to Rubens) were retained in the Lambeth MS of King Charles’s coronation, the service was translated into the vernacular. See Wordsworth, Coronation of King Charles the First,73. 16 See Hart, Inigo Jones, 205–8. 17 For Rubens’s letters to Carleton concerning their well-known exchange of antiquities for paintings, see Magurn, ed. and trans., Letters, nos. 27–38, pp. 59–71. 18 Peter Paul Rubens to William Trumbull, Antwerp, 13 September 1621, in Magurn, ed. and trans., Letters, no. 46, p. 77.

Peace Embraces Plent y

185

1636.19 In the interim Rubens made an extended visit to England (1629–30) during which he apparently brokered not only the terms of the Whitehall commission but also the ambassadorial exchange that led to the subsequent peace between England and Spain. Despite Rubens’s success at court, where he was knighted by the king in 1630, Charles was frustratingly dilatory in paying for the Banqueting House paintings. The tardiness, as Rubens remarked in a letter, would have surprised him had he not “learned through long experience how slowly princes act in others’ interests, and how much easier it is for them to do ill than good.”20 By the time Charles found an opportunity to review the elaborately carved and gilded ceiling in its finished state, the painter, by then retired from public life, was near the end of his career. The Banqueting House ceiling is the only extant Rubens program in situ. Conceived around the movements of bodies overhead, its illusionistic figural scheme is unprecedented in London—except by Rubens’s own cloud-borne depiction of the duke of Buckingham, now lost.21 Massive in scale yet limited to a comparatively small number of individual canvases, the London ceiling is the culmination of Rubens’s propagandistic programs for some of the most powerful rulers in Europe.22 It also represents a further shift in approach from the previous major commissions for royal Catholic women, a change owing as much to the official Protestantism of the Stuart court as to the gender of his patron, Charles I and his subject, James I. Despite his renowned affability and solicitousness, Rubens was not afraid to challenge his noble benefactors with works in which their political policies were critiqued or affirmed in relation to his personal dedication to the cessation of armed confrontation between Spain and her enemies. “There is a lot of talk here about the truce, and reports from Holland offer good hopes that it will be concluded,” he had written rather obliquely from London in 1629, subsequently declaring that he “should be happier over our peace or truce than over anything else in the world.”23 Two years later, a decidedly less circumspect Rubens accepted the hearty congratulations of his old friend and fellow Fleming, Jan Woverius, for what the painter described as “the happy success and consummation of the peace with England, on which I really worked very hard, and can say without vanity, cujus pars magna fui [in which I 19 For the circumstances surrounding the deferred delivery of the canvases from Antwerp to London and their subsequent installation, see G. Martin, Ceiling Decoration of the Banqueting Hall, 79–88. 20 Peter Paul Rubens to Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Antwerp, 16 March 1636, in Magurn, ed. and trans., Letters, no. 238, p. 402. See also G. Martin, Ceiling Decoration of the Banqueting Hall,92. 21 In London, only Rubens’s now lost ceiling, the Apotheosis of the Duke of Buckingham, c.1625, anticipates the figurative di sotto in sù at Whitehall. On the early history of illusionistic painted ceilings in England, see Kingsbury, “Tradition of the Soffito Veneziano.” 22 Although Rubens’s complex and urbane festival architecture and street decorations for the Joyous Entry of the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand date from 1634, that project was by its nature collaborative and ephemeral in contrast to the anticipated permanence of the Whitehall program. See D. Martin, Decorations for the Pompa Introitus Ferdinandi. 23 Peter Paul Rubens to Jan Caspar Gevaerts, London, 23 November 1629, in Magurn, ed. and trans., Letters, no. 210, p. 350.

186 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

played a great part].”24 Given the ambiguity of his status, the exact nature of Rubens’s role in the theater of Anglo-Spanish negotiations, where he was perhaps acknowledged less as a representative of Spain than of his own Spanish Netherlands, remains uncertain.25 Regardless of his actual part in shaping Stuart foreign relations, however, Rubens clearly styled himself as a Catholic nobleman actively laboring for peace. As such, he made a fitting substitute for Isabel. Encouraged and empowered by the well-connected, politically savvy Infanta, Rubens had pointedly enlisted his paintings, or rather the allegorical and figurative agents within them, for diplomatic ends; his attack on war and consummation of peace was performed in paint just as it had been in person. Consider, for example, the red-faced, armor-clad Mars, a frequent adversary in Rubens’s anti-war works. In the Whitehall Peaceful Reign (see Fig. 4.2) the bellicose god appears at the bottom right as an unwelcome intruder in an otherwise tranquil setting. Mars seems to threaten the king with his blazing torch. But his violent incursions are staunched by the courageous tactician, Minerva—who, like James, appears chiefly concerned with the care and protection of the vulnerable figures of Peace and Plenty. Forced by Minerva’s lightning bolts into the lower vice-ridden regions of the canvas, Mars is confronted by kneeling Mercury who attempts, ineffectually, to dispatch him with the wave of his snake-entwined caduceus. Given Charles’s recent attacks on the Spanish at Cadiz (1625) and the French at La Rochelle (1627), Rubens may well have felt the king needed reminding of the potentially disastrous consequences of renewed hostilities with his continental foes.26 In any case, the cautionary moral of these pacific allegories is communicated through both the identities and body language of Rubens’s personifications. His message is unmistakable: If Peace is to prevail and Plenty to prosper, volatile aggressors must be destabilized and forcibly held at bay.27

24 Peter Paul Rubens to Jan Woverius, Antwerp, 13 January 1631, in Magurn, ed. and trans., Letters, no. 218, p. 370. 25 See, for example, Auwers, “Gift of Rubens,” 422. The author largely discounts the peace-seeking political tactics and rhetorical brilliance of the Archduchess Isabel, viewing Rubens not as a governor’s strategically mobilized envoy or diplomat but as a kind of courtly pawn or living gift exchanged between Philip IV and Charles I. 26 George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, was widely discredited for his role in these disastrous expeditions. Rubens reflected on the events transpiring in 1626 with the following observation: “[W]hen I consider the caprice and the arrogance of Buckingham, I pity that young King who, through false counsel, is needlessly throwing himself and his kingdom into such an extremity. For anyone can start a war, when he wishes, but he cannot so easily end it.” Peter Paul Rubens to Palamède de Fabri Valavez, Laeken, 9 January 1626, in Magurn, ed. and trans., Letters, no., 72, p. 123. 27 For a contemporaneous representation of a very similar conceit, see Rubens’s National Gallery, London, Minerva Protects Pax from Mars, the painting likely executed while Rubens was in England and given by the artist to Charles Stuart as a gift. On the ambiguous personification of Peace/Venus, see Hughes, “Naming the Unnameable.”

Peace Embraces Plent y

187

Rubens’s Yale Oil Sketch The oil sketch that is the focus of the remainder of this chapter, the Yale Center for British Art’s Peace Embracing Plenty (Plate 9) is one of numerous extant studies for the program at Whitehall.28 It is the monumental ceiling canvas rather than this small oil-on-panel that is and was seen by visitors to the Banqueting House. Yet any exploration of Rubens’s conception of gender and/in allegory is wise to begin with the lively painted studies from which his first thoughts for a composition inevitably emerge. Although it is important to keep in mind the formal differences and preparatory status of the Yale oil sketch in relation to Rubens’s additional studies and finished, mounted canvas, I concentrate on the panel for two reasons. First, in this preliminary smaller-scale rendering of a desiring female couple, Rubens establishes the intimately relational dynamic of his allegory through subtle details lacking in the final version, which would be a product of his Antwerp workshop subsequently retouched in London on several occasions. Second, Rubens’s isolation of these two female actors in a detailed and dazzling independent study indicates a high level of interest in them on his part; their relevance to the larger scheme is made clear by his wish to emphasize in an oil sketch the tropological signification of a certain kind of physical encounter or deed. Peace and Plenty’s facing orientation, nuanced facial expressions and supple, lifelike flesh are artistic choices that suggest and arguably enact a state of yearned-for and essential mutuality. Although Rubens would make decisive changes in Peace and Plenty’s position in relation to the architecture of the king’s throne niche, their connection with the final painting is indicated by the Solomonic columns in their midst in both images. Taken together as a single trope, Peace Embracing Plenty makes up an allegory within the allegory. Rubens has explicitly rendered the female dyad as separable from the scene’s more readily identifiable mythological characters such as Mars, Mercury, and Minerva, and the crowning winged Victories, as well as the historical portrait of the elderly king himself. The Whitehall program has been the focus of extensive study by art historians, historians, and scholars of British literary and cultural history. A surprising number of iconographical details stubbornly resist conclusive decipherment, as is often the case with Rubens’s allegories. But the basic content of each scene is well known and will not be rehearsed here. The titles (following Gregory Martin) of the three large central canvases and the two smaller canvases by which each is flanked are as follows, from the bottom center (Fig. 4.4): the Wise Rule of King James, flanked by Apollo Bestowing Royal Liberality Suppresses Avarice and Temperance Triumphant over Intemperance; the Apotheosis of King James, flanked by celebratory processions of amoretti, lions and bears; the Union of the Crowns of England and Scotland, flanked 28 For the Yale Center for British Art’s Peace Embracing Plenty, see Sutton et al., Drawn by the Brush, 222–25, cat. no. 32.

188 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Fig. 4.4. Simon Gribelin, ceiling in the Banqueting House at Whitehall, c.1720, London, Royal Collection Trust Photo: ©Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2019/Bridgeman Images.

Peace Embraces Plent y

189

by Hercules Crushing Discord and Minerva Overcoming Ignorance. With the exception of a club-wielding Hercules and an androgynous Apollo, the female figures in these scenes generally make the gestures and perform the acts necessary to dramatize Rubens’s allegorical meanings in human terms. Where the generally solitary male characters sit, kneel, and lose their balance, the female figures more often uphold, soar, and trample, typically working in concert to execute the peacemaking duties Rubens has assigned them. As Svetlana Alpers has observed of Rubens’s allegorical inventions in other political paintings, these supporting personifications “characteristically display a restlessness more consonant with the activity of making war than the repose of being at peace.”29 Although they occupy only a portion of the Peaceful Reign, the female figures known as Peace and Plenty play a pivotal part in the program at large. It is their identities that are said to epitomize (the reign of) James I to whom they are formally connected by the enthroned king’s pointing or protecting gesture. As is worthy of their significance, the oil on panel study for Peace Embracing Plenty is wonderfully refined and cohesive.30 In it Rubens spares no detail, lavishing painterly care on the lively folds of the women’s classicized robes and forming intricate twists in their golden hair. In an approach that is somewhat unusual for modelli of this type, he has given distinctive, particularized features to women possessed of nearly identical physical traits. The two are sufficiently individualized to imply the passivity of the rose- and blue-clad Plenty and the more aggressive single-mindedness of the radiantly advancing Peace. Glimpses of bare flesh, lengthy forearms, an exposed breast, and muscular shoulder, are rendered in a complex range of cool undertones with glassy highlights. The prominent, provocatively placed fruited horn—lightly balanced by Plenty between her legs—lends the scene an erotic note. Having apparently consigned it to Mercury’s use, the artist has painted out a once present caduceus, traces of which are barely visible in Peace’s grip.31 Thus while Plenty’s plump fingers grasp both Peace and her cornucopia, Peace lacks any attribute other than the woman she draws near her. Rubens has given a tender and familiar quality to the exchange of glances between the sketch’s two figures, whose individual expressions and eye contact, as well as Peace’s poised descent, convey their respective sense of purpose and expectancy.

29 Alpers, Making of Rubens, 30. 30 In this regard it differs from both the unique Tate sketch (formerly known as the Glynde sketch, designated the “multiple bozzetto” by Martin), in which multiple perspectives and figures are combined, as well as, for example, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ Mercury and the Yeoman, which pairs two figures not ultimately shown together in the final canvases. 31 As Rubens would have known, the use of the caduceus as a sign of peace is mentioned in accounts of military triumphs and surrender by Thucydides and Livy. See Friedlander, History of the Caduceus Symbol in Medicine, 127–28.

190 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Because there is no existing contract or description of the ceiling’s iconography by the artist or his patron, scholars have gleaned the allegorical gist of the Peaceful Reign from subsequent sources.32 The latest but most explicit of these is a printed diagram of the ceiling that may have been provided to early nineteenth-century visitors wishing to survey the first Palladian building in England.33 In this key plan the presumed identities of each figure are clearly spelled out in order of importance, that is, “King James the First on the THRONE pointing to PEACE and PLENTY embracing.”34 The names of the figures long established, the notion that the king is shown gesturing to personified derivatives of his wise sovereignty accords equally well with both James’s self-declared and publicized reputation for peacemaking (his motto was beati pacifici) and the identities of some of Rubens’s favorite allegorical personifications and their attributes.35 Published around the time of the ceiling’s bicentennial, the plan dates from long after the installation of the Whitehall canvases. Nonetheless, as Julius Held succinctly put it: “That the two figures of women at the left represent Peace and Plenty (or Abundance) has never been questioned.”36 In need of further exploration, however, is Rubens’s choice to present these specific virtues as women locked in an attitude of reciprocal, if not entirely balanced, affection. Amid his own erotic couples, Rubens’s Peace Embracing Plenty stands out as a daring alternative to heteronormative pairings such as Hercules and Omphale and Samson and Delilah. Given its female characters, the topos might seem more analogous to Jupiter and Callisto, portrayed in Rubens’s much earlier painting of around 1612. In this work, however, Rubens renders the ultimately successful rape, or sexual ‘conquest,’ of Diana’s nymph by a somewhat masculinized, female-bodied Jupiter in very different physical and emotional terms. Although similarly limited to two massive human forms, the mythological work is laced with the tension between force and resistance. In response to Callisto’s tightly crossed legs and attempted veiling of her genitals, Jupiter grasps her neck, tilting her face to meet his chilly gaze. The success of Jupiter’s appealingly feminine disguise, engineered to mask his cruel masculine intentions, 32 Notwithstanding the discovery of two allegorical panegyrics, or written ‘projects,’ of which King James was the subject (found among the papers of Charles I’s secretary of state, John Coke) and which may have been given to Rubens as an iconographical guide. Importantly, however, the content of the Peaceful Reign differs markedly from its analogues in both of these schemes where the king is to be shown in a scene described by Martin as “reminiscent of Raphael’s Parnassus” emphasizing James’s pursuit of peace and patronage of the arts (Project A) or “conducted by Religion and Concord” while “embracing Minerva and Astraea” (Project B). See G. Martin, Ceiling Decoration of the Banqueting Hall, 36. 33 See, for example, Smith, “Italian Sources of Inigo Jones’s Style.” See also Strong, Britannia Triumphans; Thurley, Whitehall Palace. Although, as Held and others have shown, the author makes a number of speculative iconographical interpretations of Rubens’s ceiling in relation to the Spanish Match of 1623, see also the key study by Palme, Triumph of Peace. 34 The plan is reproduced in Donovan, Rubens and England, 92. It is also transcribed in Held, Oil Sketches, 193. 35 On the role of peace in James I’s self-fashioning and iconography see G. Martin, Ceiling Decoration of the Banqueting Hall, 152–53. 36 Held, Oil Sketches, 193.

Peace Embraces Plent y

191

only accentuates the possibility that one woman might be taken with, or by, another. At Whitehall, by contrast, the viewer of the female couple overhead must accept the embrace as a consensual one. Where a backstory of female homosociality is hinted at in Rubens’s numerous versions of Diana with her nymphs and the Three Graces, Peace and Plenty’s encounter is a more fully played out visual conceit predicated on the irresistible power of female same-sex desire.

Virtues ‘Compact Together’ Peace and Plenty do not figure among the theological or cardinal virtues, though Peace, like Justice, is a fixture of the rhetoric of good government. A source of Plenty’s typical attribute, the cornucopia, can be found in Book 9 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the broken “horn with all its wealth” holds “fruits in perfection.”37 The religio-political cult of Peace or ‘Pax’ has even earlier origins. Stefan Weinstock has noted that in his funeral oration, Antony acknowledged Caesar, who may already have designated himself as such, as a “peacemaker.” In literature, the figure of Pax appears for the first time in Virgil’s Georgics, and subsequently in the numismatic and architectural representation of Augustus’s Roman Ara Pacis.38 Accordingly, at the English court, the Jacobean Romanism associated with Andrea Palladio and Inigo Jones had a double meaning since it might refer to either the king’s taste for the antique, as reflected in the Tempietto-like funeral catafalque designed by Inigo Jones, or to his supposed Roman Catholic sympathies.39 It is also possible that King James strategically appropriated the instrumental use of Peace and Plenty from his predecessor, Elizabeth I. An anonymous copy of an allegorical painting for Elizabeth I originally by the Fleming, Lucas de Heere, provides an intriguing example of the benefits of good governance gendered female. In the Allegory of the Tudor Succession (Fig. 4.5) c.1590, past and present rulers including, from left, Philip II and Mary Tudor, Henry VIII, Prince Edward VI, and Elizabeth Tudor, form an anachronous group portrait flanked by personifications. The allegory presents a less than subtle critique of Catholic, here Marian, rancorousness. The copyist shows a threatening Mars emerging, shield and club in hand, from the picture’s Catholic side in order to align himself with Mary Tudor and Philip II, her Spanish consort. From the right, however, ladylike Peace moves in to oppose this Hispanized group, blithely treading on the trappings of war in order to take the hand of the (future) Protestant queen. Close at Elizabeth’s side, a bare-breasted Plenty follows with an enormous, fruit-filled cornucopia. It is not only the presence of the two female personifications 37 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 9.98–99 (p. 208). 38 Weinstock, “Pax and the ‘Ara Pacis,’” 47. 39 On the former see Peacock, “Inigo Jones’s Stage Architecture and its Sources.”

192 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Fig. 4.5. Unknown artist after Lucas de Heere, An Allegory of Tudor Succession: The Family of Henry VIII, c.1590, New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Photo: courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art.

(whose splendid gold and pink garments are matched in Rubens’s Yale sketch) but their fond gestures and hand-clasp that retroactively predict the tenor of the contemporaneous queen’s government and its “nurture of concord and harmony.”40 Some sixty years later, when Rubens took a more dramatic approach to commemorating a reign of “comfort, peace, and plenty,” as the Jacobean apologist Barnabe Barnes described it, he would employ many of de Heere’s Elizabethan personae.41 Yet caught in medias res, Rubens’s personifications combine more expressively in order to suggest the birth of a hybrid abstraction, that is, the transformation before the viewer’s eyes of two symbolic meanings into one anticipated state. Rubens’s women confront each other physically but they are not oppositional. Theirs is less a reconciliation than a union. Traditionally separate but equal, the women’s virtue lies by implication in the more than doubled goodness that will result from their encounter. Part of the wonder of the coupling of Peace and Plenty in the Yale sketch, therefore, is 40 The original painting was a gift from Elizabeth I to her courtier, Francis Walsingham. For De Heere’s image see Hearn, ed., Dynasties, 81, cat. no. 35. See also Hopkins, “Marlowe and the Allegory of the Tudor Succession.” 41 Quoted by Jorgensen, Shakespeare’s Military World, 156. The author provides (201) additional Jacobeanera allusions to “peace and plenty,” including Archbishop Cranmer’s fictionalized Shakespearean prophecy concerning the good government of Henry VIII’s successors where, of James I and VI, it is predicted that “peace, plenty, love, truth, and terror” shall be his (Henry VIII, Act 5, scene 5).

Peace Embraces Plent y

193

its capture of the pregnant moment between meeting and kissing. This anticipatory instant is also represented in Rubens’s larger multifigural sketch and in the final ceiling panel itself, where Plenty remains ever expectant of “the kiss of Peace.”42 The true consummation of Peace and Plenty’s pictorial and metaphorical pairing is therefore in a state of perpetual suspension, its outcome dependent upon Minerva’s ability to keep the external threat of Mars at arm’s length. In view of the Stuart patron, Minerva’s antagonistic role at Whitehall is somewhat surprising. Constructions of Jacobean pacifism had often relied on the reputedly Amazonian hawkishness of Elizabeth I as a point of divergence from the manly, if peace-minded, king. The play-loving James had gone so far as to prohibit the performance of a “Masque of Amazons” (1617–18), ostensibly, as Julie Crawford has argued, because “James did not want women performing Amazonian roles in his court, even as entertainment.”43 Rubens, however, marshals the figure of the battling goddess to serve his own ends. At Whitehall, Minerva’s strength and tenacity lends weight to the fundamentally essentialist proposition that even the wisest and most powerful women innately seek calm and concord: the goddess of war thus employs military aggression in order to preserve peace.44

Veronese and the Daughters of God Despite their disapproval of the warrior-woman Elizabeth I, Charles and James Stuart were considerably indebted to the queen for her wide-ranging experiments in self/representation. In general, however, Elizabeth I preferred miniatures and painted portraits to large-scale cycles. Compared to previous portrayals of English royalty, one of Whitehall’s most important innovations is therefore its physical format. Ceilings adorned with figural groups and narrative ‘histories’ were largely unheard of in Caroline England, where, as is often stated, both Inigo Jones’s embellished giltwood soffit and Rubens’s vertiginous views di sotto in sù were recognized as natively Venetian in flavor.45 The Caroline court’s affinity for northern Italian art was consistent with the collecting habits of some of its most acquisitive and well-traveled nobles—the earl and countess of Arundel and the duke of Buckingham among 42 Contemporary viewers would likely have made the analogy between Peace’s kiss in Whitehall’s secular setting and the practice of the kiss of peace as a reconciliatory union of souls prior to the Eucharist. For the homoerotic charge of the ‘holy kiss’ in Northern art of the previous century, see Pearson, “Visuality, Morality, and Same-Sex Desire.” 43 See Crawford, “Fletcher’s ‘The Tragedie of Bonduca,’” 361. 44 Rubens’s admiration of Minerva’s prudent war-making is mirrored, moreover, in his respect for Isabel Clara Eugenia. 45 Schulz, Venetian Painted Ceilings, 52–53. By contrast, Elizabeth Honig believes the novelty of the painted ceiling in seventeenth-century England has been overstated given the presence of “many, albeit different, decorated ceilings in Elizabethan Long Galleries.” Pers. commun., 25 March 2012.

194 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

them.46 By the 1630s, Charles, too, had distinguished himself as an avid collector of Venetian art.47 Well known within courtly circles in Spain, where Charles had first learned to appreciate northern Italian painting, Rubens was acknowledged by Lope de Vega as the heir of the painterly colorito tradition practiced by Titian and his followers.48 An ersatz Venetian at Whitehall, the Flemish painter evoked the majestic splendor of Veronese’s illusionistic ceilings in a way that would have been understood by those familiar with northern Italian villas, palaces, and churches as the height of modern art judiciously derived from worthy Renaissance exemplars. The nine canvases by Veronese that adorn the ceiling at the Venetian church of San Sebastiano are commonly cited as a source of inspiration for Rubens’s London program. Yet in their shared emphasis on statecraft the feminized allegories at Whitehall are also closely related to Veronese’s ceiling in the doge’s palace. Akin to the English Banqueting House, the Palladian Sala del Collegio in Venice functioned as a ceremonial site of power devoted to the reception of foreign ambassadors, the entertainment of courtiers, and the aggrandizement and display of the current ruler. Fitted with an elaborately carved coffered frame, the ceiling of the Venetian salon (Fig. 4.6) exhibits a series of airy canvases by Veronese and contemporaries, which, like Rubens’s allegories, articulate the desirability of good governance through the sensual, sociable bodies of virtuous female personifications. Most relevant for this purpose is an allegory of the Venetian state in which Veronese has placed elegant embodiments of Justice and Peace (Fig. 4.7) at the foot of an enthroned figure of Venetia who tranquilly surveys them from her perch on an immense terrestrial globe. Brought before the figure of La Serenissima, the women join two disparate virtues traditionally aligned with pacification on the one hand and punishment on the other; for while both are forces for the common good, justice and peace are often at odds. In Veronese’s painting, accordingly, whereas Justice, or ‘Righteousness,’ as she is sometimes called, brandishes a sizable sword along with her unerring scales, Peace is unarmed. Although her hands, too, are full it seems Peace’s only task is to crown with olive those capable of accommodating her. Veronese’s presentation of a gentled Justice and preserved Peace made subject to the Republic thus implies that the distinctive polity of Venice provides a hospitable setting for their détente. Veronese’s imagery of Justice and Peace has a probable source in Psalm 85, in particular, lines 10–11 which describe the assembly of the virtuous quartet traditionally known as the ‘Four Daughters of God.’ As Ralph Klinefelter explains, this allegorical trope is first mentioned in an eleventh-century Jewish commentary subsequently 46 For the mania for Venetian art and its value as social capital at the Caroline court see Shakeshaft, “To Much Bewiched with Thoes Intysing Things.” 47 See Brown and Elliott, eds., Sale of the Century, 23–38, 41–68. 48 The Spanish playwright referred to Rubens as “el nuevo Ticiano” in a silva entitled “Al Quadro y retrato de su Majestad que hizo Pedro Pablo de Rubens, Pintor excelentissimo,” cited by de Armas, “Lope de Vega and Titian,” 341.

Peace Embraces Plent y

195

Fig. 4.6. Paolo Veronese, ceiling in the Sala del Collegio, c.1575–78, Venice, Palazzo Ducale. Photo: Palazzo Ducale, Venice, Italy/Cameraphoto Arte Venezia/Bridgeman Images.

adapted to Christian theology by Hugh of St. Victor and Bernard of Clairvaux. According to exegetical tradition the ‘daughters’ were Truth, Mercy, Righteousness/Justice, and Peace. In medieval commentaries, these four personifications were summoned before God (or in some cases a king) to debate the fate of a sinful soul. In most versions, “God’s Justice and Truth demanded satisfaction through punishment: His Mercy and Peace urged forgiveness.”49 In the psalm’s chiasmic compromise, therefore, one member of each aggressive, vengeful couple is joined with her more passive and forgiving counterpart, that is, Mercy with Truth and Justice with Peace. 49 Klinefelter, “Four Daughters of God,” 90; see also the pioneering study by Immaculate, “Four Daughters of God,” 959.

196 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Fig. 4.7. Paolo Veronese, Venice Enthroned between Justice and Peace, c.1575–78, Venice, Palazzo Ducale. Photo: Palazzo Ducale, Venice, Italy/Bridgeman Images.

Like her Catholic half-sister, Mary, Elizabeth Tudor drew often on this scriptural passage when she styled herself, and by implication her faith, as Truth—the daughter not only of Time but also, according to St. Bernard, of God. On the title page of the Bishops’ Bible (The holi bible, 1569) authorized under her reign (Fig. 4.8), Elizabeth is framed by colorful sibylline personifications of Justice and Mercy and beneath them Fortitude and Prudence.50 Peace, interestingly, does not make an appearance. The queen’s ermine-trimmed cloak, formidable frontality, and presentation of the globus 50 King, “Godly Woman,” 67.

Peace Embraces Plent y

197

Fig. 4.8. The holi bible (Bishops’ Bible), c.1569, London, British Library. Photo: British Library, London, UK, ©British Library Board (all rights reserved)/Bridgeman Images.

cruciger and scepter are compositionally similar to contemporary painted coronation portraits of which only copies now exist. Observing iconographical consonances between this popular genre of hieratic Elizabethan imagery and pre-Reformation Flemish devotional paintings of Christ as salvator mundi, Meryl Bailey (following Ernst Kantorowicz) has argued that the association of Elizabeth Tudor with the

198 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

“redeemer of the world” alludes to her exceptional duality as simultaneously human and divine, bodily female yet politically male.51 On the one hand, like Veronese’s ‘Venetia,’ she is presented as an accidental woman whose exceptional power defies her innately weak sex. On the other hand, however metaphorically Christlike, the representation of Elizabeth’s physical body aligns the living queen with the decorative female figures around her, whose inherent vacuousness renders them ornamental and (only) symbolically full of virtue. Multivalent readings of this sort are possible because the queen’s image is permitted to oscillate between portrait and personification. As would not be the case with a male personage such as King James, however, any portrayal of Elizabeth’s particularities as a historical woman inevitably destabilizes her claims on vir-tue. Where Elizabeth had necessarily to represent some-thing other than or outside her female self, James, always-already biologically virile, could be safely represented as ‘merely’ a man, though no less a monarchical type, to whom both women and female-gendered moral abstractions might advisedly subject themselves.52

Ripa, Rubens, Rubsters In the visual tradition of personification allegory, the proposition that women’s bodies were uniquely capable of reifying as opposed to generating meaning can be traced to the Aristotelian gender binary of active (male) form over against passive (female) matter. Early modern artists and handbook writers such as Cesare Ripa drew on an extensive classical tradition of feminized personification allegories, largely based on representations of female-bodied virtues in Greco-Roman coins and sculpture. Looking up ‘Peace’ and ‘Plenty,’ as Rubens almost certainly did, in Ripa’s 1603, 1611, or 1618 editions of the Iconologia, one finds ‘Abondanza’, or Plenty (Fig. 4.9), is the book’s first illustrated entry. Standing on a flat plain, a garland-crowned woman with an airborne mantle rests her right hand on a large cornucopia. In her left hand are sprigs of grain. She ought to be depicted as pretty and graceful, Ripa writes, as a good and desirable thing who is the opposite of abominable famine. She is also called ‘Copia,’ the author points out, and details of her etiological relationship to the horn of plenty can be found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.53 In the Yale oil sketch, we see that Rubens’s seated figure resembles Ripa’s prescribed Abundance. The scale of the horn 51 Bailey, “Salvatrix Mundi,” 184. 52 It is interesting in this respect to contrast Elizabeth’s allegorical Bible portraits with the title page of James’s first Authorized Version (1611), in which Moses, Aaron, the apostles, and the four evangelists are mystically gathered in a typological all-male sacred conversation from which the figure of James, though not his written ‘commandment’ of the scriptural translation, is absent. 53 “Bella et gratiosa si debbe dipingere l’Abondanza, sì come cosa buona et desiderata da ciascheduno, quanto brutta et abominevole è riputata la carestia, che di quella è contraria.” Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (1603), 1–2. Translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

Peace Embraces Plent y

199

Fig. 4.9. Unknown artist, Abondanza, in Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, 1618, Padova, Pietro Paolo Tozzi. Photo: Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

of plenty and the female figure’s light grasp of this eponymous attribute are similar; the flowing gown of Rubens’s Plenty and her fluttering mantle, while not green as Ripa suggests, also seem to echo the engraving. Peace’s origins are more complicated. Based as it is on an Augustan medal, Ripa’s first entry (of thirteen) for ‘Pace,’ would have undoubtedly appealed to the antiquarian-minded Rubens. It reads: “A lady: who holds in her left hand a Cornucopia, full of fruits, flowers, palms, with an olive branch, and in her right hand, a torch, with which she sets ablaze a pile of arms. The Cornucopia signifies abundance, mother and daughter of peace.”54 Additional explanation is then provided about the meanings of the attributes in contexts of war and peace, and to this information Ripa notably appends a line from Psalm 121 (KJV 122): “Fiat pax in virtute tua, & abundantia in turribus tuis” (“Peace be within thy walls and prosperity within thy palaces”). The iconographer concludes: “For an explanation of [Peace’s] Cornucopia, we will use what we have said of the figure of Abundance.”55 Rather incredibly, none of Ripa’s thirteen versions of Peace is illustrated, the implication being that the earlier portrayals of 54 Ripa, Iconologia, 375: “Donna, che nella sinistra mano tiene un Cornucopia, pieno di frutti, fiori, frondi, con un ramo d’ulio, & nella destra una facella, con la quale abbrucci un montone d’Arme. Il Cornucopia significa l’abbondanza, madre, & figliuola della pace.” 55 Ripa, Iconologia, 375: “Per dichiaratione del Cornucopia, ne serviremo di quello, che habbiamo ditto nella figura dell’abbondannza.”

200 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Plenty or Abundance and her cornucopia might serve as suitable, or interchangeable, models. With the Iconologia’s entries in mind, a new interpretation of Rubens’s Whitehall personifications becomes possible. As Rubens, following Ripa, appears to have realized, in contrast to Psalm 85’s remorseful quality, Psalm 122 provides a more obvious source for an apotheosis of the peace-loving, palace-building, father of Charles Stuart. In Stuart art and architecture, spiraling columns such as those flanking King James have been interpreted as emblematically pro-Calvinist by some and pro-Catholic by others; in both cases, however, the columns refer to “the original Temple of Solomon which, in turn (since it was of divine origin) could be seen as the Temple of the New Jerusalem—God’s Kingdom on Earth.”56 In addition to the repeated pairing of ‘peace’ and ‘prosperity’ in Psalm 122, lines describing “thrones of judgment, the thrones of the house of David,” may go further to explain the prominence of the so-called Solomonic throne, or throne of wisdom, in Rubens’s Whitehall images. In his expressive dyad, Rubens has thus elaborated on Ripa by using two female bodies to perform the biblical text’s intertwined themes. That the two women are becoming one trope, or figural turn, is neatly echoed by sensuous Solomonic columns infused with anthropomorphic fullness, an expressive architectural rhyme deployed by the artist in both the sketch and the final canvas. Moreover, compositional similarities between Rubens’s Plenty and Ripa’s ‘Abondanza’ imply greater reliance by the Flemish painter on the Italian iconographer than is sometimes allowed.57 In Ripa’s terms, we now know Peace is just as likely as Plenty to display a Cornucopia. In fact, the two personifications were envisioned as being so similar in appearance that only one (Abundance) is illustrated in the Iconologia, where she and/or her attribute are also described—in a figurative heightening of their intimate relationship—as being both mother and daughter of Peace. Admittedly, the notion that Rubens wished to portray the two amorous women as an actual mother and daughter cannot be entirely rejected; his rather disturbing depictions of an aged father, Cimon, nursing at the breast of his nubile daughter, Pero, in multiple versions of Roman Charity have been cast by some viewers in a titillating light. Yet at Whitehall the ontological impossibility that Peace or Plenty could exist as both cause and effect may point not to an incestuous, or even ‘innocent,’ biological connection but rather to an unexpectedly romantic one. In accordance with its felicitous strangeness, Rubens emphasizes the inconceivable, inverted, dynamics of the women’s relationship by pairing an assertive, virago Peace with a chastely receptive Plenty. 56 Stewart, “Rome, Venice, Mantua, London,” 18. 57 Donovan, Rubens and England, 145, notes that Inigo Jones followed Ripa’s emblems very closely in his masque designs, but writes of Rubens’s Whitehall personifications: “The complex symbolism described by Cartari or Ripa is absent in these images.”

Peace Embraces Plent y

201

Indeed, by placing Peace allusively on top Rubens may have subtly invoked early modern descriptions of the aggressive Sapphist, known at the time as ‘fricatrice,’ ‘rubster,’ or ‘tribade.’58 At the English court, Inigo Jones’s quarrelsome collaborator, the playwright Ben Jonson, used the term derisively in a number of works, referring in one instance to the Three Graces as a “tribade trine.”59 (Rubens would depict the Graces as a voluptuous and physically demonstrative threesome around 1636–38.) Although she does not include Rubens’s women in the same ‘proto-lesbian’ context, Valerie Traub has suggestively analyzed a group of strikingly concurrent, possibly analogous, representations of female same-sex desire in painted stagings of the girlon-girl kissing war embedded in Battista Guarini’s pastoral tragicomedy, Il pastor fido (1590).60 Van Dyck’s c.1631–32 version of this scene in Amaryllis and Mirtillo was the first of numerous seventeenth-century presentations of the subject by a Netherlandish artist.61 The painting, commissioned by the Orangist Stadholder, Frederik Hendrik, was completed just prior to the posthumous publication (1633) of John Donne’s notorious ‘lesbian poem,’ Sapho to Philaenis. As Janel Mueller writes, in Donne’s “Heroical Epistle,” the poet addresses her female lover with “focused tactility” in an appeal that “their body contact and caresses be multiplied to an implied climax.”62 In one passage, Sappho exclaims: “And oh […] the likeness being such/ Why should they not alike in all parts touch?/ Hand to strange hand, lippe to lippe none denies;/ Why should they brest to brest, or thighs to thighs?”63 These unapologetically homoerotic literary and artistic works predate the installation, though perhaps not the conceptualization, of the Whitehall canvas in which Rubens’s Peace Embracing Plenty appears.64 Traub reads the literal and formal marginalization of female same-sex desire around the borders of Van Dyck’s painting as complicit in the work’s “affirmation of the superiority of heteroeroticism.”65 Yet this apparently dismissive or normative compositional choice may have a more (same-sex) positive—though aesthetically motivated—valence. While Van Dyck’s painting is a clever homage to Titian, it is also a subversive one. In the baroque work, after all, the brightly lit reclining seminude in the foreground, conspicuously appropriated from the Venetian master’s Bacchanal of the Andrians of 1523–24 (Fig. 4.10), is no longer alone, but partnered by Van Dyck with the comely golden-haired nymph who leans in to kiss her. 58 For classical and contemporary definitions of these terms, see Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England, 45–46. 59 The phrase appears in Jonson’s poem “The Forrest” (1601), cited in Walen, Constructions of Female, 28. 60 Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, 1–2. 61 For Van Dyck’s Amaryllis and Mirtillo, see Barnes et al., Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue, 294, cat. no iii.60. 62 Mueller, “Troping Utopia,” 200. 63 Quoted in Mueller, “Troping Utopia,” 200. 64 The literature concerning Donne’s poem (c.1590) is plentiful, but see Holstun, “Will You Rent our Ancient Love Asunder?”; Harvey, “Ventriloquizing Sappho”; Revard, “Sapphic Voice”; Infante, “Donne’s Incarnate Muse”; Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England, esp. 46–51. 65 Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, 2.

202 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Fig. 4.10. Titian, Bacchanal of the Andrians, c.1523–24, Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Prado, Madrid, Spain/Bridgeman Images.

Rubens, like Van Dyck, locates his female couple off-center at Whitehall. Yet in a skilled negotiation of the valorizing compositional conventions of early modern painting, he also allocates Peace and Plenty an honorific position at the king’s right hand. Where, as we have seen, in marriage portraits or popular religious subjects such as the Last Judgment the viewer’s ‘dominant left’ is typically reserved for morally superior and/or male personages, Rubens gives pride of place to his female couple. Second only in importance to the king who gestures toward them, Peace and Plenty enact the benefits of James’s reign otherwise, in a female-gendered and narratively allegorical manner he cannot.

Peace Embraces Plent y

203

Glory, Laud, and the New Jerusalem It is reasonable to speculate that Psalm 122 was introduced as the processional anthem at Charles’s coronation by William Laud, who served as the officiant of the ceremony.66 Laud, later archbishop of Canterbury under Charles’s personal rule, was executed, prior to the king, in 1644, for treason against the state. Though less gifted a poet than his rival John Donne, he was already a figure of some renown in King James’s time. In fact, though James Stuart did eventually bestow preferments on Laud, the king was said to worry, presciently it seems, about the “restless spirit” of a man who “loves to toss and change, and to bring things to the pitch of reformation.”67 Mention in Rubens’s correspondence of at least one “little book” by Dutch “Arminians”—the moderate Protestant Remonstrants with whom Laud was associated for his worksbased theology, sacramentalism, and hostility toward Predestination—may indicate some level of familiarity with the English bishop’s reforms.68 Rubens would likely have shared Laud’s belief in the divine right of sovereigns and certainly his espousal of the “beauty of holiness” in church liturgy and adornment.69 Throughout the 1620s the rising tide of English Arminianism and with it advocacy of the divinely appointed right of kings to dictate worship in the commonwealth was at the forefront of religious controversy at the Caroline court. The subjects of Charles Stuart lived in a world where, as one Arminian polemicist had optimistically phrased it: “the Church and State being so nearly united that though they may seeme two bodies, yet indeed in some respects they may be accounted but as one.”70 If the inseparability of church and state became a hallmark of Caroline Laudianism, Laud himself had already begun to promote his theocratic views in the final years of James’s rule. On 19 June 1621, in the same year that Rubens began to jockey for the Whitehall commission, Laud, then chaplain-in-ordinary preached a career-making sermon in the presence of the reigning monarch, James I. The sermon was based entirely on Psalm 122, which Laud used as a brief for both the commingling of church and state and the prefiguration of James in King Solomon himself.71 Much to Laud’s approval a transcription of his well-received sermon was published by the king’s command 66 For the liturgy and ceremonial practices designated for Charles’s coronation and the notes made on the ceremony by Laud, see Wordsworth, Coronation of King Charles the First, 11–61. 67 Cited in Carlton, Archbishop William Laud, 26. 68 Rubens refers to the book by “the Arminians” in two letters of 1626, see Magurn, ed. and trans., Letters, no. 76, p. 127; no. 79, p. 130. 69 ‘Enforcement’ may be a more appropriate term for Laud’s approach to liturgical conformity. For accounts of Laudian ministers of the 1620s and 30s refusing communion to parishioners who declined to kneel or stand as dictated by High Church rubrics, see Parry, Glory, Laud and Honour, 18. 70 Robert Sibthorpe, Apostolike Obedience Shewing the Duty of Subjects to pay Tribute and Taxes to their Princes (London, 1627), cited in Schwartz, “Arminianism,” 60. 71 On Laud’s divine right homiletics see Prior, “Ecclesiology,” 874, 883. Collins, “Restoration Bishops,” 552–55.

204 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

shortly after he had heard it preached at Wanstead. There is no documentary evidence that Rubens owned a printed copy of Laud’s sermon. But the archbishop’s writings were well known to Rubens’s long-time English liaison to the Stuart court, Dudley Carleton. While concluding his tenure as Dutch ambassador, Carleton wrote numerous reports to Laud concerning exiled English Puritans.72 Theologically, Laud would have occupied the middle way between the Reform-minded Carleton and the devoutly Catholic painter. It is difficult to imagine that Rubens, who counted so many highly placed Jesuits as friends, would not have recognized Laud as the exponent of religion at Charles’s—and to a lesser extent, James’s—court. Although Laud vigorously defended himself until what was his dying day against accusations that he had attempted to deliver England to the bosom of the Roman church, his openness to Catholic liturgy and his antipathy to Puritans might have endeared him to worldly papists such as Rubens—as well the French-born Henriette-Marie, daughter of Maria de’ Medici.73 Laud may or may not have met Rubens during the latter’s London stay. But he very certainly met Anthony van Dyck. The archbishop sat to Van Dyck, who, like Rubens, was an ardent Catholic, for the only portrait among that painter’s works of an English Bishop in convocation attire.74 Verses 6 and 7 of Psalm 122: “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem; let them prosper that love thee; Peace be within thy walls, and prosperity within thy Palaces,” provide the touchstone for Laud’s sermon before King James. It is a long, at times turgid, discourse, Donnean in reach, less sure in execution. Yet the self-conscious pains taken by an ambitious mid-career cleric to make plain his message are understandable: The occasion of his preaching was no less than James I’s birthday, in the church calendar a red-letter day, accorded the status of a feast or saint’s day, to which Laud skilfully alludes in the following passage: Again I cannot be so unthankful to God and my text, but that I must fit one circumstance more to Rogate Pacem, pray for peace. And it is, Pray for it this day: why this day? Why? Why David brought up the Arke with this Psalme and he would have built the Temple: But God’s answer to him was: No: But behold, a sonne is borne unto thee, which shall be a man of peace, for I will give him rest from all his enemies round about, therefore his name is Solomon, and I will send peace and quietness upon Israel in his days. And had not David then great reason to call upon his people, even all sorts to pray for that Peace, which God would give by Solomon? And surely we have a Jerusalem, a State, and a Church to pray for, as well as they. And this day was our Solomon, the very Peace of our Jerusalem borne. And though hee were not borne among us, yet hee was borne to us, and for the good 72 Sprunger, “Archbishop Laud’s Campaign,” 308, 312. 73 Laud and Hinde, Archbishop of Canterbury’s Speech, 13. 74 Barnes et al., Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue, 550–51, cat. no. iv.153.

Peace Embraces Plent y

205

and wel-fare of both State and Church. And can yee do other than Rogare pacem, pray for peace in the day, nay, Nativity, the very birthday of both Peace, and the Peace-maker?75

In one exhortation—“pray for peace”—Laud is able to fit the whole figurative meaning, with theological implications intact, of James’s reign as the second Solomon, a masculine Peace who is also a peacemaker on earth. Having described the christological pacifism of the ruler, the preacher proceeds to build him a rhetorical home in the New Jerusalem figured as the palace the British king was at the time constructing, the stately edifice that can be none other than the new Whitehall. “Heere” Laud says of James: is his prayer for peace and prosperity for Jerusalem, for the State, for the Church: but whereabouts would he have these excellent blessings seated? Where? Why everywhere, but especially in Muris and Palatis, about the Wall and the Palace. And they are excellently fitted. He would have them spread all over Jerusalem: But Loca Dominu, the places of their exaltation, are these in my text; the Wall and the Palace: For peace that keeps at the wall, and so workes inward to calme the City: But the child of peace, Prosperity, that is borne after in the Palace, [and] comes outward to enrich the very wall.76

Here, too, the harmonizing, absolutist themes of Rubens’s Peaceful Reign are encapsulated: The benefits of a conjoined church and state are made manifest in the ‘high places.’ There they are borne out by the personified figures of Jerusalem’s co-creative virtues of Peace and Prosperity, who are excellently fitted and move toward each other to meet in exaltation at the crux of city and court, civic and sacred. Seated on his throne, King James attempts to protect Peace and Plenty, whom he shields from the chaos and strife threatened by war, plots, and revolution, just as mighty Minerva protects the royal body from these ever near and incendiary forces. A crucial bridge between two reigns, Laud’s vision for the Church of England under James I came nearly to fruition under Charles I. Rubens, I want to suggest, understood Charles’s much-desired union of church and state as an outcome prefigured in James I’s anagogical rhetoric of Peace and Plenty, a rhetoric with which he himself was in deep sympathy. As demonstrated in their paintings, plays, and poems, Rubens and Van Dyck, like their contemporaries Donne and Jonson, seem to have shared what Harriette Andreadis has described as a demonstrable “interest in the erotic relations of women with one another” revealed in the cultural life and arts of the Jacobean and Caroline courts.77 Rubens’s affectionate female couple is therefore 75 Laud, Sermon preached before his majesty, no pag. [12]. 76 Laud, Sermon preached before his majesty, no. pag. [12]. 77 Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England, 47.

206 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

an appropriately eroticized allegory of an alluring but impossible utopia in the fullness of time, where peace and prosperity, under the aegis of a pacific—one hazards to say, impotent—Protestant sovereign, are encouraged to flourish and generate in and of themselves. As Patricia Simons put it in her ground-breaking essay: “so ‘unreal’ was lesbianism that sensual contact between women could enter a society’s peripheral vision.”78 The notion that the consummation of female-female desire should be both physically impossible and metaphorically imaginable suits Rubens’s utopian outlook and conforms to his use of loving female personifications in hopeful civic allegories designed for a culture in which such long-time female partnerships were supposedly unheard of.79

Works Cited Alpers, Svetlana, The Making of Rubens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Andreadis, Hariette, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics, 1550–1714 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001). Auwers, Michael, “The Gift of Rubens: Rethinking the Concept of Gift-Giving in Early Modern Diplomacy,” European History Quarterly, 43 (July 2013), 421–41. Bailey, Meryl, “Salvatrix Mundi: Representing Queen Elizabeth I as a Christ-Type,” Studies in Iconography, 29 (2008), 176–215. Barnes, Susan J., Nora De Poorter, Oliver Millar, and Horst Vey, Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). Baskins, Cristelle and Lisa Rosenthal, eds., Early Modern Allegory: Embodying Meaning (Aldershot/ Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007). Brown, Jonathan and John Elliott, eds., The Sale of the Century: Artistic Relations between Spain and Great Britain, 1604–1655 (New Haven: Yale University Press in association with the Museo del Prado, 2002). Caplan, Harry, “The Four Senses of Scriptural Interpretation and the Mediaeval Theory of Preaching,” Speculum, 4 (July 1929), 282–90. Carlton, Charles, Archbishop William Laud (New York/London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987). Cohen, Sarah R., “Rubens’s France: Gender and Personification in the Marie de Médicis Cycle,” Art Bulletin, 85 (September 2003), 490–522. Collins, Jeffrey R., “The Restoration Bishops and the Royal Supremacy,” Church History, 68 (September 1999), 549–80. Crawford, Julie, “Fletcher’s ‘The Tragedie of Bonduca’ and the Anxieties of the Masculine Government of James I,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 39 (Spring 1999), 357–81. De Armas, Frederick, “Lope de Vega and Titian,” Comparative Literature, 30 (Autumn 1978), 338–52. Donovan, Fiona, Rubens and England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). Friedlander, Walter J., The Golden Wand of Medicine: A History of the Caduceus Symbol in Medicine (Westport: Praeger, 1992). Gough, Melinda J., “‘Not as Myself’: The Queen’s Voice in Tempe Restored,” Modern Philology, 101 (2003), 48–67. Hart, Vaughan, Inigo Jones: The Architect of Kings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). 78 See Simons, “Lesbian (In)Visibility,” 111. 79 A version of this chapter first appeared as “A Psalm for King James: Rubens’s Peace Embracing Plenty and the Virtues of Female Affection at Whitehall,” Art History, 40 (2016), 38–67, published with the permission of Wiley.

Peace Embraces Plent y

207

Harvey, Elizabeth, “Ventriloquizing Sappho: Ovid, Donne, and the Erotics of the Feminine Voice,” Criticism, 31 (1989), 115–38. Hearn, Karen, ed., Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England, exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing, 1995). Held, Julius, Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens (London: National Gallery of Art, 1980). Held, Julius, “On the Date and Function of Some Allegorical Sketches by Rubens,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 38 (1975), 218–33. Held, Julius, “Rubens’s Glynde Sketch and the Installation of the Whitehall Ceiling,” Burlington Magazine, 112 (May 1970), 272 and 274–81. Holstun, James, “‘Will You Rent our Ancient Love Asunder?’: Lesbian Elegy in Donne, Marvell, and Milton,” English Literary History, 54 (Winter 1987), 835–67. Hopkins, Lisa, “In a Little Room: Marlowe and the Allegory of the Tudor Succession,” Notes and Queries, 53 (December 2006), 442–44. Hughes, Anthony, “Naming the Unnameable: An Iconographical Problem in Rubens’s ‘Peace and War,’” Burlington Magazine, 122 (March 1980), 157–65. Immaculate, Sr. Mary, “The Four Daughters of God in the Gesta Romanorum and the Court of Sapience,” PMLA, 57 (December 1942), 951–65. Infante, Stella, “Donne’s Incarnate Muse and his Claim to Poetic Control in ‘Sapho to Philaenis,’” in Representing Women in Renaissance England, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 93–106. Jacobs, Lynn, “Rubens and the Northern Past: The Michielsen Triptych and the Thresholds of Modernity,” Art Bulletin, 91 (2009), 302–24. Jorgensen, Paul A., Shakespeare’s Military World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956). King, John, “The Godly Woman in Elizabethan Iconography,” Renaissance Quarterly, 38 (Spring 1985), 41–84. Kingsbury, Pamela D., “The Tradition of the Soffitto Veneziano in Lord Burlington’s Suburban Villa at Chiswick,” Architectural History, 44 (2001), 145–52. Klinefelter, Ralph, “‘The Four Daughters of God’: A New Version,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 52 (January 1953), 90–95. Laud, William and John Hinde, The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Speech: Or his Funerall Sermon Preacht by himself on the scaffold on Tower Hill on Friday the 10 of January, 1644 (London, 1644). Laud, William and John Hinde, A sermon preached before his majesty, on Tuesday the nineteenth of June, at Wansted, Anno Dom. 1621 (London, 1621). Magurn, Ruth, ed. and trans., The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1955). Martin, Gregory, The Ceiling Decoration of the Banqueting Hall, CRLB 15 (Oostkamp: Grafikon, 2005). Martin, John Rupert, The Decorations for the Pompa Introitus Ferdinandi, CRLB 16 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). Mueller, Janel, “Troping Utopia: Donne’s Brief for Lesbianism,” in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 182–207. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. David Raeburn, with introd. by David Feeney (London: Penguin, 2004). Palme, Per, Triumph of Peace: A Study of the Whitehall Banqueting House (London: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1956). Parry, Graham, The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation: Glory, Laud and Honour (Rochester: Boydell & Brewer, 2006). Peacock, John, “Inigo Jones’s Stage Architecture and its Sources,” Art Bulletin, 64 (June 1982), 1–8. Pearson, Andrea, “Visuality, Morality, and Same-Sex Desire: The Infants Christ and Saint John the Baptist in Early Netherlandish Art,” Art History, 38 (June 2015), 434–61. Prior, Charles W.A., “Ecclesiology and Political Thought in England, 1580–c. 1630,” Historical Journal, 48 (2005), 855–84. Range, Matthias, Music and Ceremonial at British Coronations from James I to Elizabeth II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

208 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Raylor, Timothy, “‘Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue’: William Cavendish, Ben Jonson, and the Decorative Scheme of Bolsover Castle,” Renaissance Quarterly, 52 (1999), 402–39. Revard, Stella P., “The Sapphic Voice in Donne’s ‘Sapho to Philaenis,’” in Renaissance Discourses of Desire, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 63–76. Ripa, Cesare, Iconologia (Padova, 1603). Roskill, Mark, “Van Dyck at the English Court: The Relations of Portraiture and Allegory,” Critical Inquiry, 14 (1987), 173–99. Sanders, Julie, “Caroline Salon Culture and Female Agency: The Countess of Carlisle, Henrietta Maria, and Public Theatre,” Theatre Journal, 52 (2000), 449–64. Schulz, Juergen, Venetian Painted Ceilings of the Renaissance (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968). Schwartz, Hillel, “Arminianism and the English Parliament, 1624–1629,” Journal of British Studies, 12 (May 1973), 41–68. Shakeshaft, Paul, “‘To Much Bewiched with Thoes Intysing Things’: The Letters of James, Third Marquis of Hamilton and Basil, Viscount Feilding, concerning Collecting in Venice 1635–1639,” Burlington Magazine, 128 (February 1986), 114–34. Simons, Patricia, “Lesbian (In)Visibility in Italian Renaissance Culture: Diana and Other Cases of Donna con Donna,” Journal of Homosexuality, 27 (1994), 81–122. Smith, Joan Sumner, “The Italian Sources of Inigo Jones’s Style,” Burlington Magazine, 94 (July 1952), 200–8. Sprunger, Keith L., “Archbishop Laud’s Campaign against Puritanism at the Hague,” Church History, 44 (September 1975), 308–24. Stewart, J. Stewart, “Rome, Venice, Mantua, London: Form and Meaning in the ‘Solomonic’ Column, from Veronese to George Vertue,” British Art Journal, 8 (Winter 2007/8), 15–23. Strong, Roy, Britannia Triumphans: Inigo Jones, Rubens and Whitehall Palace (London: Thames & Hudson, 1981). Sutton, Peter C. and Marjorie E. Wieseman, with Nico van Hout, Drawn by the Brush: Oil Sketches by Peter Paul Rubens, exh. cat. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). Thurley, Simon, Whitehall Palace: An Architectural History of the Royal Apartments 1240–1698 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). Traub, Valerie, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002). Van der Stock, Jan, ed., Antwerp, Story of a Metropolis, exh. cat. (Antwerp: Snoeck-Ducaji & Zoon, 1993). Walen, Denise, Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Weinstock, Stefan “Pax and the ‘Ara Pacis,’” Journal of Roman Studies, 50 (1960), 44–58. Wittkower, Rudolph et al., Masters of the Loaded Brush: Oil Sketches from Rubens to Tiepolo, exh. cat. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967). Wordsworth, Christopher, The Manner of the Coronation of King Charles the First of England at Westminster, 2 Feb. 1626 (London, 1892).

5. All That Depends on Color

Feminizing Rubens in the Seventeenth Century* Abstract This chapter analyzes the coded and continuously reappropriated stylistic binaries that subtend seventeenth-century constructions of a Flemish painter and Spanish colonial subject as a consummate practitioner of Venetian colorito. Through close readings of Rubens’s early critical reception, it shows the various ways in which early modern writers mobilized dichotomously gendered, regionalist taxonomies of painting in order to reassign the artist from the ranks of the foreign-born naturalist painters considered as Caravaggisti to the company of the purportedly (even) less cerebral, graphically unskilled followers of Titian. If Bolognese such as the Carracci were regarded as falling conveniently outside the longstanding binary of masculine Tuscan design and feminine Venetian coloring, Rubens, who rightly saw himself as highly capable in both arenas, remains underappreciated for what might be viewed as a longawaited synthesis of the two rival, regional approaches to painting. Keywords: Rubens; Roger de Piles; feminism; queer; trans; Titian

The eighteenth century’s feminized view of Rubens, was not, it turns out, so wrong. ‒ Svetlana Alpers, The Making of Rubens (1995) This final chapter considers the feminized artistic production we have been examining in relation to the critical gendering of Rubens beginning in the years shortly after his death. I analyze the coded, recycled stylistic binaries used by seventeenth-century art writers to construct Rubens’s artistic identity as a Flemish painter and Spanish subject who was a consummate practitioner of Venetian colorito. More specifically, through a selective examination of Rubens’s early critical reception, I show the various ways in which early modern writers used oppositionally gendered, regionalist taxonomies of painting in order to reassign the artist from the ranks of the boldly indecorous, foreign-born naturalist painters considered as Caravaggisti to the company of the purportedly less cerebral and graphically skilled followers of Titian. If ** This chapter is dedicated to my sister in arms and chromophilia, the painter, Ann Pibal. Lyon, J.V., Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463722216_ch05

210 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Bolognese such as the Carracci were regarded as falling conveniently outside the Vasarian binary of masculine Tuscan design and feminine Venetian coloring, Rubens, who rightly saw himself as highly capable in both arenas, went largely underappreciated by his contemporaries for what might be viewed as a long-awaited synthesis of the two rival, regional styles of painting.

Rubens, Painting, Gender Rubens’s views of and on women have been narrowly conceived by many modern writers, who often fail to consider that his notions of femininity and womanhood might have changed, as this book has argued, even edging toward a kind of proto- or nascent feminism toward the end of his four decades as a painter. If for some he and his art are avowedly patriarchal and doctrinaire, insidiously valorizing masculinity above all else, for others he is a randy hedonist whose paintings merely recreate the feminine pleasures and pleasurable females he found himself continually seeking; a relatively recent survey of Rubens and his Women more than once considers the painter an early modern “Pygmalion.”1 Some combination of these characterizations may hold for the phase around Rubens’s bachelor years in Italy, when he moved alongside his brother in homosocially male and Neostoic social spheres. But as we have seen, things become more complicated after his marriage in 1609 to Isabella Brant, his rich and educated wife. Moreover, by 1621, when, following the death of the Archduke Albert, the Infanta Isabel became sole ruler of the Spanish Netherlands, Rubens, had, I believe, come to recognize the intellect, steadfastness, and agency of certain individual women, in addition to the uniquely powerful rhetorical and symbolic capacities of the female body when represented in tactile paint on canvas. Any attempt to trace the evolution of his notions of sex difference must nonetheless return to Rubens’s earliest commissions as a courtier. In 1603, for example, while in Valladolid, on his first trip to Spain, he bitterly complained of having been given what was to him the insulting task of painting a gallery of beauties, comprised of the ladies of the Spanish Habsburg court—“works unworthy of me, and which anyone can do to the Duke’s taste”—for his first important Italian patron, the Gonzaga Duke Vincenzo I.2 Yet this little remarked upon, and seemingly unfulfilled, assignment surely laid the groundwork for the change of heart that followed.3 Whether or not he accomplished the Duke’s commission, Rubens would soon undertake a similar task, this time of his own volition. By 1606, his Spanish patrons—the duke of Lerma, among them—and his Gonzaga connections combined to confirm Rubens’s 1 Feghelm and Kerstling, Rubens and his Women, 40, 69. 2 Rubens to Annibale Chieppio, Valladolid, [?] November 1603, in Magurn, ed. and trans., Letters, no. 12, p. 38; p. 435, n. 2. 3 But see Belkin, Rubens, 75.

All That Depends on Color

211

new-found popularity in the prosperous city of Genoa, an independent state from whose banking families the Spanish crown secured many of its loans. During Rubens’s stay there of less than a year, Genoa’s opulent and insular aristocracy “found its ideal interpreter in the young painter from Antwerp.”4 His imposing, almost confrontational large-scale portraits of Marchesa Brigida Spinola Doria (1606) and her circle of wealthy, self-possessed noblewomen undoubtedly prepared the artist for some of his most innovative depictions of other contemporary women. They wonderfully anticipate not only the aforementioned double portrait with his adored first wife, Isabella Brant, but his candidly grand half-length likenesses of Maria de’ Medici, and Isabel Clara Eugenia and the multiple depictions of his architectonically staged and sumptuously dressed second wife, Hélène Fourment (e.g. the Louvre portrait of 1638–39) dating from the decade before his death.5 While Rubens’s name does not appear in most of what was being written about contemporary painting in the early seicento, numerous and prestigious Italian commissions prove that he was recognized as an exceptional, excitingly modern, young artist. His fame in Rome reached its apex with the coveted commission for the high altar of the Chiesa Nuova (1608), where a resplendently courtly St. Domitilla dominates one of the two large canvases flanking the church’s miraculous image of the Madonna. But Rubens’s early fame as a painter of beautiful women was not without its costs. By the mid-seventeenth century, (male, mainly Italian) art writers and amateurs had begun to class his art, and by extrapolation, his character, as both foreign and feminine, as inescapably imbued, whether positively or negatively, with the same biological and moral qualities thought to be inherent in the women he represented. This critical gendering of Rubens is rarely explicit. Polemical portrayals of his art are less commonly fueled by blunt name-calling than by national and stylistic stereotypes themselves philosophically and linguistically gendered since at least the age of Vasari. Early modern art writers as well as contemporary art historians have located an abrupt departure in Rubens’s art away from the smooth surfaces and dry linearity of central Italian style toward the tangible colorism of Venetian painterliness. Yet they have not gone so far as to declare Rubens an artist who, in a decisive change of course, made the transition from one end of a gendered aesthetic spectrum to ‘the other.’ To take an influential example, Max Rooses, the renowned Rubens expert and curator, observed a drastic transformation in the painter’s style after his completion of the proudly Michelangelesque altarpiece known as the Raising of the Cross (Plate 3), likely finished c.1611–13. Rooses writes of Rubens’s suddenly “calmer, sweeter and more human tone” in the central panel of the Descent from the Cross (Plate 2), the solemn, chromatically restrained triptych installed in Antwerp’s 4 Tagliaferro, “Di Rubens e di alcuni genovesi,” 38. 5 On the six established full-length portraits, five female, one male, of the Genoa period, see Huemer, Portraits, 36–43.

212 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Church of Our Lady cathedral in 1614. With uncharacteristic agnosticism, he then concludes: “whatever the reason that led him to adopt this new manner, he remained faithful to it for many years.”6 Referring to the nature of Rubens’s “new manner,” Rooses might just as well be describing Veronese or Titian. Yet the language he uses also evokes traditionally feminine features and qualities. As Patricia Reilly, David Summers, Fredrika Jacobs, Philip Sohm, and Svetlana Alpers were among the first to make clear, nationalism, artistic style, and de/valorizing gender conventions are inextricable in the history and criticism of Renaissance and baroque painting. Understood as Flemish painting in a Venetian key, Rubens’s art was always already doubly feminine in the minds of most seventeenth-century writers. It may therefore be helpful to briefly recall the regional and stylistic biases upon which early modern art writing and criticism were founded. In his Roman Dialogues of 1548, Michelangelo’s Portuguese admirer, the painter, Francisco de Holanda, famously attributed to the Florentine artist the assertion that painting in Flanders “is done without reason or art,” which manifestly renders it pleasing to the devout, most women, and others lacking appropriate discernment and cognitive skills.7 Similarly, in the second, revised edition of his Vite (1568), a like-minded Vasari, again in the guise of Michelangelo, had not-so-subtly belittled Titian in the name of Florentine theoretical supremacy. As Vasari reported: when the divine Michelangelo had occasion to witness the creation of Titian’s famed reclining nude, the glittering Danae intended for the Spanish collection of Philip II, he observed that while the Venetian artist had pleased with his “coloring and style,” it was nonetheless “a shame that in Venice they did not learn to draw well from the beginning.”8 Nearer to Rubens’s formative years, Karel van Mander, in his Schilder-Boeck of 1604, firmly takes issue with Michelangelo’s supposed reference to oil painting (of which Flemish artists were the acknowledged innovators) as “woman’s work” in contrast to the “manly effort” of Italian fresco.9 Within this heated and parochial discourse of style, the Flanders-born but Amsterdam-based Van Mander (1548–1606) forms an important link between Florentine antipathy to and French enthusiasm for freely gestural, coloristic painting.10 In an anticipation of Roger de Piles’ controversial veneration of the informed practice of coloris as exemplified by Rubens’s art, Van Mander champions Venetian painting over the Roman tradition in part by underscoring its technical and philosophical affinities with Netherlandish painting.11 He defines a range of essential practices used and effects sought by the best Northern 6 Rooses, Rubens, 171. 7 For a much-needed account of de Holanda’s rhetorical reversals and their deployment in art history’s ‘mythography’ of North v. South—in which Alpers has played a major critical role—see Agoston, “Holanda’s Michelangelo.” 8 Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 455. 9 Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon, 96. 10 On Van Mander’s formation and training, see Leesberg, “Karel van Mander as a Painter-Author.” 11 On the de Pilesian formulation of coloris, see Lichtenstein, Eloquence of Color, esp. 147, 156.

All That Depends on Color

213

painters, many of which, such as vleesachtich[heyt], the property of “fleshiness,” and poeselijck[heyt], “the quality of ‘pliability,’ ‘resilience,’ and ‘softness’ characteristic of youthful flesh, and evoked by the deft handling of malleable pigment,” herald the signature qualities of Rubens’s art.12 But Van Mander’s positive appraisal of the materiality of (Northern) painting is an exception in a period when nationalistic terminology was commonly used to undercut a tactile, naturalistic mode that signaled the descent into rote, ‘feminine’ mimesis in contrast to images based on drawings and, as a result, equated with ‘masculine’ forethought and intellect.13

Style Makes the Man As noted, one explanation for the inability or unwillingness of early modern writers to recognize Rubens as an aesthetic compromise is his transferred artistic loyalty from the Tuscan to the Venetian schools during the beginning of the second phase of his long career. In the wake of Caravaggio’s art-world shake-up and the seemingly unshakable supremacy of the Carracci Rubens did in fact provide an artistic alternative. Although his bold painterly style was seemingly unrehearsed, his rigorously humanistic approach to the study and interpretation of textual and material sources was augmented by his encyclopedic familiarity with ancient as well as modern art and, perhaps more tellingly, his technical ability as a draftsman. Rubens was, moreover, an enthusiastic copyist and a distinguished collector (and corrector) of drawings by other artists, including his contemporaries. At his death, he was said to possess six drawings by Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese—and at least two sheets by Michelangelo.14 The importance Rubens placed on patient observation and conscientious draftsmanship is not only apparent in notebooks crammed with studies of Italian art and historical costumes but also in the artistic practice of his best and most accomplished disciple, Anthony van Dyck, who compiled similar notebooks—with sketches based on Rubens’s original drawings as well as those of others.15 Elaborate forms of attire, novel figural groupings and gestures, and all manner of body parts in motion—characteristically extracted and decontextualized from engravings, paintings, and sculptures—were deemed by Rubens as subjects appropriate for drawing (see e.g. Fig 1.9, after Michelangelo).16 His early encounters with classical sculpture formed the conceptual basis for the meaning-making capacity of the human body 12 Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon, 104–5. 13 On the disegno/colore debate, in addition to the incendiary revision by Reilly, “Taming of the Blue,” other important studies include Sohm, “Gendered Style in Italian Art Criticism”; Jacobs, “Aretino and Michelangelo”; and Alpers, “Art History and its Exclusions.” 14 The drawings are lost; Jaffé, “Rubens as a Collector of Drawings.” 15 Jaffé, “Second Sketch Book by Van Dyck.” 16 On Rubens’s copies after Michelangelo, see Wood, Rubens Drawing on Italy, 16, 42–47.

214 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

in his works which, coupled with his ability to conjure captivatingly human, lifesized figures with seemingly minimal effort or preparation, set him apart as a Flemish painter. If few contemporary critics acknowledged Rubens as a prodigy of the pen and pencil, all agreed on his facility with paint.17 Indeed, as his career and celebrity extended, Rubens’s reputation for excellence as a colorist was achieved at the expense of his mastery of figure drawing, a talent of his frequently contested throughout the midto late seventeenth century by a growing class of connoisseurs and academicians. Rubens was repeatedly portrayed by these authors as an artist who, like Titian before him, overcame deficiencies in technical skill with an intuitive approach to painting. As a Fleming, Rubens was also sporadically understood as a painter who consciously set aside an early investment in the theoretical demands of central Italian style as exemplified by Raphael and Michelangelo—and/or the cutting edge metaphysics of Caravaggesque chiaroscuro—for the baser, unintellectual interests of Venetian practice. It might seem the ultimate honor to be deemed the heir, if not the reincarnation, of Titian (who died the year before Rubens was born). But the designation was loaded with a range of moral and philosophical associations owing to contemporary writers’ deployment of ‘Venetian’ as a euphemism for womanish art. This critical burden would soon become evident in the well-known juxtaposition of Rubens the colorist and Poussin the draftsman beginning with the late seventeenth-century treatises of the French academician Charles-Alphonse Du Fresnoy and his editor and friend, Roger de Piles. Half a century after his death, Rubens’s art was paradigmatic of a loosely expressive form of painting where the attire, accessories, and bodies of women in particular are enlivened with color rather than delimited by line. Accordingly, the use of Rubens’s art and aesthetics as a baseline against which to measure the debt owed to ‘seductive’ and ‘sensual’ Venetian coloring by subsequent baroque and rococo artists is well documented.18 Less understood is the commonplace of feminizing rhetoric in early modern constructions of Rubens himself. Already in his own day, Rubens’s critics employed the language of artistic debate in order to deride his competence as a diplomat, as for example in a letter written to his secretary of state by Nicolas de Baugy, French ambassador to the Spanish Netherlands. “The painter Rubens is in town,” writes de Baugy, from Brussels in 1624. “The Infanta has commanded him to paint the portrait of the Prince of Poland, a matter in which I fancy he will succeed better than in the negotiations for a truce, to which he can only give superficial color and shade, without body or solid foundation.”19 Richly apt is the Frenchman’s dismissal of Rubens’s 17 In fact, a Heldian technical and stylistic analysis of Rubens’s drawings is very much a product of the twentieth century. See Logan, review of Rubens: Selected Drawings, by Julius S. Held, but also Burchard and d’Hulst, Rubens Drawings. 18 Nowhere better than Lichtenstein, Eloquence of Color, esp.152–68.

All That Depends on Color

215

conduct of foreign relations as merely “superficial,” the negligible achievement of a famous manipulator of color and shadow, if not smoke and mirrors. One might surmise that the ambassador also sought to emasculate Rubens for his subjection to the Infanta Isabel as the Spanish woman on top in the artist’s homeland. In any case, seventeenth-century views of Rubens’s art as derivatively pleasing but flawed—and of Rubens himself as arrogant, vain, and pretentious—tend to conflict with modern-day images of the inveterate worldling, a hirsute, prototypically manly impresario who reaches maturity as a Senecan stalwart and dies as the passionate husband of an oversexed and adoring teenage bride. Indeed, Rubens continues to occupy a role in modern art history as a (male) painter’s painter whose ‘appreciation’ of women reveals itself in the obvious pleasure he takes in rendering their frequently nude bodies by means of a pictorial mode well matched to such touching and erotic subject/matter. The perfect correspondence of Rubens’s manipulation of pigment to the voluptuous female body type he chose to render again and again is often observed. While accepting its premise, Svetlana Alpers has challenged the implications of this conception of Rubens, arguing that we should grasp the “androgynous possibilities” offered by his painted bodies.20 To her, Rubens renders flesh not as “beautiful surface” but “all too solid human stuff” charged with materializing the condition common to men and women alike.21 Yet for early modern subscribers to an Aristotelian outlook, form and matter, masculine and feminine, structure and surface, though related, were neither commensurable nor equivalent. The relationships between opposites, or contraries—in which Vasari had rooted his Florentine prejudices—had been well-established prior to the Renaissance in the so-called Pythagorean binaries discussed in Aristotle’s Physics. However, the Philosopher’s sets of terms were not, strictly speaking, pairs, since, as David Summers writes: they are hierarchical rather than symmetrical, the first being superior, just as form and matter are both necessary principles but form is higher. “Male” belongs to the category which contains “limited” (or definite), “oddness” (of numbers), “unity,” “right,” “rest,” “straight,” “light,” “good,” and “square”; “female” is associated with “unlimited’ (or indefinite), “even” (as in two, four), “plurality,” “left,” “movement,” “the curved,” “dark,” “bad,” and “oblong.” Any one of these might trigger the idea of the others.22

Perhaps, then, what Rubens’s supposedly feminine style and affinity for female subjects has made most problematic is its seeming reconciliation of Aristotelian, or 19 De Baugy to d’Ocquerre, Brussels, 13 September 1624, quoted in Rooses, Rubens, 395. 20 Alpers, Making of Rubens, 138. 21 Alpers, Making of Rubens, 129. 22 Summers, “Form and Gender,” 257–58.

216 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Pythagorean, contraries in an art where human stuff—not only soft flesh, but flexing muscle—and beautiful, passive, surface are combined to make an oxymoronic concept like the powerful woman possible. Notwithstanding an occasional (and conventionally ephebic) St. Sebastian or his intriguingly multiple and exceptionally sexualized renditions of the fleshy and insatiable man-beast Silenus, art historians have been right to note Rubens’s more obvious “fixation,” to use Alpers’s word, on the naked female form. Along these lines, Rubens’s artistic identity has been irrevocably shaped by Burckhardt’s vision of him as the untouchable creator of a bewitching bevy of female nudes who “by the mere beauty of the skin blended with light and chiaroscuro, captivate the judgment before we can even realize the poetry of the subject and the beauty of the form.”23 Burckhardt’s belief that the “mere beauty of the skin” of a painted female nude is at once sufficient to seduce the beholder and define the artist, only slightly recalibrates a descriptive formula that was well in place for Rubensian painting even before the advent of Rubens.

Practicing Venice Rubens’s adoption of Venetian artistic practices also went a long way to secure his critical association with the northern Italian tradition. Like Tintoretto, who effectively established the oil sketch as a standard step in studio practice, Rubens increasingly preferred to plan his works in paint rather than ink or charcoal.24 But while he did not invent the oil sketch—for him a free and direct first thought worked out in rapid, often notational, brush strokes, visibly evolving compositions, and unblended pigments—Rubens may be said to have perfected it by elevating the diminutive, briskly executed studies to valued works of art in themselves. More than 450 of Rubens’s oil sketches survive, many of which were avidly acquired by collectors shortly after his death.25 Spontaneous by definition, the oil sketch frequently took the place of or superseded preparatory drawings for Rubens. Oil sketches like that of Peace Embracing Plenty discussed in the previous chapter, were therefore a valuable component of Rubens’s studio practice. The prized smallscale panels commonly contain iconographical details and compositional structures not present in the artist’s realized works, an indication of his ability to incorporate new ideas in the paintings without further preliminary studies. Yet the oil sketches were also understood as impulsive eruptions of Rubens’s passionate artistic spirit and, as such, confoundingly similar to his openly retouched full-scale works. In the 23 Burckhardt, Rubens, 40. 24 On the history of the oil sketch see Wittkower et al., Masters of the Loaded Brush, pp. xv–xxv. 25 Sutton et al., Drawn by the Brush, 17. See also Held, Oil Sketches; Peter Paul Rubens, a Touch of Brilliance, 10–11, 17.

All That Depends on Color

217

absence of studies and drawings, Rubens’s finished paintings could therefore be approached—both scathingly and admiringly—as oil sketches writ-large; an unrehearsed art form hastily achieved in a fit of genius and frenzy. As Catherine Lusheck has noted, such “Commotions of the mind” were described by William Sanderson, who had observed the artist at work on making a painting, presumably while in London in 1629–30. “In a draft of designe,” Sanderson wrote, “the artist must face every circumstance of his matter in hand”: As usually Rubens would (with his Arms across) sit musing upon his work for some time; and would force out, his over-charged brain into description, as not to be contained in the Compass of ordinary practice, but by a violent driving on of the passion. The Commotions of the mind, are not to be cooled by slow performance: discreet diligence, brings forth Excellence: Care, and Exercise, are the chiefest precepts of Art. But diligence is not to stagger and stay at unnecessary Experiments; and therefore I have observed in excellent Pieces a willing neglect, which hath added singular grace unto it. Be not so over-curious that the grace of your work be abated by the over-diligence; as never to tell, when you have done well: therein you will be maximus the Calumniator, your owne worst detractor.26

Sanderson refers to “willing neglect” or negligence as, in this case, a virtue. The singular grace he describes is undoubtedly the principal quality of Castiglione’s nonchalant sprezzatura, wherein “whatever is done or said appear[s] to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.”27 In the Courtier, Castiglione’s noble interlocutors find “much grace” in this notion. The dissimulating, because seemingly impromptu, courtly behavior he praises, as much a philosophy as a personal style, had far-reaching implications for early modern conceptions of sex difference.28 Despite their separation by more than a century, both Castiglione and Sanderson equate grace with effortlessness and effortlessness with the willful abnegation of forethought; thus the unchecked and ‘thoughtless’ artfulness they extol is potentially gendered feminine. Seemingly aware of this possibility, Sanderson counters what might be construed as impotence or womanly lassitude in the “cooled performance” of Rubens—whom he earlier describes as thoughtfully (passively?) posed with his “Arms across” to compose a picture—with an image of the artist’s mental vigor and physical speed. Rubens’s Venetian appreciation as opposed to Tuscan sublimation of 26 Sanderson, Graphice, 34. Although Sanderson’s ekphrases of Titian and Palma borrow liberally from previously published letters by Sir Henry Wotton, his eyewitness account reputedly dates from a visit to Rubens’s studio in 1629–30. See Hard, “Ideas from Bacon and Wotton”; Lusheck, Rubens and the Eloquence of Drawing, 106. 27 Castiglione, Courtier, 43. 28 A parallel point about the social significance of sprezzatura in distinguishing early modern artists from craftsmen is made by Held, Oil Sketches, 7.

218 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

color may nonetheless be his undoing by English standards, for as Sanderson goes on to observe: “So Ruben[s] in his affected Colouring sometimes in the privy Gallery at Whitehall […] seem[s] exceedingly to abuse that gentle and modest license, which always graced the work of that admirable Michael Angelo.”29 By another, more tortuous, path, Castiglione would attempt to mitigate sprezzatura’s grammatically feminine gender by opposing its “simplicity and nonchalance” to womanly artifice. For the Renaissance author, this cursedly cosmetic artificiality, or “bane of affectation,” is best exemplified by the female sex’s habitual “embellishing of the face with so much care and sometimes pain” toward the vain pursuit of outward beauty.30 It is not without irony that in this context of artfulness, making an active effort, elsewhere a sign of manliness, turns out to be as ungraceful as it is feminine. As Castiglione’s speaker makes clear, the line between women painting and painting women would appear to be a blurry one. If a pretty woman is always a sort of affected painter, might not one who paints—rather than draws—pretty women be similarly construed? However well-thought-out Rubens’s oil sketches were in reality, their medium, provisionally the same viscous and dissembling hues used by women to adorn or disguise their faces, relegated them to a status below that of the cerebrally conceived preparatory drawing.31 Rubens’s empirical, even scientific, knowledge of vision—evidenced by his involvement in the production of the Six Books of Optics (1613), written by François d’Aguilon—was belied by his reliance on color. It was Rubens’s Jesuit collaborator who had first isolated as primary the colors red, yellow, and blue, designating a further range of compound or composite hues derived from combining these three.32 The artist’s post-Italy works, in which stark juxtapositions of primary and complementary colors frequently occur, testify to his practical knowledge of incipient early modern chromatic theory. Indeed, as Martin Kemp and others have suggested, it seems entirely reasonable that Rubens, with his insuperable experience mixing pigments, would have aided in his cleric friend’s scientific discovery. To examine at close range the beautiful—read female—bodies for which Rubens is so well known is to witness his attempt to recreate human flesh from an almost subcutaneous level. Nevertheless, his complex technique, where even the pinkest skin is commonly underlaid, bruise-like, with patches of green, orange, blue, and plummy purple, was gendered femininely impulsive and disordered, thereby Venetian. Despite the intellectual and scientific company he kept, Rubens was linked to a nationalistic tradition that was, due to its privileging of inherently superficial color, damningly affiliated with feminine artifice.33 29 Sanderson, Graphice, 74. 30 Castiglione, Courtier, 65; see also Puttfarken, Titian and Tragic Painting, 183–204. 31 For the cosmetic debates and their relationship to early modern painting see Phillippy, Painting Women. On eighteenth-century rococo “homologies between painting and feminine cosmetics” see the important article by Hyde, “‘Makeup’ of the Marquise,” 458. 32 On Aguilon see Ziggelaar, Francois de Aguilon, S.J. See also Shapiro, “Artists’ Colors and Newton’s Colors,” 606–8; Kemp, Science of Art, 274–84. 33 Held, “Rubens and Aguilonius.”

All That Depends on Color

219

Rubens and Italian Criticism after Caravaggio When Rubens hastily left Rome in 1608, Italy’s artistic vanguard had yet to be named. But there were some clear contenders. First among painters whose unconventional style and innovative technique was recognized—and hotly contested—was a man just six years Rubens’s senior, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610). Caravaggio’s first documented commission, the Calling of St. Matthew and the Martyrdom of St. Matthew for the Contarelli Chapel in the Roman church of San Luigi dei Francesi, dates from around the year Rubens arrived in Italy c.1599–1600. By 1606, Caravaggio had fled Rome under suspicion of murder. By 1610, he was dead. In the interim, Rubens had found himself negotiating the purchase by his patron, the duke of Mantua, of the Italian artist’s rejected and much-derided Death of the Virgin (1605–6), even as the duke refused to acquire a work by his personal court artist, Rubens himself. However professionally jealous he might have been, Rubens’s artistic interest in Caravaggio was both sincere and enduring, as is revealed by his much smaller and more Northern-looking version (1612–14) of the Italian artist’s Entombment (1602–4) today in Ottawa.34 On another point in the stylistic trajectory of early baroque painting, though far from the opposite end, were the Carracci. The brothers Agostino (1557–1602) and Annibale (1560–1609) and their cousin, Lodovico (1555–1619), opened the Accademia degli Incamminati, translated by Alice Sedgwick Wohl as “Academy of the those who have set forth on the way,” in 1580, establishing Bologna as a center of the newest developments in naturalistic—yet orthodox—drawing and painting. The painters—Annibale, in particular—were widely and enthusiastically hailed, first by Giovanni Battista Agucchi (1570–1632), and subsequently by Giovanni Pietro Bellori (1615–1696) and Carlo Cesare Malvasia (1616–1693), as artists by whom a rare mastery of color and design was demonstrated in equal measure. Agucchi’s Trattato della pittura, written around the time of 1607–15, but published in 1646, praises the Carracci in exactly this fashion. First, however, the Bolognese Agucchi expresses disgust with the “dark shadows of the early barbarianism” (presumably a reference to Caravaggio) and an equally unacceptable new style “based more on appearance than substance.” Practitioners of this illusory manner, he writes, were satisfied to feed the eyes of the people with the loveliness of the colors and rich vestments. Using things taken from here and there, painting forms that were gross in outline, rarely well joined together, and straying into other notable errors […].35 34 On the differences between the two see Puttfarken, Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 152–53. 35 Agucchi, Diverse figure da Annibale Carracci […] (Rome, 1646), ed. Enggass and Brown, 29. Portions of the Trattato are reprinted in Mahon, Studies in Seicento Art, 241–58. See also Muller, “Rubens’s Theory and Practice,” 234.

220 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Although likely aimed at contemporary Venetian painters, Agucchi’s backhanded praise of lovely and delectable color—itself a kind of enticing, fancy dress—and his condemnation of poor draftsmanship echo the gendered stock phrases most often used to discuss Titian and Veronese in the previous century as well as the language so often used to describe Rubens in the decades to follow. Rubens’s Italian works such as the paintings for the high altar of the Chiesa Nuova would almost certainly have been known to Agguchi, who counted the painter Domenichino among the members of his Roman household. Even so, the as-yet-undetermined style of the young Fleming may not have caught the learned Agucchi’s eye. This is regrettably typical of Rubens’s early critical fortunes. He was not to have a Flemish biographer in his lifetime and evaluations of his work prior to his death are scarce. Even Vicente Carducho, the Spanish Habsburgs’ respected Italian-born court painter and theorist mentions Rubens only in passing in his Dialogos de la pintura, which was published in 1633, just five years after Rubens’s triumphant second visit to Spain.36 The most detailed and sophisticated appraisals of Rubens’s art thus originate not from his immediate contemporaries but from those writing in the second half of the seventeenth century when the critical discourse of painting connoisseurship can be said to have burgeoned internationally, gradually extending beyond Italy to the Netherlands, France, and, in embryonic form, to England.37 However, Rubens’s name does appear briefly in some of the earlier seventeenth-century Italian sources. There one finds that the Flemish painter’s choice to assert his artistic identity through “furious” brushwork and layers of raw pigment was well recognized by writers and critics as aligning him with a certain manner of painting derived from the innovative northern Italian tradition though, initially at least, not necessarily situated under the heading of Venetianism. An early example of this attitude is found in a letter written in the decade following Caravaggio’s death, by Vincenzo Giustiniani (1594–1637), the pioneering Roman connoisseur and one of Caravaggio’s most ardent patrons.38 Giustiniani included Rubens among a short list of second-generation non-Italian Caravaggesque painters (including Ribera, Honthorst, and Heemskerk) whom he highly valued for their knowledge of “how to handle colors almost from instinct” and paint “directly from natural objects.”39 As Giustiniani notes at the conclusion of his description of naturalistic painting, most of the best modern painters of this type “were Flemish but were active in Rome and had a good sense of color.”40 In other words, despite their 36 Carducho, Dialogos de la pintura, 66, 350. 37 Rubens is favorably mentioned by the Dutch art theorist Samuel van Hoogstraten, in relation to inventive composers and the Venetian colorists, in his Introduction to the Academy of Painting, or The Visible World (1678); see Weststeijn, Visible World, 55, 142, 264. 38 The letter is discussed by Bell, “Some Seventeenth-Century Appraisals.” 39 Giustiniani, Racolta di lettere sulla pittura (Rome, 1768), ed. Enggass and Brown, 19. 40 Giustiniani, Racolta di lettere sulla pittura (Rome, 1768), ed. Enggass and Brown, 19.

All That Depends on Color

221

Northern or Spanish roots, the painters mentioned developed a following among Italian collectors and used color in an appropriately gradated, tonal manner that remained pleasing and realistic without lapsing into stereotypical Netherlandish fussiness. In this sense, as a painter who supposedly worked from direct observation, Rubens, in Giustiniani’s view, possessed Caravaggio’s aptitude for imitating what he saw before him but lacked the Italian painter’s imaginative use of color in the service of dramatic, often rhetorical, optical effects.41 Giustiniani’s relatively fair-minded inclusion of Flemish naturalism and good coloring within the spheres of Roman painting is one indication of a brief hiatus of the parochial debate between Venetian colore and Tuscan disegno incited by Vasari some seventy-five years earlier. Though of a much younger generation than Rubens and Giustiniani, the Modena-based priest and physician Francesco Scannelli (1616–1663) was among the first seventeenth-century critics to strike a qualitative balance between inspired colorito and rational draftsmanship. Writing in his Il Microcosmo della pittura, published in 1657, Scannelli purports to praise three schools of painting equally while in fact providing a hierarchical schema that proceeds from the first foundations of “scholarly” Tuscan painting to the second school of animated Venetian realism and, higher, to the synthetic ideal of the third and best, Lombard, school.42 Scannelli’s protagonist is therefore neither Michelangelo nor Titian but Antonio Allegri, best-known as Correggio (1489–1534), a category-defying Emilian. To Scannelli’s mind, preparatory drawings were a hindrance to Correggio’s God-given spontaneity and invention. This Renaissance artist’s uniqueness is shown to spectacular effect in the numinous tangibility of his daringly erotic Jupiter and Io (1532–33). In fact, Correggio’s painting destined for the Palazzo del Te of the Gonzaga Duke Federico II can be seen to enact a balanced encounter of color and line in the curiously gender-upended figures of a cloud-like, disembodied Jupiter who wraps smoky ‘hands’ around Io’s solid and far more demarcated female form. Although Correggio executed numerous sketches and studies, in the end, according to Scannelli, he wisely put aside his drawings in order “to find fulfillment through pigment and in the highest type of art.”43 Scannelli contrasts Correggio with classicizing baroque painters such as Guido Reni, whose workmanlike manner prevents him from achieving the painterly sprezzatura crucial to (the enjoyment of) great art. True to his roots, Scannelli’s principal interest is Italian painters. Yet in his biography, the first, of Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (known as Guercino, 1591–1666), he briefly refers to Rubens in a way that suggests he and other contemporary art writers were paying sufficient attention to perceive a definitive alteration in Rubens’s handling of light and color within the span of his four decades as a painter. Under a section dealing with “investigations of the reasons 41 Bell, “Some Seventeenth-Century Appraisals,” 123. 42 See Enggass and Brown, ed., Sources, 41–42. 43 Scannelli, Il Microcosmo della pittura (Cesena, 1657), ed. Enggass and Brown, 47.

222 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

why [painters] today have changed their styles to the lighter manner,” Scannelli cites “more general and adequate reasons” for Guido Reni’s and Peter Paul Rubens’s “second manner.”44 Including Rubens in an otherwise all-Italian (indeed, mostly Bolognese) litany comprising Guercino, Francesco Albani, Pietro da Cortona, and Reni, Scanelli writes: “All of these men, who are the most capable and famous masters of our time, have afterwards, during the period of their greatest acclaim, changed over in their manner of working to the lighter colors.”45 From both chromatic and dramatic standpoints, the pure timbre and gentle clarity of Guercino (1591–1666), and especially the less painterly Reni, is admittedly quite different in flavor from the saturated, high-keyed tonality of Rubens’s hectic scenes and energetic actors. But it is still worth remembering that among the Bolognese artists, Reni and Albani (as well as the unmentioned Domenichino), had studied together in the Bologna studio of Denys Calvaert (1540–1619), an Antwerp-born painter who moved to Italy in 1562. Calvaert founded his own art academy and lived and died in the home of the accademia carracessca, with the exception of a brief stint in Rome. That these Lombard artists so famed for the refined classicism and chaste sweetness of their imagery had received their earliest technical formation under the direction of a Fleming further complicates the stylistic classification of certain early baroque artists as strictly Northern, Italian, or even northern Italian.46 Like Calvaert’s art, Scannelli’s remarks about style-switching hold special meaning in view of his knowledge and appreciation of traditionally Bolognese pictorial concerns—light, color, effortlessness—and the plight of non-Roman artists in a city where the demands of enormously rich and influential local patrons frequently outweighed a painter’s personal artistic inclinations and aesthetic philosophy. Thus, in registering what was to him a regrettable stylistic turn from enigmatically indeterminate and expressive imagery to paler, prettier palettes, more brightly and uniformly lit, Scannelli documents a concerted artistic retreat from (in particular) Caravaggio’s intense and artificial tenebrism and unmodulated leaps in value. In some cases, as well, Scannelli simply wishes to assert his own renegade dislike of what he viewed as the bloodless antique beauty of which Reni and Guercino, in contrast to their northern Italian precursor, Correggio, had become the most famous purveyors.47 But likewise for Rubens, the so-called second manner was one in which the starker drama of Caravaggesque color and lighting appears to have been intentionally replaced by softer transitions and the cheerfully harmonious colorism of

44 Scannelli, Il Microcosmo della pittura (Cesena, 1657), ed. Enggass and Brown, 99. 45 Scannelli, Il Microcosmo della pittura (Cesena, 1657), ed. Enggass and Brown, 99. 46 DaCosta Kaufmann briefly notes the need for further art historical consideration of Calvaert’s Flemishness within the context of cinquecento and seicento Bolognese art in a review of the monograph by Simone Twiehaus, Dionisio Calvaert (um 1540–1619): Die Altarwerke (2002). 47 Enggass and Brown, ed., Sources, 97.

All That Depends on Color

223

the type associated less with the chiaroscuro of the Lombard than the sunny coral, gleaming gold, and cerulean blue of Bellini, Titian, and their followers.

Good Venetian Color: Seventeenth-Century Critics and Rubens’s Second Manner In 1642, just two years after his death, Rubens’s first biography, a short, rather formulaic Vita, was published in Rome by Giovanni Baglione. The German biography of Rubens published in 1675 by Joachim von Sandrart (1606–1688) is far more personal and journalistic in tone. The painter Sandrart had lived in Italy and was well-acquainted with seventeenth-century Roman, Venetian, and northern art. Trained as an engraver, he had supervised the production of the Galleria Giustiniani, an impressive two-volume set of prints devoted to Vincenzo Giustiniani’s sculpture collection.48 Sandrart had witnessed Rubens’s interaction with mutual acquaintances in a circle of prolific and celebrated Dutch painters (including his teacher, Gerrit van Honthorst, as well as Abraham Bloemaert) during the Flemish painter’s visits to Utrecht and Amsterdam around 1627. Writing with an air of reflective judiciousness, Sandrart observes that Rubens had “diligently contemplated the praiseworthy statues of antiquity, as well as the works of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael of Urbino and others, always bearing in mind that the aforementioned Venetian manner suited him better.”49 But Sandrart’s invocation of the Venetian manner implied more than the valorization of color, hands-on manipulation of oil paint, or the rendering of natural-looking figures even-handedly bathed in light. Throughout the seventeenth century, the works of Titian and his one-time pupil, Veronese, were also associated with certain kinds of subjects and themes for which their refined and graceful style was thought to be best. First among these was the female body. Whether grandly encased in fashionable silks or barely concealed by diaphanous gauze, the female figure was continually linked to the highest achievements of Venetian style. Following Vasari, who had the last word in so many things, Venetian artists had to endure a critical caesura of almost a century. It would be up to Carlo Ridolfi, known as the ‘Venetian Vasari,’ to give northern Italian artists their due. Ridolfi, a student of one of Veronese’s disciples, includes a lengthy and punctilious biography of Veronese in his Le maraviglie dell’ arte (1648) where, in fact, he challenges the Vasarian view of Venetian painters by confirming Veronese’s profound interest in drawing and copying the works of Parmigianino among others.50 A somewhat reactionary baroque 48 Cropper, “Vincenzo Giustiniani’s Galleria,” 101–26. 49 Sandrart, Life of Peter Paul Rubens, trans. Belkin, 36. 50 Pignatti and Pedrocco, Veronese: catalogo completo, 9.

224 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

critic-painter, Ridolfi greatly respected both Titian and Tintoretto.51 Suavely uniting the two Renaissance extremes of artistic excellence, he praises the well-traveled Veronese for his careful study of Raphael and Michelangelo and for his “more than masterful inventions, for the perfected beauty of his subjects, for the pleasing nature of his faces, for the variety of his expressions, for his indefinable charm, and for the infinitely seductive beguilements that are put into his works.”52 In art writing that would follow the publication of Ridolfi’s laborious documentation of Veronese’s works, patronage, and highly successful career, the artist is consequently cast as Titian’s well-behaved protégé—in contrast to Tintoretto, for whom, according to Ridolfi, Titian formed an abiding hatred.53 Subsequent critical approaches to Veronese as a derivative painter are underscored by their frequent, coda-like placement in the biographical and theoretical literature directly after a discussion of Titian, on whose description they often depend or elaborate (the same literary technique occurs in treatments of Van Dyck, who is often though incorrectly cast as Rubens’s apprentice, rather than as his chief follower and ‘favorite’ student). For example, in Charles-Alphonse Du Fresnoy’s Sentiments, a compilation of “judgments” published by the author’s student Roger de Piles in 1668, a brief entry for Veronese is virtually appended to the longer description of Titian. Du Fresnoy, Nicolas Poussin’s former room-mate in Rome, begins his entry for the older painter as follows: Titian was one of the greatest colorists, who was ever known; he designed with much more ease and practice than Georgione [sic]. There are to be seen women and children of his hand, which are admirable both for the design and coloring: the gust of them is delicate, charming and noble, with a certain pleasing negligence of the head-dresses, the draperies and ornaments of habits, which are wholly peculiar to him. As for the figures of men, he has designed them but moderately well. There are even some of his draperies which are mean and savour of a little gust. His painting is wonderfully glowing, sweet and delicate. 54

Du Fresnoy’s views on Titian’s one-time pupil continue in the same manner. Veronese, he begins:

51 On Ridolfi’s counter-Vasarian stance and publications see the introduction to Ridolfi, Life of Titian, ed. and trans. Bondanella et al., 41–49. 52 “maestose invenzioni, per la venustà de’ soggetti, per la piacevolezza de’ volti, per la varietà de sembianti, per le vaghezze, e per gl’ infiniti allettamenti, che frammise nelle opera sue […].” Ridolfi, Le maraviglie dell’ arte, 75. My translation. 53 For recent discussions of the sometimes rabidly competitive nature of their relationships see Ilchman et al., ed., Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese. 54 Du Fresnoy, De arte graphica (Paris, 1668), ed. and trans. Allen et al., 405; English translation from Du Fresnoy, Art of Painting, trans. Dryden (London, 1695), 218.

All That Depends on Color

225

was wonderfully graceful in his airs of women: with great variety of shining draperies; and incredible vivacity, and ease. Nevertheless his composition is sometimes improper; and his design is incorrect. But his colouring, and whatsoever depends on it, is so very charming in his pictures, that it surprizes at the first sight, and makes us totally forget those other qualities which are wanting in him.55

The French author’s equivocal comments would seem to align him with the school of the classicist, Poussin, where clinically accurate drawing was valued above all else. In fact, however, Du Fresnoy was a great advocate of coloring whose emphasis, as numerous scholars have noted, prepared the way for the royal championing of Rubens’s art over Poussin’s.56 In this respect, Du Fresnoy’s account of Rubens, which maintains a special piquancy in John Dryden’s translation of 1695, subtly imparts the feminized flavor of his previous appraisals of Titian and Veronese without criticizing the Flemish painter quite so harshly for committing similar errors: And though we cannot but observe in all his Paintings, somewhat of great and noble; yet it must be confess’d, that generally speaking, he design’d not correctly: But for all the other parts of Painting, he was as absolute a Master of them, and possess’d them all as throughly as any of his Predecessors in that noble Art. His principal Studies were made in Lombardy, after the Works of Titian, Paul Veronese and Tintoret; whose Cream he has skimm’d (if you will allow the Phrase) and extracted from their several Beauties many general Maxims and infallible Rules, which he always follow’d.57

The author’s recourse to cream as a sensory, and gustatory, metaphor is noteworthy. At around the same time, the Venetian critic Marco Boschini had cited Palma Il Giovane’s description of Titian’s fondness for “‘condiments’ in the shape of last retouches,” such that he would “model the light into half tint with the rub of his finger.”58 Du Fresnoy goes on to emphasize the selective manner in which Rubens had taken “all the other parts” of painting besides drawing, namely the best of northern Italian coloring, for his own. Following Venetian “rules” he manages to cloak his supposedly flawed design with the superficial appearance of greatness and nobility—becoming in the process a worthy follower of his cinquecento Italian predecessors.

55 Du Fresnoy, De arte graphica, ed. and trans. Allen et al., 405; English translation from Du Fresnoy, Art of Painting, trans. Dryden (London, 1695), 219. 56 See, for example, Holt, ed., Documentary History of Art, II, 164. On Du Fresnoy, see the introduction to Du Fresnoy, De arte graphica, ed. and trans., Allen et al. 57 Du Fresnoy, Art of Painting, trans. Dryden (London, 1695), 225. 58 Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Titian, I, 219; see also Sohm, Pittoresco, 152–53.

226 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Written a generation after Rubens’s death, Du Fresnoy’s glancing rhetoric, adroitly moving between coded and gendered categories of praise and blame, was a sign of things to come. In the last forty years of the seventeenth century, when the theoretical discourse of colore/disegno recommenced in full, the gendering as feminine, of color, bodies, ornamentation, and pigment, that is, the material substance of paint, was well established. Taken together, Du Fresnoy’s assessment of Rubens’s infallible adherence to Venetian standards and Sandrart’s characterization of Rubens’s natural affinity for the ‘Venetian manner’ over against Tuscan style mark the beginning of a critical arc. This gendered definition of Rubens would continue into the twentieth century with Kenneth Clark’s classic claim that “Rubens did for the female nude what Michelangelo had done for the male.”59 Fundamental to this art historical understanding of Rubens as a painter who specialized in the representation of women is, as I have suggested, his conscious adoption of a Venetian painterly style and technique which was itself gendered feminine in the art-theoretical discourse of the day.

Something Wanting in his Nature: Rubens and Bellori Unlike the French classicist, Nicolas Poussin, who was assumed into the Italian (i.e. Roman) pantheon, Rubens was portrayed by the Roman establishment as an outsider looking in on Italian art. The Flemish painter owes this dubious expatriate status to one writer. Giovanni Pietro Bellori (1613–1696) was the authoritative Roman critic and biographer who served at one time as the artistic adviser and librarian of Christina of Sweden and, from 1670, as commissioner of antiquities of Rome. A close friend and admirer of Poussin, whose art he viewed as appropriately faithful and properly antiquarian in its translation of the (lost) pictorial vocabulary of the Roman imperial age, Bellori provides an invaluable, though not always accurate, late seventeenth-century documentation of many of Rubens’s major works.60 In an increasingly cosmopolitan era, Bellori deemed a French painter the inimitable modern interpreter of Roman antiquity even as he himself served a transgressive Swedish Lutheran convert to Catholicism.61 By the century’s end, as is well known, the controversy over the qualitative and quantitative ends of Rubens versus Poussin was at the heart of the ethical-stylistic debates which were to consume the newly formed French Academy through much of the eighteenth century.62 In a passage from his 59 Clark, Nude, 205. 60 As Sparti, “Bellori’s Biography of Rubens,” demonstrates, de Piles was “better informed” about Rubens than was Bellori, whom de Piles had met and even supplied with biographical information about the artist. 61 Although, as is well known, the France of Poussin’s youth and early career was steeped in antique, especially Roman, culture, for which see Olson, Poussin and France, 26, 29. 62 On Rubens’s significance to de Piles in this regard, see Alpers, Making of Rubens, 65–88.

All That Depends on Color

227

lengthy and, in fact, quite patronizing, Life of Rubens (1672), which lays the foundation for the terms of the subsequent French disputes, Bellori faults Rubens for having: failed to achieve the beautiful forms of nature for want of good draftsmanship, because of which, and because of something wanting in his nature that would not suffer correction, he was kept from graceful beauty in the aria delle teste and from grace in outlines, which he distorted with his style.63

Bellori’s negative appraisal not only reappropriates the quality of grace for the chauvinistic disegno faction, it also portrays Rubens as ungracefully haughty and arrogant, an obstinate Fleming unable to “suffer correction” although he himself famously offered it to the stable of painters in his employ. Bellori also openly parrots Vasari/ Michelangelo’s polite derision of Titian for never learning to “draw well” in Venice, which should be kept in mind when considering his more generous-seeming, commonly cited observation that Rubens “brought the good color of Venice to Flanders, which was the basis of his fame.”64 The Italian critic might almost have written ‘the basis of his infamy,’ for elsewhere in his account he attests (with similarly veiled disapproval) to the adverse effect of northern Italian models on Rubens’s art. Not only was Rubens inclined to paint his at times anatomically incorrect historical figures in anachronously modern dress, his vivacious nudes were artless. Bellori claims that Rubens had “studied” in Venice, where he: looked always at Titian, Paolo Veronese, and Tintoretto, observing the chiaroscuro and the masses of hues. He colored from nature and was intense in his mixtures, making light radiate through contrast with forms in shadow so that he was admirable in contrasts of shadow and light. He maintained such unity and resoluteness that his figures seem executed in one dash of the brush and infused with one breath, as can be recognized in the Luxembourg gallery, which is completely harmonious and has the most stupendous effects of color and is the most beautiful and glorious product of his brush.65

Here, too, Bellori’s summation appears complimentary until one considers that for him “figures executed in one dash of the brush” were inferior to the frieze-like, painstakingly rendered forms of a classicist such as Poussin. In a series of isolated observations, Bellori thus manages to spoil an ostensibly favorable estimation of Rubens 63 Bellori, Lives, 206. For Bellori’s rhetorical style and theoretical inconsistencies (with particular attention to the biographies of Caravaggio and the Carracci), see Raben, “Bellori’s Art.” 64 Bellori, Lives, 205. 65 Bellori, Lives, 205; the author owned portraits attributed to Titian and Tintoretto, for which see Sparti, “Giovan Pietro Bellori and Annibale Carracci’s Self-Portraits.”

228 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

as a stupendously free colorist in the Venetian manner with a negative denotation drawn from the established central Italian critique of Titian’s style and practice as lacking intellectual force and good design. As Poussin himself had succinctly put it: “the colors in painting are, as it were, blandishments to lure the eyes.”66 “Given such views,” wrote Rudolf Arnheim of the French painter, in one of the twentieth century’s definitive studies of visual perception, “it is not surprising that we find shape identified with the traditional virtues of the male sex, color with the temptations of the female.”67 But to return to Bellori, who begins his jubilant introduction to the Life of Poussin by situating the French emigrant in an era when “the fine arts of disegno were flowering most in Italy and in Rome.”68 This in contrast to his prefatory comments on Rubens, whose art is identified as exceptional among the “evils” of “mechanical and lowly” painting that were “corrupting” Flanders at the time of his birth.69 Later in his account, Bellori identifies Rubens’s Medici cycle as the best example of the art of coloring. Yet of the same artist he will remark elsewhere that however much his subjects were based on antique statues and sources, Rubens was prone to “distort them to such an extent that he left no form or trace by which to recognize them.”70 Bellori was an even harsher critic of the theatrically naturalistic paintings of Caravaggio in this regard. In an important sense, the classical tradition and Roman antiquity are placed in contrast to both Caravaggio, who was similarly accused by Bellori and his colleagues of an incomplete knowledge of ancient models, and with Rubens’s so-called ‘second manner’: the warmer palette, uniform lighting, and painterliness associated at the time with the blandishing colorito and easy naturalism of the Venetian style.71

Everything that Depends on Coloring In the critical discourse of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the northern Italian tradition was gendered feminine in part because it was thought to evince, above all, the ‘female’ qualities of (additive or accidental) color; (intemperate or excessive) materiality; and (unintellectual or unmediated) naturalism. That Venetian painting is not only fit for women as Francisco de Holanda/Michelangelo had remarked of Flemish painting, but evocative of conventionally feminine qualities such as softness and refinement, was stated outright well before Bellori’s time by 66 Poussin, Correspondence, 146; excerpts from these letters of Poussin also appear in Bellori’s Vite (1672). 67 Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, 326. My emphasis. 68 Bellori, Lives, 309. 69 Bellori, Lives, 193. 70 Bellori, Lives, 206. 71 On Bellori’s incorrect opinion that Caravaggio seemed “to imitate art without knowing what it is about,” see, for example, Posèq, “Caravaggio and the Antique.”

All That Depends on Color

229

Ludovico Dolce in his Aretino (1557). There, having praised the careful imitation of the tones of the flesh and the details of fine fashion, the native-born apologist for Venetian painting observes: “I think myself that the delicate body ought to take precedence over the muscular one.”72 But where Dolce praises the privileging of certain types of effeminate subjects, the Frenchman Paul de Fréart, writing in his mock diary of the sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini, likely composed around 1640–43, returns again to a notion of Venetian practice and its products as variable and erratic in a distinctly feminine way: I forgot to mention that he [Bernini] said that Paolo Veronese and Titian sometimes took their brushes and executed things they had not planned, letting themselves be carried away by a kind of frenzy of painting; that was the cause of the marked differences among their works; those of them which had been carefully handled were incomparable while others sometimes were only color without composition of thought.73

Still later in the century, even Roger de Piles, ultimately the great proponent of Rubenisme, notes rather incredulously in his Reflections, first published in 1699: Though Rubens lived seven years in Italy; though he made a considerable collection of medals, statues, and engraved stones; though he examined, understood, and extolled the beauty of the antique […] yet, through education, and the nature of his country, he fell into a Flemish character and sometimes made an ill choice, offending against the regularity of design.74

Like Bellori, de Piles blames Rubens’s shortcomings on the artistic and cultural deficiencies of his native country. But if Rubens had learned bad design in Antwerp, he made up for it in Italy with his mastery of pigment and paint. Thus, elsewhere in the same pages, the same writer—closely paraphrasing Du Fresnoy’s appraisal of Veronese—remarks: “Everything that depends on coloring is admirable in Rubens.”75 The French critic therefore employs Flemishness, rather than Venezianità, as a cipher for ill-conceived design. He leaves himself room to exalt Rubens’s art in Italian terms on another occasion. For these and more recent art writers, Rubens’s actual style was not easily separated from the nation whose painters were equated with a lack of discrimination and true creativity. Even beyond such biases, however, Rubens’s psychological approach to portraiture, his eroticizing mythologies, his 72 Roskill, ed. and trans., Dolce’s Aretino, 143, 153, 155. On this passage see also Goffen, Renaissance Rivals, 98–99. As regards Rubens, see Thielemann, “Stone to Flesh,” 72. 73 De Fréart, Journal de voyage du Cavalier Bernin, 139. 74 De Piles, Art of Painting, trans. Scott, 89–90. 75 De Piles, Art of Painting, trans. Scott, 91–92.

230 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

site-specific programmatic commissions, noble and patrician patronage, and, chiefly, his painterly naturalism—often achieved through an indexical layering of, at times, counter-intuitive, color—are all vital evidence of the artist’s turn to Venice, though few can agree on when such a turn took place.76 *** It is one thing to count Rubens as first among the baroque painters for whom Venice provided an artistic tradition deserving of both emulation and appropriation. It is another thing to suggest that the turn to Venetian models implied not only formal commitments but philosophical/ideological ones, and above all, commitments directly tied to an understanding of gender. Yet even a cursory survey of Rubens’s works from around the middle of the second decade forward reveals the almost simultaneous onset of a more painterly, colorito style coupled with an exponentially greater number of female bodies, whether saints, nymphs, or the bare-breasted and—as Sarah R. Cohen has deftly shown—fluidly gendered, personifications and courtly personages of the kind animating the Medici cycle.77 With certain important exceptions, these conspicuous women are splendidly attired, naturally graceful and full-bodied though not necessarily heavily ornamented, and never, I would argue, accidental in the sense of being additive and visually delectable yet iconographically or symbolically irrelevant. In short, the numerical presence of women seems to increase with Rubens’s investment in the pictorial, physiological, and psychological traits associated by critics with femininity and, by extension, with Venetian painting. As Rubens becomes a more sympathetic and inventive painter of women and for women, he also paints more of them/ us. Following this reasoning, it is possible to characterize his reconception of the Powers of Women in a positive manner, one that privileges femininity’s unique capacity to figure artistic expression as well as abundant goodness or fullness of grace in a tropologically procreative sense. Here again it is the female form’s distinctive ability both to contain and re/produce that complicates the binary of universal and particular.78 Paintings such as Samson and Delilah (1609) and the Raising of the Cross (1611–13), completed in the first years following Rubens’s return to Antwerp from Italy, point to the possibility that the Flemish painter still saw himself and wished to be seen as a 76 Whereas scholars have long identified citations from Tintoretto in Rubens’s early religious works and the Flemish painter’s debt to Veronese for the di sotto in sú perspective of the ceiling panels designed for the Jesuit church in Antwerp (1618–20), his enthusiasm for Titian is often forestalled until his second journey to Spain (1628–29). For his part, the painter expresses his admiration for the Venetian artist from a very early moment in his career—his first visit to Spain in 1603–4—when he wrote of being astonished by the “splendid works of Titian and Raphael” on view in the Escorial and the king’s palace. See Rubens to Annibale Chieppio, Valladolid, 24 May 1603, in Magurn, ed. and trans., Letters, no. 8, p. 33. 77 Cohen, “Rubens’s France.” 78 Warner, Monuments and Maidens, 12.

All That Depends on Color

231

Romanist inheritor of Michelangelo and Caravaggio, whose works he had so conscientiously studied. Following the creation of the second Antwerp Crucifixion, however, this assertion is more difficult to make. The radical but as yet unexplained change of style between these two highly visible works created for Flemish patrons identifies the Descent from the Cross as the harbinger of a new way of seeing, painting, and relating for Rubens—deepened empathetic investments I would associate with the death of his beloved brother, the pregnancy of his wife Isabella, and the arrival of their first child, Clara Serena. It is, I believe, no accident that the privileged left interior wing of the Descent portrays a Visitation composed of a majority-female group featuring an elevated and very Flemish-looking Virgin Mary. Of crucial importance, the model for Rubens’s patrician biblical encounter is found not in Michelangelo but in Veronese (Fig. 5.1), at the time the unparalleled northern Italian painter of local color and genteel, similarly stately women.79 (It may not be going too far to read this scene as a formal prefiguration of Rubens’s Whitehall Peace Embracing Plenty, Plate 9, a female dyad signifying yet another kind of utopian reproduction and anagogic doubling.) So much in fact was Rubens’s second manner associated with Venetian painting that one repeatedly encounters characterizations of his art, both its defects and accomplishments, in language directly borrowed from descriptions of Titian, Tintoretto, and especially Veronese. Color and its cognates and connotations— ornament, surface, materiality, sensuality, impulsiveness—helped critics gender Rubens’s style as ‘Venetian’ in the euphemistically feminine sense in which the word was adjectivally employed. In this sense, Rubens’s art was thus prefigured by the painterly Venetian tradition of the previous century. Recognized as the next Titian, as an admirer of Tintoretto’s technique, and as a creative appropriator of the artistic concerns of Veronese, Rubens’s inevitable inheritance as a ‘Venetian’ painter was the feminized mantle that accompanied this critically ambiguous designation. As Rona Goffen made clear, Titian was not only known for his painted women but also (according to Aretino) for his womanizing—most often in the form of kissing and fondling ladies who were not his wife.80 Yet in the hands of early modern critics even Titian was made womanly. Together with their art, Rubens and Titian were gendered, if not queered, in Boschini’s tribute to local painting, La carta del navegar pitoresco (1660). There, as Maria Loh has noted, Boschini gleefully proclaims that Rubens was nursed on the milk of Venetian painting, further declaring that the Flemish painter worshipped Titian “as a lover holds his woman in his heart.”81 Hence, if Venetian painting, and by synecdoche, Titian, is the mother of Rubens’s art, ‘s/he’ is also the object of the faithful Fleming’s desire. 79 Jaffé, Rubens and Italy, 38. 80 Goffen, Titian’s Women, 1, discusses Aretino’s contrast of his own fondness for brothels with Titian’s making a “to-do” that goes “no further.” 81 Boschini, La carta del navegar pitoresco, ed. Pallucchini, 80–81; also quoted in Maria Loh, Titian Remade, 72.

232 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Fig. 5.1. Paolo Veronese, The Visitation, c.1577, Birmingham, Barber Institute of Fine Arts. Photo: Henry Barber Trust, the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham/Bridgeman Images.

All That Depends on Color

233

Fig. 5.2. Peter Paul Rubens, The Drunken Silenus, c.1617–18, Munich, Alte Pinakothek. Photo: Alte Pinakothek, Munich, Germany/Bridgeman Images.

To conceive of Rubens’s sexuality, or his performance of gender, as in some way non-binary is to return to Svetlana Alpers’s iconoclastic proposition that the artist felt a special transhistorical kinship with the Bacchic-side man, Silenus, a dissolute and amply fleshed, ergo feminized, “figure to whom he returned again and again.” (The figure of Silenus is also a fitting place to end in view of its status as the exemplar of figuration itself, taken from Plato by Erasmus and read as a humanistic likeness of Christ.)82 In The Making of Rubens Alpers makes the rather tantalizing proposal that Rubens’s astounding painting in Munich (Fig. 5.2) portrays his destabilized stand-in in the midst of anal intercourse with a black devotee who ‘penetrates’ him from behind.83 Heightening, by means of style, Silenus’s androgyny—or perhaps, their trans-ness—Rubens paints a corpulent male subject in a lavishly naturalistic mode usually reserved for female bodies, especially those of nude women. Thus, to 82 “But especially do the Holy Scriptures, like the Silenus of Alcibiades, conceal their real divinity beneath a surface that is crude and almost laughable.” Quoted from the Enchiridion, in Scodel, 214; see also Alpers, Making of Rubens, 123–24; Schaudies, “Bacchic Bodies,” 320–24. 83 Alpers, Making of Rubens, 110.

234 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

rehearse Alpers’s hypothesis: when Rubens renders the satirically overindulged and promiscuous Silenus as a breasty, soft-fleshed nude with a pregnant-looking belly, irresistibly grabable ass—and grape-leafed, indiscernible genitals—he lays bare, or embodies, something of his own poetic desire to play the passive, or womanly, role, thereby setting aside the obligations of a respectable Catholic family man in order to experience and create the world from an-other position.84 Published in 1995, at the height of the culture wars, Alpers’s racy take on Rubens resonated well with the identity politics of the time, as indeed, it does again today. But another of the art historian’s transgressive analogies from the same iconic study is even more to the present purpose. In that formulation, Alpers—with thanks to her former student Walter Melion for observing the “double-gendered nature” of the topos— points to Rubens when, in the early stages of mourning the death of his first wife, Isabella, he casts himself as Dido in a letter to a friend.85 Nesting a Latin passage from the Aeneid in his response to Pierre Dupuy in July 1626, Rubens ponders the advisability of taking a trip. Getting away, he imagines, would remove him from the many objects that painfully recall his lost love, having rendered him like Dido “just as she mourns alone in the empty house, and broods over the abandoned couch.”86 In the minds of his contemporaries, citing Virgil’s Dido on mourning (as an expression of grief), would already have skewed Rubens to the feminine side; ‘brooding’—as a hen over her chicks—only emphasizes this gendered alignment. Alpers views Rubens’s projection of his own desires onto or into the figure of Silenus as an engagement of “the pleasure and productivity of male submission.”87 (She does not acknowledge the meaning or implications of race in this productive pleasure, though one could argue that the alterity of Silenus’s ‘bottom’ status is heightened by his submission to a dominant black satyr—or perhaps that what we see is Rubens/Silenus getting ‘taken’ or topped by color.)88 Clearly, wanting to have sex with a man does not mean that one is or wants to be a woman. But if painting the Bacchic character helps him envision himself as queerly, or sodomitically, male, Rubens’s epistolary ventriloquizing of Dido nonetheless facilitates another kind of role play—one in which he becomes not passively masculine but actively feminine. Or better, even putatively lesbian, considering that it is a dead wife over which he, as she, is known to be grieving. In this way the rhetorical gendering of Rubens can be traced back somewhat further than 84 However iconographically unlikely it may or may not be, it is a testament to the radical and for some, deeply disconcerting, nature of Alpers’s claim that McGrath labels it “simply inadmissible” in a recent study; see “Black Bodies,” 311. 85 Alpers, Making of Rubens, 174, n. 32. 86 Rubens to Pierre Dupuy, Antwerp, 26 July 1626, in Magurn, ed. and trans., Letters, no. 84, p. 136. 87 Alpers, Making of Rubens, 152. 88 Following a new study of Silenus’s humoral associations (which does not make this racialized connection), the black satyrs and maenads surrounding Rubens’s Bacchic subjects could also allude to “an excess of black bile, a cold earthy substance” thought to plague the type of the melancholic old man. See Davis, “On feet made unsteady,” 259.

All That Depends on Color

235

his largely posthumous critical reception and early biographies, to a time when he feminized himself.

Works Cited Agoston, Laura Camille, “Holanda’s Michelangelo and the Drama of Cultural Difference,” Word & Image, 22 (2006), 54–67. Agucchi, Giovanni Battista, Diverse figure da Annibale Carracci intagliate in rame da Simone Guilino […] (Rome, 1646), in “From Agucchi’s Trattato della Pittura,” Italy and Spain, 1600–1750: Sources and Documents, ed. Robert Enggass and Jonathan Brown (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 26–30. Alpers, Svetlana, “Art History and its Exclusions,” in Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 182–99. Alpers, Svetlana, The Making of Rubens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Arnheim, Rudolf, Art and Visual Perception (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966). Belkin, Kristin Lohse, Rubens (London: Phaidon, 1998). Bell, Janis, “Some Seventeenth-Century Appraisals of Caravaggio’s Coloring,” Artibus et Historiae, 14 (1993), 103–29. Bellori, Giovan Pietro, The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl, with translation notes by Hellmut Wohl, introd. by Tomaso Montanari (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Boschini, Marco, La carta del navegar pitoresco (Venice, 1660), ed. Anna Pallucchini (Venice/Rome/Florence: Instituto per la Colaborazione Culturale, 1966). Burchard, L. and R.-A. d’Hulst, Rubens Drawings (Brussels: Arcade Press, 1965). Burckhardt, Jacob, Rubens (New York: Phaidon, 1950). Carducho, Vicente, Dialogos de la pintura (1633), ed. D.G. Cruzada Villaamil (Madrid: Imprenta Galliano, 1865). Castiglione, Baldesar, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles S. Singleton (New York: Doubleday, 1959). Clark, Kenneth, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956). Cohen, Sarah R., “Rubens’s France: Gender and Personification in the Marie de Médicis Cycle,” Art Bulletin, 85 (September 2003), 490–522. Cropper, Elizabeth, “Vincenzo Giustiniani’s Galleria: the Pygmalion effect,” in Cassiano dal Pozzo’s Paper Museum, II, Quaderni Puteani 3 (Milan: Olivetti, 1992), 101–26. Crowe, J.A. and G.B. Cavalcaselle, Titian: His Life and Times, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1877). DaCosta Kaufmann, Thomas, review of Dionisio Calvaert (um 1540–1619): Die Altarwerke (2002), by Simone Twiehaus, Renaissance Quarterly, 57 (Summer 2004), 597–99. Davis, Lucy, “‘On feet made unsteady by age and wine’: Rubens’ Silenus and Human Aging,” in Rubens and the Human Body, ed. Cordula van Wyhe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 249–68. De Fréart, Roland, sieur de Chantelou, Journal de voyage du Cavalier Bernin, trans. as “Diary of Cavalier Bernini’s Journey in France,” in Documentary History of Art, ed. Elizabeth Holt, 3 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), II, 124–41. De Piles, Roger, “Reflections on the Works of Sir Peter Paul Rubens,” from The Art of Painting (1699), in The Lives of Rubens, trans. Katie Scott, with introd. by Jeremy Wood (London: Pallas Athene, 2005), 87–94. Du Fresnoy, C.A. The Art of Painting, trans. John Dryden (London, 1695). Du Fresnoy, C.A., De arte graphica (1668), ed. and trans. Christopher Allen, Yasmin Annabel Haskell, and Frances Muecke (Geneva: Librarie Droz, 2005). Enggass, Robert and Jonathan Brown, ed., Sources and Documents in the History of Art: Italy and Spain, 1600– 1750 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970). Feghelm, Dagmar and Markus Kerstling, Rubens and his Women (Munich/New York: Prestel, 2005).

236 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Giustiniani, Michele, Lettere memorabili, from Racolta di lettere sulla pittura, ed. G. Bottari and S. Ticozzi (Rome, 1768), pp. 247–53, trans. as “From a Letter Written by Giustiniani to Amayden,” in Italy and Spain, 1600–1750: Sources and Documents, ed. Robert Enggass and Jonathan Brown (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 16–20. Goffen, Rona, Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). Goffen, Rona, Titian’s Women (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). Hard, Frederick. “Ideas from Bacon and Wotton in William Sanderson’s ‘Graphice,’” Studies in Philology, 36 (April 1939), 227–34. Held, Julius, The Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens: A Critical Catalogue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). Held, Julius, “Rubens and Aguilonius: New Points of Contact,” Art Bulletin, 61 (June 1979), 257–64. Holt, Elizabeth, ed., Documentary History of Art, 3 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). Huemer, Frances, Portraits, CRLB 9 (New York: Phaidon, 1977). Hyde, Melissa, “The ‘Makeup’ of the Marquise: Boucher's Portrait of Pompadour at Her Toilette, Art Bulletin, 82 (Sep., 2000), 453–475. Ilchman, Frederick et al., ed., Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice, exh. cat. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2009). Jacobs, Fredrika H., “Aretino and Michelangelo, Dolce and Titian: Femmina, Masculo, Grazia,” Art Bulletin, 82 (March 2000), 51–67. Jaffé, Michael. Rubens and Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Jaffé, Michael, “Rubens as a Collector of Drawings: Part One,” Master Drawings, 2 (Winter 1964), 383–97. Jaffé, Michael, “The Second Sketch Book by Van Dyck,” Burlington Magazine, 101 (September–October 1959), 316–21. Kemp, Martin, The Science of Art: Optical Themes from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). Leesberg, Marjolein, “Karel van Mander as a Painter-Author,” Simiolus, 22 (1993/94), 5–57. Lichtenstein, Jacqueline, The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age, trans. Emily McVarish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). Logan, Anne-Maria, review of Rubens: Selected Drawings, by Julius S. Held, Master Drawings, 25 (Spring 1987), 63–82. Loh, Maria, Titian Remade: Repetition and the Transformation of Early Modern Italian Art (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007). Lusheck, Catherine H., Rubens and the Eloquence of Drawing (New York: Routledge, 2017). McGrath, Elizabeth, “Black Bodies and Dionysiac Rebels: Rubens’s Bacchic Ethiopians,” in Rubens and the Human Body, ed. Cordula van Wyhe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 291–316. Magurn, Ruth, ed. and trans., The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1955). Mahon, Denis, Studies in Seicento Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1947). Melion, Walter, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander’s Schilder-Boeck (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991). Muller, Jeffrey M., “Rubens’s Theory and Practice of the Imitation of Art,” Art Bulletin, 64 (June 1982), 229–47. Olson, Todd. Poussin and France: Painting, Humanism, and the Politics of Style (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). Peter Paul Rubens, a Touch of Brilliance: Oil Sketches and Related Works from the State Hermitage Museum and the Courtauld Institute Gallery, exh. cat., Courtauld Institute (Munich: Prestel, 2003). Phillippy, Patricia, Painting Women: Cosmetics, Canvases, and Early Modern Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). Pignatti, Terisio and Filippo Pedrocco, Veronese: catalogo completo dei dipinti (Florence: Cantini, 1991). Posèq, Avigdor W.G., “Caravaggio and the Antique,” Artibus et Historiae, 11 (1990), 147–67. Poussin, Nicolas, Correspondence, trans. as “Letters,” in A Documentary History of Art, ed. Elizabeth Holt, 3 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), II, 146–59.

All That Depends on Color

237

Puttfarken, Thomas, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). Puttfarken, Thomas, Titian and Tragic Painting: Aristotle’s Poetics and the Rise of the Modern Artist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). Raben, Hans, “Bellori’s Art: The Taste and Distaste of a Seventeenth-Century Art Critic in Rome,” Simiolus, 32 (2006), 126–46. Reilly, Patricia L., “The Taming of the Blue: Writing Out Color in Italian Renaissance Theory,” in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 86–99. Ridolfi, Carlo, Le maraviglie dell’ arte (Venice, 1648). Ridolfi, Carlo, The Life of Titian, ed. and trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella, Peter Bondanella et al. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). Rooses, Max, Rubens, trans. Harold Child (London/Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott/Duckworth & Co., 1904). Roskill, Mark, ed. and trans., Dolce’s Aretino and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento (New York: Renaissance Society of America, 2000). Sanderson, William, Graphice: The use of the pen and pensil; Or, the most excellent art of painting; in two parts (London, 1658). Sandrart, Joachim von, Life of Peter Paul Rubens, in The Lives of Rubens, trans. Kristin Lohse Belkin, with introd. by Jeremy Wood (London: Pallas Athene, 2005), 33–56. Scannelli, Francesco, Il Microcosmo della pittura (Cesena, 1657), trans. as “Excerpts from Microcosmo della Pittura” and “From Scannelli, Il Microcosmo della Pittura,” in Italy and Spain, 1600–1750: Sources and Documents, ed. Robert Enggass and Jonathan Brown (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 42–48 and 98–100. Schaudies, Irene, “‘Boisterous druncken headed imaginary gods’: The Bacchic Bodies of Rubens and Jordaens,” in Rubens and the Human Body, ed. Cordula van Wyhe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 317–40. Scodel, Joshua, “The Affirmation of Paradox: A Reading of Montaigne’s ‘De la Phisionomie’ (III:12),” Yale French Studies, no. 64 (1983), 209–37. Shapiro, Alan, “Artists’ Colors and Newton’s Colors,” Isis, 85 (December 1994), 600–30. Sohm, Philip, “Gendered Style in Italian Art Criticism from Michelangelo to Malvasia,” Renaissance Quarterly, 48 (Winter 1995), 759–808. Sohm, Philip, Pittoresco: Marco Boschini, his Critics, and their Critiques of Painterly Brushwork in Seventeenthand Eighteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Sparti, Donatella Livia, “Bellori’s Biography of Rubens: An Assessment of its Reliability and Sources,” Simiolus, 36 (2012), 85–102. Sparti, Donatella Livia, “Giovan Pietro Bellori and Annibale Carracci’s Self-Portraits: From the ‘Vite’ to the Artist’s Funerary Monument,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 45 (2001), 60–101. Summers, David, “Form and Gender,” New Literary History, 24 (Spring 1993), 243–71. Sutton, Peter C. and Marjorie E. Wieseman, with Nico van Hout, Drawn by the Brush: Oil Sketches by Peter Paul Rubens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). Tagliaferro, Laura, “Di Rubens e di alcuni genovesi,” in Rubens e Genova, by Giuliana Biavati et al., exh. cat. (Genova: Palazzo Ducale, 1978). Thielemann, Andreas, “Stone to Flesh: Rubens’ Treatise De imitatione statuarum,” in Rubens and the Human Body, ed. Cordula van Wyhe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 41–102. Vasari, Giorgio, Lives of the Artists, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin, 1965). Warner, Marina, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (New York: Athenaeum, 1985). Weststeijn, Thijs, The Visible World: Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Art Theory and the Legitimation of Painting in the Dutch Golden Age, trans. Beverly Jackson and Lynne Richards (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008). Wittkower, Rudolph et al., Masters of the Loaded Brush: Oil Sketches from Rubens to Tiepolo, exh. cat. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967). Wood, Jeremy, Rubens Drawing on Italy (Edinburgh: National Gallery of Scotland, 2002). Ziggelaar, August, Francois de Aguilon, S.J. (1576–1617): Scientist and Architect (Rome: Bibliotheca Instituti Historici S.I., 1983).

Epilogue Coming to clear conclusions about Rubens is a challenge. He was many things: so many, that not all of his aspects are easy to admire. Take his women. Not to be too polite about it—because politeness is not an obviously Rubensian quality—his women are usually thought too fat. In our world, we admire size 6, but not size 16. […] However, if you look through the entirety of Rubens’s extraordinary career, you will find plenty of females crowded into his art who are not particularly fat. You cannot say that Marie de Medici, the focus of no less than 24 paintings at the Louvre in Rubens’s momentous telling of her life story, is noticeably fat. […] And when Rubens painted his first wife, the enchanting Isabella Brant, sitting under the honeysuckle bower with him in their lovey-dovey wedding portrait of 1609, is she fat? Not at all. She’s petite, demure, charming. ‒ Waldemar Januszczak (2014)1

Thus begins the reviewer for the Royal Academy of Arts Magazine, warming up the reader for his take on the blockbuster exhibition “Rubens and his Legacy: Van Dyck to Cezanne,” which traveled from Brussels to London in 2015 accompanied by a hefty and informative catalogue.2 That Januszczak’s sexist and proudly fat-phobic appraisal is merely the latest addition to a centuries-old tradition of gendered Rubens criticism is by now, I hope, obvious. Feminist scholarship aside, a writer for the quarterly publication of Britain’s longest established art school, “run by artists” since Reynolds’s day in 1768, assumes the like-minded reader will appreciate Rubens’s art only in proportion to his sexual attraction to (or revulsion for) the kinds of female bodies the artist paints. Of course, in 2014, Januszczak’s jokey, locker-room inanity helped pave the way for what was coming. Two years later another recalcitrant chauvinist who “has repeatedly mocked women for being overweight” in the words of the New York Times, would become president of the United States “having accused women of having ‘fat, ugly’ faces and of repelling voters because of their looks.”3 Had I begun this research at Berkeley in the era of Trump as, once again—as far as I know—the only out queer woman of color in the doctoral program in art history, but still interested in writing a book about Rubens and representations of 1 2 3

Januszczak, “Baroque ‘n’ Roll,” 47. Van Hout et al., Rubens and his Legacy. Shear and Sullivan, “‘Horseface,’ ‘Lowlife,’ ‘Fat, Ugly’: How the President Demeans Women.”

Lyon, J.V., Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463722216_epi

240 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

female power—there are many things I would have approached differently. The most I can do here is mention a few of them. First, I would have considered cultural and historical relationships between misogyny, race, and weight. This notional cluster is often unmistakable in overtly chauvinistic art writing. But it is also sometimes implicit in writing by ‘feminist’ historians of early modern art, for whom for example critical race and/or queer and trans theory are not always on the radar. (Perhaps relatedly, the percentage of humanities doctorates in ‘studies of the arts’ awarded to members of traditionally under-represented racial and ethnic groups has gone down since I received my PhD, hovering in 2015 at less than 5 percent; African Americans received 3.5 percent of all humanities doctorates in 2015.)4 If collective body dysmorphia and fear and loathing of fat have created a Western culture in which “thinner bodies are defined as morally, medically, aesthetically, and sexually desirable, while heavy bodies are vilified,” art writers and museums obsessed with the nude should be prepared to recognize this phenomenon along with, say, the impact of white supremacy on histories of the Old Masters.5 It seems self-evident that the way “we” write about represented bodies reflects the way we think about human beings; continual references to “Rubens’s” women reify not only the fantasy of autonomous male reproduction and possession but the critical confusion of real women with painted ones, as if there is someone there beneath the surface to evaluate and own.6 Moreover, the intersection of gender and race, the manner in which racial and chromatic whiteness are imbricated in Rubensian notions of female beauty deserves attention in his works even when racialized subjects are nowhere to be seen. Would that I had had the courage and the training to think more carefully about early modern artistic and aesthetic tropes of color, blackness, and whiteness along the lines of Kim Hall’s fundamental study ahead of its time—Things of Darkness—which, with other works of Black Feminism as well as Queer of Color Critique, has inspired me to move in new art historical directions since I undertook this project.7 It is no accident that the pejorative anatomical associations of ‘Rubenesque’ with which this book commenced were beginning to be standardized at precisely the time (c.1815) when the ‘fat’ buttocks of Saartjie Baartman and other African women were simultaneously

4 “Racial/Ethnic Distribution of Advanced Degrees in the Humanities.” 5 Saguy and Ward, “Coming Out as Fat,” 54. 6 A Hyperallergic review of another of their exhibitions focused on the (female) Rubensian nude, “Renoir, The Body, The Senses” (Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, 2019), enacts both of these tiresome moves: “Now and again, to speak frankly, we critics have our awkward moments when [sic] find ourselves unsure about how to respond generously to visually magnificent exhibitions. Many, perhaps most of us, are willing to enjoy paintings of women by Pablo Picasso notwithstanding his obvious sadism; […] The trouble, then, with Renoir’s female nudes, buxom stout young women, is that, the way he painted them, they look so … what’s the word I’m looking for? Vapid?’” Carrier, “Trouble with Renoir’s Nudes,” no pag. 7 Hall, Things of Darkness; see esp. the epilogue: “On ‘Race,’ Black Feminism, and White Supremacy,” 254–68.

Epilogue

241

Fig. E.1 . R. Rushworth, The Bum Shop, 1785, etching, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale Universaity. Photo: courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

reviled, imitated, and sexualized by European audiences.8 Indeed, the first (fictional) woman purportedly categorized as “Rubenesque” in 1834 is described on the same page—having bowed “awkwardly as a Hottentot”—as possessed of a “dark and dingy” complexion and a “low forehead.”9 Conversely, in an eighteenth-century British print titled The Bum Shop (Fig. E.1), fashionable white women are aided in trying on derrières intended to pad the figures of those “to whom Nature in a slovenly moment has been niggardly in her distribution of certain lovely Endowments.”10 The same “racial subtext to the anti-fat discourses that would become more aggressive in the twentieth century and which are ubiquitous today” is arguably present in the tradition of art historical writing about (women in) Rubens’s art.11 Histories of Western painting and the doctoral programs and museum exhibitions that produce them 8 See Farrington, “Reinventing Herself: The Black Female Nude.” The indomitable McGrath, “Black Bodies,” 295, has recently followed Rubens’s visual legacy of racialized bodies into the era of the English slave trade. Unlike her, however, I do not find it at all surprising that a caricaturist like Thomas Rowlandson would derive his rhetorically distorted bodies from Rubens’s depiction of ‘blacks’; nor would I consider Rowlandson, as the author of graphic white supremacist imagery, to be merely “affected by racist views current at the period” (293) but rather as eagerly complicit in constructing them. 9 Anon., “Lover of Beauty; or Which will He Wed?,” 405. 10 I am grateful to Heather V. Vermeulen for directing me to this print. 11 Forth, “Fat, Desire and Disgust in the Colonial Imagination,” 215–16.

242 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

have a long way to go. “It has been an assumption of feminist students of art history that their task is nothing less than to rewrite the history of art,” Svetlana Alpers asserted nearly four decades ago.12 What might we do to today make that task more possible and less necessary?

Works Cited Alpers, Svetlana, “Art History and its Exclusions: The Example of Dutch Painting,” in Feminism and Art History, Questioning the Litany, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 183–99. American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, “Racial/Ethnic Distribution of Advanced Degrees in the Humanities,” American Academy of Arts and Sciences website, updated 2017, www.humanitiesindicators. org/content/indicatordoc.aspx?i=46 (accessed 15 August 2019). Anon., “The Lover of Beauty; or Which will He Wed?” in The Analyst; Monthly Journal of Science, Literature, and the Fine Arts, I (London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1834), 307–18, 400–11. Carrier, David, “The Trouble with Renoir’s Nudes,” Hyperallergic [blog], 3 August 2019, https://hyperallergic. com/511548/the-trouble-with-renoirs-nudes/ (accessed 4 August 2019). Farrington, Lisa E., “Reinventing Herself: The Black Female Nude,” Woman’s Art Journal, 24 (2003), 15–23. Forth, Christopher E., “Fat, Desire and Disgust in the Colonial Imagination,” History Workshop Journal, no. 73 (2012), 211–39. Hall, Kim F., Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). Januszczak, Waldemar, “Baroque ‘n’ Roll,” RA: Royal Academy of Arts Magazine (Winter 2014), 47–54. McGrath, Elizabeth, “Black Bodies and Dionysiac Rebels: Rubens’s Bacchic Ethiopians,” in Rubens and the Human Body, ed. Cordula van Wyhe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 291–316. Saguy, Abigail C. and Anna Ward, “Coming Out as Fat: Rethinking Stigma,” Social Psychology Quarterly 74 (2011), 53–75. Shear, Michael D. and Eileen Sullivan, “‘Horseface,’ ‘Lowlife,’ ‘Fat, Ugly’: How the President Demeans Women,” New York Times (16 October 2018), www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/us/politics/trump-womeninsults.html (accessed 31 August 2019). Van Hout, Nico, Alexis Merle du Bourg, Gerlinde Gruber, Arturo Galansino, David Howarth, and Tim Barringer, Rubens and his Legacy, exh. cat. (London: Royal Academy, 2014).

12 Alpers, “Art History and its Exclusions,” 183.

About the Author J. Vanessa Lyon, who received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, is Associate Professor of Art History at Bennington College. Her essays concerning early modern British and Flemish art have appeared in Word & Image, The Huntington Library Quarterly, and Art History.

Index Agucchi, Giovanni Battista 219–220 Aguilonius (François, d’Aguilon) 109, 111, 218 Allegory 16, 28–31, 55, 121, 169, 183, 187, 191, 194, 198, 206 Albani, Francesco 222 Albert VII (Archduke) 16, 56, 121, 124, 140, 148, 152–153, 210 Alpers, Svetlana 25, 53, 189, 209, 212n7, 215, 233–234, 242 Ambrose (Saint) 162, 165–166, 169 Aquinas, Thomas (Saint) 18–19, 99, 162, 165, 169 Aristotle 17–20, 41, 68, 107, 111, 119, 215 Arminians 203 Artemisia 122 Auerbach, Erich 30–31 Augustine of Hippo (Saint) 31, 60, 62, 97, 112–115, 162, 165–167, 169 Baartman, Saartjie 240 Baglione, Giovanni 223 Barbieri, Giovanni Francesco 221–222 Baskins, Cristelle 179 Baxandall, Michael 33 Belkin, Kristin Lohse 13, 25, 28 Bellona 125, 128, 134, 180, 182 Bellori, Giovanni Pietro 123, 168–169, 170, 219, 226–229 Belvedere Torso 48, 66 Bentivoglio, Guido (Cardinal) 148, 152 Bentley, Thomas 37 Berger, Jr., Harry 75 Bernard of Clairvaux (Saint) 164, 195–196 Bernini, Gianlorenzo 29–30, 229 Bialostocki, Jan 87 Bocaccio 57 Bolswert, Schelte à 168 Bonaventure, Thomas (Saint) 169 Borromeo, Charles (Saint) 17, 167 Bos, Cornelis Leda and the Swan (after Michelangelo) 40 Brant, Isabella 34, 37, 42, 54, 56, 58–59, 71, 74–76, 210–211, 239 breastfeeding 79, 88, 102–112, 114–116, 200; see also lactation; nursing Breda 140–142, 147, 148–152, 155–161 Bronzino (Agnolo di Cosimo) 17, 120 Brueghel, Jan the Elder 59, 66, 103 Burckhardt, Jacob 33, 83, 93–94, 98, 149, 216 Burchard, Ludwig 33 Bynum, Caroline Walker 102 Callot, Jacques 142, 157–158, 160–161 Siege of Breda 157–158 Calvaert, Denys 222 Calvin, Jean 61, 164 Calvinists 61, 113–114, 140, 155, 166, 184, 200 Campin, Robert 73–74 Marriage of the Virgin 73 Carducho, Vicente 220 Carillo, Juan 146 caritas 107, 147, 156, 200; see also charity Carleton, Dudley 184, 204

Carracci 93, 114, 209–210, 213, 219 Agostino 105, 219 Annibale 94, 108, 219 Lodovico 219 Carroll, Margaret 13, 25, 28, 70, 123 Castiglione, Balthesar (Baldassare) 15–16, 217–218 The Courtier 15, 61, 217 Catherine de’ Medici 79, 122, 124 Cecill, Thomas 134, 135 Truth Presents the Queen with a Lance 134–135 Chantal, Jeanne de (Saint) 21, 136 Charles I 122, 131, 134, 177, 183–186, 194, 203–205 Charles V 70–71, 140, 145–146 Chiesa Nuova  167, 211, 220 Christina of Sweden 29–30, 226 Cigoli (Lodovico Cardi) 93 Clare of Assisi (Saint) 125, 163, 165–166, 169 Clark, Kenneth 90, 226 Cohen, Sarah R. 13, 25, 86, 123, 230 colorito 79, 89, 111, 194, 209, 221, 228, 230 Corpus Christi 146, 157, 163–165, 167 Corpus Rubenianum 11, 32n33, 33n35, 124 Correggio (Antonio Allori) 221–222 Cosandey, Fanny 123 Council of Trent 17–18, 20, 61, 63 decree on marriage 61, 72 decree on images 63 decree on enclosure of nuns 21 Dandelet, Thomas 167 Delilah 34, 37–45, 47, 50–56, 128, 190, 230 Descalzas Reales 124, 130, 145–146, 166; see also Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales Dido 57, 234 disegno 79, 109, 221, 226–228 Dolce, Ludovico 229 Donne, John 201, 203–205 Dupuy, Pierre 148, 234 Dürer, Albrecht 42 Dyck, Anthony van 169, 182, 204, 213 Ede, Minna Moore 81 El Greco (Doménikos Theotokópoulos) 94, 105, 113 Eleonora de’ Medici 16, 144 Eleonora of Austria 144 Eleonora of Toledo 120 Elizabeth I 62, 133–134, 148, 152, 168, 191–193, 196–198 Elizabeth of Hungary (Saint) 125 Erasmus, Desiderius 233 Escorial (Royal Basilica and Monastery of San Lorenzo) 120, 144–145 Eucharist 31, 121, 129, 140, 142, 150, 155, 157, 160–162, 164–168 Eve 19, 42, 45, 60, 66–68 Evers, Hans 83–84 Eyck, Jan van 68–70, 72, 74, 100 Arnolfini “Wedding” Portrait 68–70, 73–74 Man in a Red Turban 74

246 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Fat

phobia of 23–24, 239–241 Ferdinand I (Cardinal-Infante) 144, 169, 180 Figura 28–31, 48, 170, 180 Figuration 30, 33–34, 111, 121, 233 ffolliott, Sheila 122 Fonte, Moderata (Modesta Pozzo) 15–16 Fourment, Hélène 116, 211 Franciscans 153, 169 Royal Poor Clares (Madrid) 119, 130, 145–146 tertiary order of Poor Clares 152 Francken II, Frans 51, 151 Banquet in the House of Nicolas Rockox 51 Misdeeds of Love 151 Fréart, Paul de 229 Frederick II 163 Freedberg, David 92, 96, 99–100, 103 Fresnoy, Charles du 214, 224–226, 229 fricatrice 201 Fromentin, Eugène 83, 90 Les maîtres d’autrefois 83 Galen of Pergamon 67–68 Galilei, Galileo 20 Galle, Cornelis 132–133 Obsidio Bredana (after Rubens) 158 Galletti, Sara 129 García Sanz, Ana 166 Gender 17, 19, 24–26, 33–34, 56, 64–66, 68, 74, 82–84, 86–87, 90, 108–109, 111–112, 133, 180, 187, 198, 210–212, 218, 221, 226, 228, 230–231, 233–234, 239–240; see also Sex Difference Gentileschi, Artemisia 105, 114 George (Saint) 134 Georgievska–Shine, Aneta 42n6, 52n23–24, 109, 111 Giustiniani, Vincenzo 220–221, 223 Goffen, Rona 231 Golgotha 84, 87 Goltzius, Hendrick 180 Temptation 44 Gonzaga, Vincenzo I, di (Duke of Mantua) 16, 58, 144, 210, 221 Gregory the Great (Pope Saint) 162–163, 167, 169 Gribelin, Simon Ceiling in the Banqueting House at Whitehall 188 Hall, Kim 240 Heere, Lucas de Allegory of the Tudor Succession (unknown artist after) 192 Held, Julius 180, 190 Henri IV 121, 126–127, 129, 137 Henriette-Marie (Henrietta Maria) 131, 134–135, 183, 204 Hercules 37, 41, 45–47, 52, 55, 63–67, 80, 151, 189–190 distaff 64, 66 Farnese 45–47, 80 Holanda, Francisco de 212, 228 Holofernes 39, 156 Honig, Elizabeth 70n69, 193n45 Holy Spirit 165, 167; see also Paraclete Huemer, Frances 63–64, 66 Hugo, Hermann 148, 155–157, 160–161

Ignatius of Loyola (Saint) 167 Immaculate Conception 21, 97–99 Imperiale, Giovanni Vincenzo 63 Iris 108–111 Isabel Clara Eugenia, Infanta, Governor of the Spanish Netherlands 35, 120–125, 129, 131, 133, 137, 140, 145–161, 164–165, 167–170 and Franciscan Order 142, 152–153 as military leader 121, 123, 140, 147–148, 151–152 in Spain 119–120, 122, 140, 145–146, 155, 168 Isabella de Bourbon 139, 142 Isabelle of Portugal 151 Isabella of Valois (Elisabeth of Valois) 120, 145 Jaffé, David 81 James I 122, 134, 136, 182–185, 189–191, 193, 198, 202–205 Januszczak, Waldemar 239 Jerome (Saint) 50, 162, 166–167, 169 Jesuits 27, 92–94, 156, 204; see also Society of Jesus John the Baptist (Saint) 87, 105 John the Evangelist (Saint) 34, 79, 83–86, 89, 166 Johnson, Geraldine 13, 24–25, 123, 128 Jones, Inigo 183–184, 191, 193, 201 Juana of Portugal 145–146 Judith 39, 156, 170 and Holofernes 39, 156 Juno 57, 107–110, 112, 115, 125, 137 Juvenal 57–58, 60 Kahr, Madlyn 42 lactation 79, 102–103, 106–107, 109, 112, 114–115; see also nursing Ladrón de Guevara, Alonso 158 Lanfranco, Giovanni 93 Laocoön 80–81 Laqueur, Thomas 102 Last Judgment 79, 100, 202 Laud, William (Archbishop)  177, 203–205 Leda 38–40, 52, 55 Leganés, (Diego Mesía y Guzmán), Marques de 139 Leoni, Pompeo 143–145 Philip II and his family 120, 144–145 Lerma, (Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas), Duke of 127, 134, 139, 210 Leuzzi, Maria Fubini 120 Leyden, Lucas van 41 Samson and Delilah 41 Lipsius, Justus 19–20, 76 Louis XIII 127, 132, 136–137, 139, 146, 149 Lusheck, Catherine 47–49, 55, 217 Synecdochical Masculinity 48 Luther, Martin 61, 80, 164 Luxembourg palace 123, 126, 129, 131, 184 Malvasia, Cesare 219 Mander, Karel van 110, 212–213 Mantegna, Andrea 42, 55 Samson and Delilah 42–43 Mantua 15–16, 58, 63, 68, 144 Medici, Maria de’ 33, 120–139, 149, 152, 184, 204, 211

247

Index

Marinella, Lucrezia 15–16 marriage 15, 34, 56, 60–62, 64, 69, 72–73, 84 Mars 186–187, 191, 193 Martin, John Rupert 82 Mary Magdalene 21, 52, 86–87, 94 Mary of Hungary 140, 145–146 Mary Tudor 133, 146, 191, 196 masculinity 19, 24–25, 48, 55, 80, 82, 84 McGrath, Elizabeth 13, 26, 123 Medici, Giovanni de’ 160 Melion, Walter 234 Mercury 108–109, 186–187, 189 Michelangelo 19, 37–40, 52–53, 55, 80, 83, 89, 100, 102, 104, 212–214, 221, 223–224, 226–228, 231 Last Judgment 79, 100 Night 37–38, 52, 55 Prophet Ezekiel 48–49 Samson and Delilah 37, 52–53 Miles, Margaret 13, 26 Minerva 186–187, 189, 193, 205 Molina, Tirso de (Gabriel Téllez) 168 Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales 124 monstrance 143, 151, 163–167 Moore, George 23 Moy, Maria de 57–58, 76 Muffet, Thomas 110 Muller, Jeffrey 77, 236 Nadal, Jerome 99 Neri, Filippo (Saint) 167 Neostoics 19–20, 76, 149, 210 Norbert (Saint) 162, 164–165, 169 Norgate, Edward 47 Noyes, Ruth S. 167 nursing 88, 103–108, 110, 114–116, 200; see also lactation Obsidio Bredana 157–158, 160 Olivares, (Gaspar de Guzmán y Pimental), Conde–duque de 131, 139, 147 Omphale 42, 45, 64, 66–67, 151 Ostend 148, 152 Ovid 52, 62, 64, 108–109, 191, 198 Cornucopia 191 Juno and Argus 107–110 Metamorphoses 62, 108–109, 198 Paleotti, Gabriele 16–17 Palladio, Andrea 191 Panofsky, Erwin 72 Paraclete 95, 165; see also Holy Spirit Pavia, Battle of tapestries 145–146 Peace (Pax) 35, 64, 130, 138, 153, 161, 179–180, 182, 185–186, 189, 191–196, 199–202, 204–206 Peiresc, Nicolas–Claude Fabri de 131, 137 Pérez de Tudela, Almudena 144 Pero 114–115, 200 Petrarch 50, 115, 141, 151, 162, 165 Triumphs 151, 162 Philip II 73, 120, 146, 191, 212 Philip III 144

Philip IV 122, 131–132, 139, 141–142, 147, 149, 159–160, 164, 168 pietas Austriaca 164 Piles, Roger de 55, 123, 212, 214, 224, 229 Pipelincks, Maria 58 Pius XII (Pacelli), Pope 93 Pizan, Christine de 61 Plato 19, 39, 111, 135, 150, 233 Plenty 182, 186–187, 189–193, 198–200, 205 Pollock, Griselda 24 Pontormo, Jacopo da (Carucci) 17, 53 Cupid and Venus (after Michelangelo) 54 Poor Clares 130, 145–146, 152, 163 Isabel Clara Eugenia as a tertiary member of 119, 129, 145, 152–153, 165, 169 Poorter, Nora de 124, 142, 161–162, 169 Port Royal 136 Poussin, Nicolas 214, 224, 226 Protestant Reformation 27, 61, 88, 166 Querelle des Femmes 15, 33–34, 56 Rainbow 108–109, 111 Raphael 66, 80, 92, 96, 98, 162, 165–166, 214, 223–224 Disputa 162, 165–166 Transfiguration 98 real presence 162, 167 Reni, Guido 93, 221–222 Reynolds, Joshua 23, 27 Ribera, Jusepe de 105, 220 Richelieu, Armand-Jean du Plessis (Cardinal) 130, 131, 136–138 Ridolfi, Carlo 223–224 Riegl, Alois 74 Ripa, Cesare 198–200 Rockox, Nicolas 51 Rooses, Max 82–83, 211 Rosenthal, Lisa 13, 26, 28, 64, 179 Roskill, Mark 182 Rubenesque 23, 25, 28, 240–241 Rubens, Albert 102, 105 Rubens, Clara Serena 102, 231 Rubens, Peter Paul biographies of 223, 226–227, 235 as diplomat 32, 34, 131, 150, 186, 214 and Italy 15–17, 20, 47, 55, 63, 80, 98, 210, 219–220, 229–230 and Spain 21, 70, 130, 139–140, 144, 149, 167, 186, 194, 210, 220 Rubens, Peter Paul (works) Adoration of the Eucharist 142–143, 161 Allegory with Citadel of Antwerp 180–181 Antwerp Crucifixions 80, 83, 92, 100 Assumption of the Virgin 34, 79, 90–94, 98, 100, 102 Leningrad Modello 91, 98 Augustine between Christ and the Virgin 112–113 Coming of Age of Louis XIII 127 Crouching Man Lifting a Heavy Object 47–48

248 

FIGURING FAITH AND FEMALE POWER IN THE ART OF RUBENS

Death of Henri IV with Proclamation of the Regency 126–127 Defenders of the Eucharist 161, 166, 168 Descent from the Cross 58, 80, 82–83, 89–90, 184, 211, 231 Drunken Silenus 233 Emperor Charles V and Empress Isabella (after Titian) 70–71 Felicity of the Regency 128, 137–138 Four Evangelists 161, 166 Hercules and Omphale 63–64, 66–67, 190 Holy Family 105–106 Isabella Brant, portrait of 74,75 Leda and the Swan (after Michelangelo) 39–40 Marie de Medici, portrait of 126 Nursing Madonna 103–105, 114–115 Peace Embracing Plenty 187, 190, 231 Peaceful Reign of King James I 177–179, 183, 186, 189–190, 205 Raising of the Cross 58, 80, 82–84, 86, 89–90, 96, 184, 230 Samson and Delilah 38, 52–54, 56 Self-Portrait with Isabella Brant 37, 56, 58, 75 Transfiguration 97–99, 144 Triumph at Juliers 127, 134 Rubens, Philip (brother of Peter Paul) 20, 57–58, 67, 76 Rubster 198, 201 Ruskin, John 79 Sales, François de (Saint) 136 Introduction to the Devout Life 136 Salmon, Marylynn 110 Samson 37–39, 41–56, 190, 230 Sandrart, Joachim von 223 Scannelli, Francesco 221–222 Schüssler Fiorenza, Elizabeth 26 Scott, Joan 34 Scribner, Jr., Charles 124 Shakespeare, William 64 Sex Difference 17–19, 33–34, 37, 42, 50, 54, 56, 62, 82, 210, 217 Silenus 115, 216, 233–234 Simons, Patricia 206 Snayers, Peeter 159 Solomon (King) 183, 200, 203–205 temple of 200, 204 Society of Jesus 92–93, 156; see also Jesuits Soto, Andrés de 153 Spanish Armada 133–134 Spinola, Ambrogio, Marques de los Balbases  140–142, 148, 150, 160 Spivak, Gayatri 24 Spränger, Bartolomeus 64–67 Hercules and Omphale 65–67 sprezzatura 60, 217–218 Steinberg, Leo 105 Summers, David 111, 212, 215 Teresa of Ávila (Saint) 21, 136, 155, 167 Tertullian 31, 66 Thirty Years War 35, 119, 121, 140, 146 Thomism 18 Thuillier, Jacques 123, 137

Tilney, Emund 61 Tintoretto, Jacopo (Robusti) 94, 213, 216, 224, 227, 231 Titian (Vecellio) 15, 50, 70, 79, 92–96, 98, 133, 149–151, 181–182, 194, 201, 212–214, 220–221, 223–225, 227–229, 231 Adam and Eve 45 Assumption 95 Bacchanal of the Andrians 202 Charles V and Empress Isabella (Rubens after) 70–71 Entombment 50–51 Tormo y Monzo, Elías 124 transitus 93 tribade 201; see also rubster; fricatrice Trumbull, William 184 Tunis, conquest of · tapestries 141, 145–146, 150 Urban IV (Pantaleon), Pope 163 Urban VIII (Barberini), Pope 151–152, 167 Vasari, Giorgio 17, 19, 39, 212, 215, 221, 223, 227 Veen, Otto van 53, 92, 94, 150–151 Vega, Lope de (Lope Félix de Vega Carpio) 165, 194 Velázquez, Diego de Silva 21, 141–142, 147, 154–155, 159 Madre Jerónima de la Fuente 154–155 Surrender of Breda 141, 147 Venus 37, 42, 53–54, 57 Vergara, Alejandro 124, 151, 155 Vermeyen, Jan Cornelisz 145–146, 150 Veronese, Paolo (Caliari) 93, 108, 194–196, 198, 213, 220, 223–225, 227, 229, 231 Ceiling in the Sala del Collegio 195 Venice Enthroned between Peace and Justice 196 Visitation 232 via crucis 82 Virgil 57, 191, 234 Virgin Mary 21, 32, 34, 73, 79, 84, 86–87, 89, 92–101, 104–105, 112–116, 137, 231 as co-redemptrix 87, 112, 115 patron saint of Antwerp 89, 92–93 Queen of Heaven 87, 97, 102, 152 stabat mater 34, 87 swooning 88–89 virgo lactans 111 Vio, Thomas Cajetan de (Cardinal) 88–89 Vlieghe, Hans 56, 68 Voragine, Jacobus de Golden Legend 96n42 Warner, Marina 25 Weyden, Rogier van der Deposition 88 Whitehall Palace Banqueting Hall 122, 177, 178–179, 181, 184–185, 187, 200, 205 Wölfflin, Heinrich 82 Woollett, Anne T. 124 Woverius, Jan 185 Wyhe, Cordula van 153 Xavier, Francis (Saint) 167 Zorach, Rebecca 112 Zuccari, Federico 94–95 Zurawski, Simone 157

V I S U A L A N D M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E , 13 0 0 -17 0 0

Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens argues that the Baroque painter, propagandist, and diplomat, Peter Paul Rubens, was not only aware of rapidly shifting religious and cultural attitudes toward women, but actively engaged in shaping them. Today, Rubens’s paintings continue to be used—and abused—to prescribe and proscribe certain forms of femininity. Repositioning some of the artist’s best-known works within seventeenthcentury Catholic theology and female court culture, this book provides a feminist corrective to a body of art historical scholarship in which studies of gender and religion are often mutually exclusive. Moving chronologically through Rubens’s lengthy career, the author shows that, in relation to the powerful women in his life, Rubens figured the female form as a transhistorical carrier of meaning whose devotional and rhetorical efficacy was heightened rather than diminished by notions of female difference and particularity. J. Vanessa Lyon, who received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, is Associate Professor of Art History at Bennington College. Her essays concerning early modern British and Flemish art and religion have appeared in Word & Image, The Huntington Library Quarterly, and Art History.

ISBN: 978-94-6298-551-3

AUP. nl 9 789462 985513