Rubens’s Spirit: From Ingenuity to Genius (Renaissance Lives) 9781789143997, 1789143993

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r u b e n s’s s p i r i t

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histories and achievements of significant artists, rulers, intellectuals and scientists in the early modern world. They delve into literature, philosophy, the history of art, science and natural history and cover narratives of exploration, statecraft and technology. Series Editor: François Quiviger Already published Artemisia Gentileschi and Feminism in Early Modern Europe Mary D. Garrard Blaise Pascal: Miracles and Reason Mary Ann Caws Caravaggio and the Creation of Modernity Troy Thomas Giorgione’s Ambiguity Tom Nichols Donatello and the Dawn of Renaissance Art A. Victor Coonin Hans Holbein: The Artist in a Changing World Jeanne Nuechterlein Hieronymus Bosch: Visions and Nightmares Nils Büttner Isaac Newton and Natural Philosophy Niccolò Guicciardini John Donne: In the Shadow of Religion Andrew Hadfield John Evelyn: A Life of Domesticity John Dixon Hunt Leonardo da Vinci: Self, Art and Nature François Quiviger Michelangelo and the Viewer in His Time Bernadine Barnes Paracelsus: An Alchemical Life Bruce T. Moran Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer Christopher S. Celenza Piero della Francesca and the Invention of the Artist Machtelt Brüggen Israëls Pieter Bruegel and the Idea of Human Nature Elizabeth Alice Honig Raphael and the Antique Claudia La Malfa Rembrandt’s Holland Larry Silver Rubens’s Spirit: From Ingenuity to Genius Alexander Marr Titian’s Touch: Art, Magic and Philosophy Maria H. Loh Tycho Brahe and the Measure of the Heavens John Robert Christianson

RUB ENS’S SPIR IT From Ingenuity to Genius

a l e x a n de r m a r r

R E A K T ION B O OK S

In memoriam Trevor John Marr (1938–2017)

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd Unit 32, Waterside 44–48 Wharf Road London n1 7ux, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2021 Copyright © Alexander Marr 2021 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 978 1 78914 399 7

cover: Detail of Peter Paul Rubens, Drunken Silenus, c. 1616–18, with later additions, oil on panel. Photo bpk/Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen.

contents

Preface 7 Introduction 15 1 Holy Spirit 39 2 Vive l’Esprit 84 3 Vital Spirits 127 4 Genial Painting 161 Conclusion: Genius Loci 201 References 211 further reading 241 Acknowledgements 244 Photo Acknowledgements 246 Index 248

1 Detail of Peter Paul Rubens, St Gregory the Great Surrounded by Other Saints, 1606–7, oil on canvas.

Preface

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n this book I offer a new perspective on Rubens’s creativity. By tracing the ways in which Rubens’s artistic persona was shaped by ideas about spirit, ingenuity and genius, I argue that his life and work were critical in the evolution of early modern ingenuity into modern genius. My starting point is the received wisdom that Rubens was the most universally talented artist of the seventeenth century – a figure who not only fused the traditions of Italian and Netherlandish pictorial arts but who was also prodigiously skilled in every genre of painting, and unprecedentedly prolific. This entirely accurate view was mythologized in the nineteenth century by critics such as Goethe and Jacob Burckhardt, who cast Rubens as a ‘genius’ figure combining extraordinary natural abilities with exemplary moral conduct and a near superhuman work ethic. The reception of this image of Rubens in the twentieth and even twenty-first centuries has tended to conceal the construction of his artistic identity, obscuring especially the ways in which emergent critical categories in the orbit of ‘genius’ were mobilized through the artist’s life and work. In particular, this history has occluded the extent to which Rubens was used to fashion ‘genius’ itself into a powerful critical category.

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In line with my aims, the book is arranged thematically but also roughly chronologically, beginning with Rubens’s early religious works and ending with the late landscapes. I do not aim to be comprehensive, nor could I be. Rubens’s oeuvre is sufficiently vast that I have been obliged, in this short account, to omit large parts of it. Equally, there are important aspects of his work germane to my topic – his drawings and oil sketches, for example – that I have been able to touch upon only lightly. The secondary literature on Rubens is as extensive and impressive as his oeuvre. Owing to constraints of space, I have had to be sparing in my references and suggestions for Further Reading. In the chapters, I cite only primary sources or those secondary sources that quote primary material. On occasion, such as in matters of date or attribution, I cite the relevant volumes of the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, which remains the gold standard for scholarship on Rubens. Rubens’s biography is exceptionally full and complex, for he was not only the most productive northern artist of the first half of the seventeenth century, managing Europe’s largest studio, but he also maintained an important career as a diplomat. While he spent the bulk of his life in his home town of Antwerp, his artistic and political pursuits required him to travel widely: first to Italy and (briefly) Spain, then to France, Spain and England, where he was instrumental in brokering a peace between the Catholic Spanish and Protestant English. The Rubens family had been profoundly affected by the religious upheaval of the sixteenth century. Rubens’s father, Jan, a lawyer and alderman, converted to Protestantism and fled Antwerp in 1568 with his wife, Maria Pijpelinckx. Settling in

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then-Protestant Cologne, Jan became secretary to William of Orange’s second wife, Anna, with whom he had an affair that resulted in temporary banishment to Siegen, where Peter Paul Rubens (the couple’s sixth child) was born in 1577. The following year the family returned to Cologne, where Jan Rubens died in 1587. In 1589 Maria went home to Antwerp, bringing her children up as Catholics within the patrician class to which she belonged. There, Rubens attended the Latin school of the humanist Rombout Verdonck, which provided a firm grounding in classical letters. He also served as a page to Marguerite de Ligne-Arenberg, widow of Philip, Count of Lalaing, probably in Hainaut. Rubens’s time at court helped form the urbane suavity for which he was later renowned, and which he deployed so effectively in his several diplomatic missions. Rubens must have shown an inclination towards painting, for in 1591, aged fourteen, he was apprenticed in Antwerp to a distant family member, the landscape painter Tobias Verhaecht. He trained under Verhaecht for no more than a year before moving to study under Adam van Noort, a popular master with a sizeable studio specializing in large-scale figure painting. It was probably during his time with Van Noort that Rubens produced his earliest surviving works: drawn copies of Hans Holbein the Younger’s woodcut series The Dance of Death (first published 1538). In 1594 or 1595, Rubens moved to the studio of Otto van Veen, who had a decisive and lasting influence on his artistic development. Van Veen was Antwerp’s leading pictor doctus, a ‘learned painter’ steeped in classical literature who devised highly intellectual allegorical paintings treating humanist themes, designed printed emblem books, and even wrote an arcane theological tract that fell foul of the

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Inquisition. Significantly, Van Veen was an artist who merged northern and southern European artistic traditions: he was a member of the Romanists, a group of Flemish artists who had studied in Italy and sought to imbue their works with the classicizing spirit of Italian Renaissance painting.1 Thus, when Rubens left Van Veen’s studio in 1598, establishing himself as a fully fledged independent master of the Antwerp Guild of St Luke, it was with a cosmopolitan outlook, a deep respect for classical learning and a fascination for the art of Italy. Indeed, soon after establishing his studio he decided to travel to Italy, to see at first hand the ancient and modern works of those great artists to whom he had been introduced by Van Veen. Setting out in May 1600, Rubens journeyed first to Venice, where he could admire works by the masters of colorito: Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto. Their loose handling and saturated palettes made a deep impression on the young Fleming. In Venice, Rubens became acquainted with a gentleman in the service of Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, who recommended the artist to his master. Rubens spent the next eight years in the duke’s employ – a prestigious post that (since the duke was largely absent, fighting in Croatia) afforded him the opportunity to travel extensively and undertake a range of commissions. Between 1601 and 1608 he spent time in Rome, Genoa and Spain, where he was sent in 1603 to deliver gifts from Vincenzo to Philip iii. In this fertile period Rubens received his first major commissions for portraits and altarpieces; he befriended artists and scholars; and he studied ancient and modern art, including the antiquities of Rome and the major paintings of Raphael and Michelangelo. Rubens might well have made his

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career in Italy had his mother’s illness not called him back urgently to Antwerp in the autumn of 1608. Arriving home to find that she had died, he resolved to remain in Antwerp and never returned to Italy. Over the next thirty or so years, Rubens established himself as the foremost artist in Europe. Appointed official painter to the regents of the Southern Netherlands, Archdukes Albert and Isabella, in 1609, he was given exceptional permission to live and work in Antwerp rather than at the Brussels court. In the same year, he cemented his position in local society by marrying Isabella Brant, daughter of the prominent jurist Jan Brant (illus. 72). In Antwerp he built up an enormous studio, working tirelessly with pupils and assistants (including, for a time, Anthony van Dyck) and collaborating with local artists in every genre of painting. His works ranged from major altarpieces for Antwerp’s churches, fuelled by the CounterReformation and commissioned largely by the city’s wealthy merchants (for example The Raising of the Cross, 1609–11, illus. 17), to elaborate pictorial cycles glorifying foreign rulers (such as the Marie de’ Medici cycle, c. 1622–5, illus. 70). Favouring, as the artist himself stated, large-scale ‘heroic’ painting, he concentrated his efforts on history painting: scenes from ancient and modern history, mythology and allegories, and religious subjects. Yet he also excelled in portraiture and collaborated with local specialists in still-life painting to produce ambitious genre scenes, including a number of magnificent hunting pictures. Rubens was adept at turning his imagination to all kinds of visual art: he designed tapestry series, architecture (including his own townhouse, modelled on Italian Renaissance palazzi, illus. 29), frontispieces and illustrations

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for printed books, metalwork and sculpture. He was especially innovative in his design process, deploying not only preliminary drawings but also oil sketches, which could later be worked up into full-scale compositions. All this was done in relation to his deep learning: Rubens brought to bear on his inventions extensive reading in ancient and modern literature, amassing a substantial library and corresponding with leading scholars – such as the French antiquarian Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, whom he befriended in Paris – on topics such as philosophy, archaeology and politics. In this last field, politics, Rubens was an active participant. From at least 1623 he was tasked by Isabella (whose husband, Albert, had died in 1621) with diplomatic missions, specifically related to maintaining peace in the Netherlands. In this capacity he travelled to Paris (1622–5); Rotterdam, Delft, Amsterdam and Utrecht in the northern provinces (1627); Madrid (1628–9); and London (1629–30). His missions to Spain and England were especially taxing, but fruitful – Rubens was knighted by the kings of Spain and England for his role in brokering a peace between the warring nations. Strikingly, given the laborious and sensitive nature of his diplomatic duties, Rubens combined his political work with painting: in France he created the Marie de’ Medici cycle; in Spain he portrayed the royal family and copied works by Titian in the Spanish royal collection; and in London he painted an allegory of peace (Minerva Protects Pax from Mars) (1629–30, illus. 31) for Charles i and received the commission to decorate the ceiling of Whitehall’s Banqueting Hall (completed 1634). Following these spectacular political and artistic successes, Rubens’s later years were spent in semi-retirement in Antwerp

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and at his manor house of Elewijt in the Brabant countryside, known as Het Steen, which he purchased in 1635 (illus. 82). Isabella Brant had died in 1626, and a few years later, in 1630, Rubens had married the young Helena Fourment, the sister of his first wife’s brother-in-law (illus. 62). Rubens, evidently besotted with his bride (she was just sixteen, he 53, when they wed), painted her frequently in portraits and mythological works, for which she was both a model and a muse. The artist’s last years, spent happily with his growing family, were troubled by illness. Despite a famously abstemious lifestyle, Rubens suffered from gout: he signed a letter of 1637 to the antiquarian and art theorist Franciscus Junius ‘in haste, and standing on one foot’.2 Yet his pace of work seems to have slowed little. In the final five years of his life he completed some of his most important mythological paintings, including The Three Graces (c. 1630–35, illus. 9) and The Feast of Venus (c. 1637–8, illus. 78), as well as turning his hand to landscape, painting numerous images of the countryside around Het Steen (illus. 85). Falling seriously ill in the spring of 1640, gout paralysing both his hands, Rubens made his will on 27 May and died three days later. He was interred in the Fourment family vault in his parish church of St Jacob’s in Antwerp, and a year after his death a funerary chapel was built in his honour, with one of his last paintings – the Virgin and Child with Saints (1638–9) – placed above the altar. An epitaph composed by the city clerk Jan Gaspar Gevaerts praised Rubens as the Apelles not only of his own age but of all time, celebrating the ‘gifts’ (dotes) by which he excelled in learning and the arts.3 It is those gifts – variously known as spirit, ingenuity and genius – with which this book is concerned.

2 Peter Paul Rubens, Portrait of a Man, Possibly a Watchmaker, 1597, oil on copper.

Introduction

P

eter Paul Rubens’s earliest known painting is an unprepossessing portrait of an unidentified man (illus. 2). The sombrely yet expensively dressed sitter holds up for the viewer an oval-cased watch on a short red ribbon. In his other hand, he clasps a set square and a pair of compasses. Signed and dated 1597, when Rubens was just twenty years old, it is unlike the grand and boldly executed history paintings for which the artist is revered. A small work on copper (a support Rubens barely used) and in a lowly genre (portraiture), its palette is more muted, its brushwork less energetic than in the artist’s mature works. The warm flesh tones and nervous impasto of the gentleman’s ruff hint at what is to come, but in composition and approach the work looks back to earlier sixteenth-century models. In particular, the sitter’s identity is conveyed not only by his features but especially by the objects he holds. The set square and compasses suggest he is an artisan: such implements were standard attributes of those ‘mechanical artists’ who sought to attain higher status through an appeal to the intellectual foundations of their practice, mathematics being one of the socially elevated ‘liberal arts’. The watch that he

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delicately lifts has been interpreted as a vanitas motif, yet it could equally be another sign of his profession, a masterwork this craftsman has made using the very hands and tools that frame the glittering device. The watch even seems to rest on the set square, much as the mechanical arts were seen to rely on mathematics for their worth and efficacy. In this portrait, then, the sitter’s identity may be synonymous with his profession. His skill is manifested in a clockwork jewel that puns on the relationship between mind and matter, since in the early modern period the same Latin word was used both for talent and for machine: ingenium (ingenuity).1 This polyvalent term meant many things: the nature, skill and wit of a person as well as a cunning object, a device or an engine. In fact, the sitter himself could well have been called an ‘engineer’ – a subtle artisan who made clever things.2 This youthful work is very different from how Rubens later portrayed his sitters, or indeed himself. Unlike many of his peers, Rubens never depicted himself at work in the studio, nor even with the tools of his trade, the brush and palette. Instead, he emphasized what we would today call ‘psychological insight’, the ways in which personality may be discerned through the sitter’s gaze. Writing (in Italian) in 1630 to the French antiquarian Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Rubens expressed disappointment that a recently received portrait failed to capture his friend’s character. Your portrait has brought the greatest pleasure to me, and also to those who have seen it. They are entirely satisfied by the likeness, but I confess that I do not see reflected in this face that lively wit [non so che di spiritosa]

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and a certain power in the countenance, which seem to me to belong to your genius [genio], but which it is not easy for anyone to render in a picture.3 In the Self-portrait painted around the same time as this letter, Rubens sought to master this difficult task of capturing ‘genius’ (illus. 3). His bust-length figure is at a slight angle to the viewer, set against an indeterminate, brushy background. He wears a fashionable slashed doublet with a loose, open collar and his characteristic broad-brimmed hat – perhaps adopted to affect a ‘poetic’ persona.4 His beard and moustaches have been painted in lively, flicked strokes of the brush. His lips – drawn into the hint of a smile – are a moist pink. Yet the focus is squarely on the eyes, set in the middle of the picture, the dark blue-grey of their irises pricked with a dot of reflected light. Rubens, gazing at himself and us, conveys in a glance that ‘genius’ which was lacking in Peiresc’s portrait. Neither accoutrements nor explanatory text is required to show his spirit. Indeed, when Rubens’s older brother Philip wished to conjure Peter Paul’s presence, he did so through his absent sibling’s eyes: ‘I conjure you by our love, “by your eyes, by your genius”.’5 We have now encountered the key words or notions around which the present book is organized: genius, ingenuity and spirit. They were by no means fixed in Rubens’s age and their meanings have changed significantly over time, yet they offer a string of interwoven threads that may guide us through the artist’s life, oeuvre and critical reception. These notions were called by a variety of names in the languages of early modern Europe. Thus, we find genius, ingenium

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and spiritus in Latin; genio, ingegno and spirito in Italian; génie and esprit in French; genie and geest in Dutch (French and Dutch used the same word for ‘ingenuity’ and for ‘spirit’). The polyglot Rubens, who corresponded in Italian, French and Latin as well as his native Dutch, would have been familiar with all these terms and their interrelation, not least their growing significance in artistic theory. All three concepts were used by modern writers on art whom Rubens read – such as Giorgio Vasari, Karel van Mander and Franciscus Junius – to denote creative talent, character or the effects of art on a viewer. Moreover, they are prevalent, albeit with varying senses, in the classical literature he so admired. ‘Spirit’, of course, was a staple of theology, with which Rubens – a devout Catholic – was very familiar.6 Genius is an especially tricky term when it comes to Rubens, since its meaning has changed the most between his time and our own. Most early moderns took it to be simply the character, nature or inclinations each person is born with, not the heightened creativity and extraordinary brilliance of a superior artist or scientist – the meaning we have inherited from Romanticism. The former is what the artist’s nephew meant when he wrote that the young Rubens, ‘suddenly bored with life at court and drawn by his genius towards the study of painting . . . begged his mother . . . to place him under the instruction of Adam van Noort, a painter of Antwerp.’7 Yet in a long critical tradition stretching from his earliest, seventeenth-century biographers through the eighteenthcentury writings of Diderot, Reynolds and Goethe, and down to the present day via the nineteenth-century monographs of Waagen and Burckhardt, Rubens has been singled out for

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Introduction

possessing an exalted imagination and sublime technical gifts. Reynolds’s comments in his late essay ‘The Character of Rubens’ (1797) are representative of the status quo: ‘The works of men of genius alone, where great faults are united with great beauties, afford proper matter for criticism. Genius 3 Peter Paul Rubens, Self-portrait, c. 1630, oil on panel.

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is always eccentrick, bold, and daring’; ‘[Rubens’s] superiority is not seen in easel-pictures, nor even in detached parts of his greater works . . . It does not lie in an attitude, or in any particular expression, but in the general effect, in the genius which pervades and illuminates the whole’; ‘The productions of Rubens . . . seem to flow with a freedom and prodigality, as if they cost him nothing; and to the general animation of the composition there is always a correspondent spirit in the execution of the work.’8 Reynolds had been converted to the merits of Rubens’s art on a trip to Europe, but he still considered the artist a flawed genius who combined great beauty with ‘faults’.9 In fact, these supposed flaws had been highlighted more than a century earlier. In an influential biography of the artist published in 1672, Giovanni Pietro Bellori argued that the very force of Rubens’s genius led him astray from ‘good design’: it is true that, uniting the great swiftness and fury of his brush with the copiousness of his inventions and his wit [ingegno], Rubens set his hand to a great many works . . . It is nevertheless possible to fault Rubens for having failed to achieve beautiful, natural forms, for want of good design, because of which, and because of a certain something in his genius [per un certo suo genio], which would not suffer correction, he was kept from beauty in the manner of his heads, and from grace in outlines, which he distorted with his style.10 Although Bellori did not single out any particular work for criticism, he might have had in mind one of Rubens’s most

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Introduction

celebrated commissions: the Marie de’ Medici cycle (1622–5), painted for the Palais du Luxembourg in Paris (illus. 70). In these works, Bellori observed, one could discern ‘the great swiftness and fire of his spirit [spirito], [Rubens] having deployed a wondrous assuredness and freedom of the brush’.11 This swiftness is especially evident in Rubens’s drawings, in which his superabundant imagination spills onto the page in a rapid series of inventive compositions or in the many freely painted oil sketches he made as preparatory studies for his finished paintings (illus. 56). Roger de Piles said of these works that they were the artist’s ‘first thoughts’, finished to a greater or lesser degree depending on his ‘humour’.12 Yet in Bellori’s opinion, this ‘freedom’ (libertà) was a deficiency as much as an asset. For him, the force of Rubens’s genius, and the apparent conceit that came with it, meant that the artist allowed his character free rein. This resulted in an idiosyncratic style far from the measured design – exemplified by Raphael – that many early modern critics admired. Bellori’s comments reflect a rapidly escalating debate about the respective merits of ‘design’ versus ‘colour’. In the sixteenth century this debate revolved around the contrast between the Florentine and the Venetian schools, between Michelangelo’s disegno and Titian’s colorito. In the later seventeenth century, with the growing ascendancy of France as a political and cultural power, the debate shifted to the lecture halls of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris, with Nicolas Poussin’s exacting compositions pitched against Rubens’s vibrant palette. In this comparison, Rubens found his greatest champion: the diplomat, amateur artist and critic Roger de Piles. De Piles argued not only that colour

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was ‘the soul of painting’, but that genius was the ‘first thing’ required of a good painter.13 Writing in the 1670s, and in a departure from previous authors, the French critic distinguished sharply between ‘inclination’ and ‘genius’, although he considered both necessary for success: inclination is nothing more than a simple love for one thing more than another. And genius [genie] is a talent that one has received from nature, so as to succeed in something. This talent languishes sometimes in laziness, if it is not heated by the ardour that accompanies inclination, and inclination is useless if it is not guided by the light of wit [esprit].14 Elsewhere, praising Rubens’s peerless talent, he explained that the artist’s greatness lay in a combination of innate ability and hard-won learning, in a ‘fiery’ but self-disciplined spirit that could produce lively yet decorous inventions. It is always the case that nature and genius are above rules, and are what contribute most to making a man skilful. What is needed, then, is a soul which has swift and easy motions, which has fire to invent, and firmness in execution . . . The genius of Rubens was capable of producing by itself alone, and without the aid of any precepts, extraordinary things; but as he was naturally enlightened, and in addition philosophical, he believed that since painting was an art, and not a pure effect of caprice, it possessed infallible principles whose quintessence he would extract by

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Introduction

means of the order he was able to impose upon his studies.15 De Piles visually encapsulated these requisite combinations in the engraved frontispiece to his books, in which Art and Nature join hands in alliance (‘Artis et Naturae Foedus’) (illus. 4). The pair are brought together by a winged deity bursting from the clouds in rays of sunlight: clearly a personification of the guiding light of esprit. Aptly, de Piles created this image by adapting one of Rubens’s own compositions: the title page to Silvestro da Pietrasanta’s book of emblems, De symbolis heroicis (1634) (illus. 5).16 There, as the text informs us, ‘heroic’ symbols are generated through the companionship of Nature (depicted as the fecund Natura Multimammia, or ‘many-breasted Nature’) and Art (in the guise of Mercury), who provide matter to Ingenium.17 Rubens depicted Ingenium as a butterfly-winged figure who, while receiving the gifts of art and nature, simultaneously hands the tools of painting to the eloquent god Mercury. De Piles, intent on emphasizing the fiery nature of a superior artist’s abilities, has added a flame to this figure’s head.18 Perhaps he was familiar with the French painter Simon Vouet’s Allegory of the Human Soul (c. 1624), which features a similar figure, identified in an engraved version by Claude Mellan as Ingenium, which ‘leaps like a flame, flashes like a flame, that is why it crowns the hair of the head with harmless fire’.19 Rubens’s contemporaries certainly considered him a man of exemplary ingenuity. In the earliest account of Rubens’s character to have come down to us, the scholar-publisher Balthasar Moretus wrote to Rubens’s brother Philip that his

4 Frontispiece to Roger de Piles, Cours de peinture par principes (1708), engraving.

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Introduction

correspondent had a young sibling of the ‘most charming wit’ (suavissimi ingenii).20 Similarly, Joachim von Sandrart, one of the few early biographers actually to have met Rubens, wrote that ‘he showed remarkable ingenuity [ingenium], intelligence and intellect.’21 Such qualities served Rubens well in his diplomatic career: his political intelligence, complemented 5 Cornelis Galle the Elder, after Peter Paul Rubens, title page to Silvestro da Pietrasanta, De symbolis heroicis (1634), engraving.

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by his prudence and suave nature, were admired especially by the princes and nobles of Spain and the Spanish Netherlands, who employed him on many sensitive missions in the 1620s and ’30s. Equally, Rubens liked to parade his wit in the studio, as the university student Otto Sperling noted. Entering the master’s room during a visit to Rubens’s elegant Antwerp townhouse, Sperling observed the artist at work, and at the same time [he] listened to Tacitus being read to him, and dictated a letter. As we kept silent because we did not want to disturb him, he began himself to speak with us, and in the meanwhile continued working, listening to the reading, did not stop dictating the letter, and answered our questions, whereby he wished to demonstrate to us his ingenium.22 Perhaps most evocative is the English connoisseur Sir William Sanderson’s anecdote, putatively based on having seen Rubens at work in London during his diplomatic mission to negotiate a peace between Spain and England in 1629–30. Rubens, Sanderson wrote, would (with arms across) sit musing on his work for some time; and in an instant in the liveliness of spirit, with a nimble hand 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.23

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Introduction

It is notable just how different Sanderson’s account is to Sperling’s. Where the former presents Rubens as a master of cool, calm multitasking – his ingenium reflected by his ample brain’s capacity to receive and produce at one and the same time – the latter gives us a ‘hot’ artist, driven and exalted. We might contrast Sanderson’s image of Rubens to the one conjured by Luca Giordano’s imaginary portrait Rubens Painting ‘The Allegory of Peace’, sometimes called The Genius of Rubens (c. 1660) (illus. 6). Painted some twenty years after Rubens’s death, it depicts the artist squatting on the howling figure of a conquered Fury and swiftly capturing the animated figures before him on a canvas propped up by a chained bear, representing Wrath Tamed. The painter – notably composed in the midst 6 Luca Giordano, Rubens Painting ‘The Allegory of Peace’, c. 1660, oil on canvas.

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of a palatial yet chaotic studio – is watched over by Nature (or perhaps Abundance with the gifts of Nature, since her cornucopia is overflowing) and Minerva, goddess of wisdom, while he works to the heroic blast of an angel’s trumpet. Giordano’s picture portrays Rubens as a quintessential ‘genius’ figure, conveying his grandeur, his swift yet sure hand, his copious imagination and his boldness. Yet this Rubens seems also to have tamed his passions. Conqueror of Furies and Wrath as a diplomat, he paints calmly, not rhapsodically. Here we encounter a notable fault line in Rubens’s biography and the reception of his art by later critics: where to position him in relation to passion and to freedom? Sanderson’s ‘violent driving on of the passion’ is quite at odds with reports, such as Sperling’s, of Rubens’s measured temperament, a product of the prudence he sought to exercise in all his affairs. The Self-portrait that Rubens sent to the Prince of Wales (later Charles i) in about 1624 has been interpreted as a representation of the artist’s mastery of the passions (illus. 7). It was probably begun as a portrait for his friend Peiresc in 1622, yet Rubens seems to have hastily completed the picture a few years later, sending it to London to make amends for a Lion Hunt that had been rejected and returned to the artist as ‘a peese scarse touched by his own hand’.24 In the Self-portrait, Rubens has portrayed himself against a looming rock face, its mass loosely modelled and cast deep in shadow. He has signed the work with a Latinized form of his name, Petrus Paulus, suggesting that the background may be intended as a play on words, petra meaning ‘rock’. This likely refers to the philosophical ideal of constantia (constancy), which Rubens has contrasted with the vagaries of fortune and ever-changing

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times, signalled by the sketchy, atmospheric sky of the portrait’s background. Rubens’s search for constancy was informed by his interest in Neostoic philosophy, particularly of the kind professed by the Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius and his circle, of which Rubens and his brother were active members. Rubens’s group portrait known as The Four Philosophers (c. 1611–12) depicts the artist and his recently deceased brother Philip in the company of Lipsius (who had died in 1606) and the scholar Johannes Woverius, beneath a bust of the Roman philosopher Seneca, who was considered a model of constantia (illus. 8). Yet we know that Rubens struggled to live up to this ideal. In a rare glimpse into his private life, and an equally uncommon expression of his feelings, Rubens, writing to his friend Pierre Dupuy in Paris, lamented the death of his first wife, Isabella Brant (illus. 72). Resigning himself to fate and to God’s plan at the loss of such ‘an excellent companion’, Rubens wrote: You are very prudent in commending me to Time, and I hope this will do for me what Reason ought to do. For I have no pretensions about ever attaining a stoic equanimity [impassibilità stoica]; I do not believe that human feelings so closely in accord with their object are unbecoming to man’s nature, or that one can be equally indifferent to all things in this world.25 Such comments, albeit ones made in the grip of grief, attest to Rubens’s acknowledgement of the passions as a driving force in human life. Yet Rubens could be equally scathing about passions run amok. He seems especially to have scorned

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immoderation in matters physical; indeed, those who knew Rubens attested to his abstemiousness. De Piles, for example, reports Rubens’s nephew Philip as saying the artist ‘had a great aversion to drunkenness and carousing, as well as to gambling’.26 This attitude doubtless informed certain of Rubens’s comments on ‘genius’ in his theoretical writings.

7 Peter Paul Rubens, Self-portrait, c. 1622–4, oil on panel.

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Rubens has left to posterity only fragments of his thoughts on art, in the copies of the lost Theoretical Notebook (once owned by de Piles before being destroyed by a fire in 1720) and in a handful of his letters, for much of his correspondence relates to diplomatic missions. In these sources, however, we can glimpse the ways in which our concepts informed Rubens’s approach to art. We have already observed, in the letter to Peiresc, how he deployed ‘genius’ and ‘wit’ to characterize 8 Peter Paul Rubens, The Four Philosophers, c. 1611–12, oil on panel.

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portraiture and the je ne sais quoi of personality. Elsewhere, in his observations on imitation and ancient statuary, De imitatione statuarum, he linked genius with ingenium. Lamenting the corruption of the modern era, Rubens asked, ‘What can we degenerates do in this wayward age, what base Genius [vilis Genius] fetters us to the ground, apart from the heroic, to that diminished ingenuity [imminutos ingenio] and judgment?’ He continued that the enfeebled ingenuity of the moderns results from their fondness for excess: ‘The principal cause of the difference between men of our age and the ancients is the sloth and lack of exercise of those living; indeed, they eat and drink, exercising no care for the body.’27 Thus Rubens distinguished in an entirely conventional way between genius and ingenium, both of which derive from the verb gigno, to create. In fact, genius’s ancient meaning – as a god imparting generative power – was often naturalized as a principle of human identity, including not only creative capacity but moral discernment or hedonistic bent. Hence the contrasting phrases indulgere genio and defraudare genium (to follow and to deny one’s nature).28 In De imitatione statuarum, Rubens relates genius to ingenuity: a ‘base Genius’ shackles to the ground a ‘diminished ingenuity’. That is to say, an intemperate nature binds and thus enfeebles talent, which may be overcome only by the heroic spirit. His picture The Coronation of a Hero (c. 1615–16) is a perfect example of this principle in paint (illus. 59). In this work, a muscular embodiment of masculine power (virtus) has conquered base instinct in the form of a slumped Silenus – the drunken tutor and companion of the wine god Bacchus – and is crowned by an overtly sexualized female personification of Victory. A work such as this,

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which the artist kept at home until his death, reflects not only Rubens’s attitude towards ‘base Genius’ but also his clear demarcation of gender roles and identities. We catch sight of this, too, in his letter about the death of his wife, whom he says, ‘one could love – indeed had to love, with good reason – as having none of the faults of her sex. She had no capricious moods and no feminine weakness, but was all goodness and honesty.’29 These views, common in Rubens’s lifetime, suffuse the artist’s treatment of the ‘generative’ or ‘procreative’ aspects of genius in his art, and there can be little doubt that he considered men superior to women in both intellect and creative potency. For all the importance of these secular spirits, it is important to recall that in the early modern period talent was ultimately thought to be God-given: a spiritual gift of a sacred kind. Moreover, the staunchly Catholic Rubens first made his name through a series of major altarpieces commissioned from religious orders and civic authorities for prominent Roman and Antwerp churches. Rubens’s earliest ‘victories’ derived from the depiction of religious subjects, not classical ones. Thus this book begins by exploring how Rubens approached sacred subject-matter, in particular how he responded to Counter-Reformation theologians’ calls for spiritually moving visual art. Chapter One, ‘Holy Spirit’, focuses on Rubens’s early successes, examining the religious pictures he made up to about 1610. Rubens’s father had converted to Protestantism in the 1560s and been banished from his native Antwerp to live in what is now Germany. After his death, though, Rubens’s mother returned to Antwerp and brought her children up as Catholics. Rubens developed a

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robust faith, which, combined with his attentive reading of theology, spurred his investment in spiritually affective paintings. Chapter One looks closely at those key early commissions that either depict individuals in the act of being moved by the Holy Spirit (The Holy Trinity Adored by the Duke of Mantua and His Family, 1605; St Gregory the Great Surrounded by Other Saints, 1606–7) or which were intended to move the spirit of the beholder (The Annunciation, 1609). They provide an opportunity to examine Rubens’s art in relation to spiritus, which was both the ineffable substance through which God worked in the world and also the subtle essence that powered the human body and mind. In these works, we see Rubens fitting his temperament and his emerging style to subjects that could move the passions in the service of ‘true’ religion, all the while keeping an eye on how to advance his own fame. Chapter Two, ‘Vive l’Esprit’, turns from Rubens’s religious commissions to the social and commercial worlds of early modern Antwerp. The chapter’s title is taken from a wellknown image of Antwerp’s artistic and social elite – Willem van Haecht the Younger’s The Cabinet of Cornelis van der Geest (1628) – that depicts Rubens and his ingenious colleagues beneath the motto ‘Vive l’Esprit’ (Long Live Ingenuity!). This chapter takes Van Haecht’s painting as a starting point from which to explore Antwerp’s distinctive culture of ingenuity and Rubens’s dominant position within it. On his return from Italy, Rubens swiftly developed a large, successful studio, collaborated with Antwerp’s leading genre painters and immersed himself in Antwerp’s civic society. This chapter focuses especially on the ways in which a combination of friendship, learning and commerce nurtured the arts

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in Rubens’s home city, exploring the artist’s patronage, collaborations and business savvy within the wider context of the European Republic of Letters. It stresses the collaborative or distributed nature of ingenuity in Antwerp and how this relates to the singular wit for which Rubens was praised. The chapter introduces some of Rubens’s most important collaborators, such as Anthony van Dyck, Jan Brueghel the Elder and Frans Snyders, as well as his major patrons: Archdukes Albert and Isabella and merchants like Nicolaas Rockox and Cornelis van der Geest himself, and the works they commissioned and collected. One of these works is Rubens’s feted The Battle of the Amazons (c. 1615). The chapter concludes by exploring how the dynamism (furia) of this picture resonates with the esprit celebrated in Van der Geest’s cabinet. Chapter Three, ‘Vital Spirits’, explores Rubens’s relationship to the study and use of ancient art by considering ingenuity as imitation, in the context of ‘those great spirits’ he professed to follow. In so doing, it highlights the gendered aspects of Rubens’s enterprise: the supposedly masculine character of heroic virtue and its association with robust form, especially the classical male nude. It also takes seriously the ‘digestive’ model of imitation the painter inherited from antiquity. Ancient sculpture, he said, had to be fully ‘imbibed’, suffusing the artist’s mind and soul. Rubens, steeped in early modern medical theories that connected diet, the humours and talent, conceived of creative juices as something literal as well as figural. For Rubens, creativity was not only an embodied process but a deliberative one. Throughout his life, he wrestled with the problem of how best to integrate ancient

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art into modern practice in an innovative but respectful way. A relentless student of antiquity in all its guises, he made dozens of drawings after classical statuary; wrote De imitatione statuarum, on how ancient sculpture could best be used by the painter; and displayed in his letters and paintings a profound concern for philological and archaeological accuracy. Yet Rubens was concerned not simply with copying but with emulation: a selective art that could convey the spirit of antiquity while avoiding slavish replication. One of the most distinctive features of his ingenuity lay in achieving this form of imitation while retaining his own unique manner – a synthetic combination of old and new that surpassed even the best of both ancient and modern artists. Antiquity was for Rubens a ‘vital spirit’ that, metaphorically imbibed, inspired the artist to great heights of imagination. Chapter Four, titled ‘Genial Painting’, explores the artist’s spirited treatment of festal subject-matter, in which themes of fertility, abundance and creativity are combined in a celebratory mode. While Rubens treated sacred love often in his religious pictures, profane love was a major theme in his secular oeuvre. In subjects such as Venus and Adonis, Rubens reflected on rapture by the passions and the ways in which love was communicated by sight, touch and breath – all of which relied on ‘spirit’ for their efficacy. Such passions were the province of genius not simply because of their ecstatic nature but because they pertained to geniality: to pleasure and mirth. Rubens, twice married, explored the delights of love and sex in renowned pictures such as The Feast of Venus (c. 1637–8), but he was equally interested (artistically, at least) in the bodily pleasures of dancing and feasting. In the Kermis (c. 1635), or

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‘village fair’, subject-matter and style mutually reinforce one another. Rubens’s swift, viscous painting technique is a perfect complement to the fleshy excesses of the depicted revellers. With creative gusto, Rubens invites us to partake of the feast, consuming with our eyes so that we might be liberated by the pleasures of art. The book’s conclusion, ‘Genius Loci’, returns to this issue of freedom in Rubens’s art. Towards the end of his life, Rubens purchased the estate Het Steen in Brabant, which conferred on him the noble title Lord of Steen. He had become a member of the landed aristocracy, the nominally freeborn or ‘ingenuous’ elite of early modern society, through the fruits of his own ingenuity. In his final years, Rubens turned especially to landscape painting, depicting repeatedly his own estate as if determined to capture its governing spirit, its genius loci. In antiquity, the genius loci referred to the protective spirit of a particular locale, but it increasingly came to be associated with the unique atmosphere of a given place, with early modern humanists positing that the genius of a region coloured decisively the ingenium of the people born on its soil. Thus the genius loci came to be bound up with emerging notions of national identity or the fixed character of a given populace. Examining the late landscapes through this lens brings into focus an important critical debate that we encountered earlier through Bellori and de Piles: Rubens’s stylistic identity. Traditionally, Rubens has been viewed as a northern artist who successfully mastered the art of Italy to create a hybrid or international style. Yet the late landscapes show the artist engaging with traditionally Flemish subject-matter, with a particular debt to the landscapes of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a couple of whose

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works Rubens owned. To what extent, then, do these late works see the ageing Rubens experimenting with a Flemish vernacular? How, when placed in the context of Rubens’s biography, might we use them to understand the vexed notion of individuality and the transformation of early modern ingenuity into Romantic genius?

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ubens is popularly known as a painter of plump, eroticized bodies (illus. 9). The Three Graces (c. 1630– 35) is paradigmatic of the sensual treatment of rounded female form that gave us the term ‘Rubenesque’ as a descriptor of the voluptuous female figure. In this monumental painting Rubens lingers, in luscious passages of impastoed paint, on the warmly pliable flesh of the nubile Graces, the left-hand one of which he may have modelled on his youthful second wife, Helena Fourment. Goethe, writing towards the end of the eighteenth century, neatly summarized the enduringly Romantic appreciation of the corporeal in Rubens: You find Rubens’s women too fleshy? I tell you, they were his women, and if he had populated heaven and hell, air, earth and water with ideal forms, he would have been a poor husband and they would not have been the mighty flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone.1 Yet Rubens made his name not as a painter of flesh but as a painter of spirit, or rather of bodies being moved by the

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spirit. In his early years as a mature artist – first in Italy, then back home in Antwerp – Rubens produced a series of devotional works that depict the faithful in a moment of being touched, filled or moved by the Holy Spirit. St Gregory the Great Surrounded by Other Saints (1606–7), commissioned by the Oratorians for the high altarpiece of the Chiesa Nuova (Santa Maria in Vallicella), their main church in Rome, is a 9 Peter Paul Rubens, The Three Graces, c. 1630–35, oil on panel.

10 Peter Paul Rubens, St Gregory the Great Surrounded by Other Saints, 1606–7, oil on canvas.

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good example (illus. 10). The saint – his arms open to receive celestial light into his body – is moved to ecstasy by the Holy Spirit, which descends in the form of a dove, its wing touching his brow. In this picture, Rubens traded on the productive ambiguity of spiritus (pneuma, in Greek) as something that hovers between the material and the immaterial. As Thomas Aquinas explained, ‘“spirit” is a name imposed to signify the subtlety of some nature. Hence it is said of corporeal as well as incorporeal things.’2 In theology, spiritus was the stuff of the soul and of God, properly imperceptible yet made visible in miracles and visions, depicted often as the most intangible substances: vapours, light and fire. In natural philosophy and medicine, spiritus was a subtle substance, which had both a simple and a rarefied form: the ‘vital’ and ‘animal’ spirits. In its purest form, in the ventricles of the brain, the animal spirits powered cognition. Mingled with blood, the vital spirits coursed through the body, enabling motion and sensation. The Spanish physician Juan Huarte de San Juan explained this succinctly in his influential treatise on ingenuity, Examen de ingenios para las ciencias (1575): there is found in the body another substance, whose service the reasonable soul useth in his operations . . . These are the vitall spirits, and arteriall blood, which go wandring through the whole body, and remaine evermore united to the imagination, following his contemplation. The office of this spirituall substance is, to stir up the powers of man, and to give them force and vigour that they may be able to work.3

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In Rubens’s picture, St Gregory’s mind and body – both driven by natural spirits – have been moved by the spirit, the Holy Spirit. The painting’s original viewers, the congregants of the Chiesa Nuova, were expected similarly to be ‘spiritually moved’ by Rubens’s painting while admiring equally the artist’s own creative talents in the work. Indeed, we may say that in Rubens the Counter-Reformation Church found an ideal partner through a felicitous meeting of spirits: an artist equipped with the natural ingenium and religious sympathy to realize most effectively the ambitions of a faith in renewal. Faith surely aided his phenomenal success in securing commissions for religious paintings from Catholic patrons. While the artist’s father had converted to Protestantism, Rubens’s mother raised her children as Catholics in Antwerp, in an environment that strongly encouraged conformity to the Roman faith. Rubens is generally considered to be the artistic embodiment of this conformity, yet in fact we know very little about his personal religious convictions. His correspondence contains barely a mention of confessional matters beyond transactions for paintings with religious subjectmatter, while hardly any reports of his devotional habits have come down to us. A rare glimpse is provided by Roger de Piles, who portrayed Rubens as firmly devout, writing that the artist ‘rose every day at four in the morning and made it a rule to start the day with Mass’.4 If true (and there is no reason to doubt de Piles, who had conferred with Rubens’s nephew Philip), such observance doubtless recommended the artist to patrons such as the Oratorians and the Jesuits, committed to renewing, strengthening and spreading Catholicism in Europe and beyond by commissioning robust imagery of

11 Peter Paul Rubens, The Miracles of St Ignatius of Loyola, c. 1617–18, oil on panel.

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martyrdom and miracles. These included Rubens’s paintings for the Jesuit church in Antwerp, among which were an enormous pair of altarpieces proclaiming the spiritual efficacy of the order’s founders: The Miracles of Francis Xavier and The Miracles of St Ignatius of Loyola (both c. 1617–18) (illus. 11).5 In the latter, Rubens depicted Ignatius as a thaumaturge, a spiritual wonderworker. He conducts the spiritus – depicted as a gauzy plume of vapour – emanating from an altarpiece of The Crucifixion in order to drive out demons from possessed bodies, writhing furiously in the foreground. This unashamedly propagandistic picture is a useful reminder that in his commissions for altarpieces and other devotional works, Rubens accommodated himself to the doctrinal or political positions of his patrons. That is to say, his commissioned pictures reflect the patrons’ attitudes, not necessarily the artist’s own, even if these may often have been in accord. St Gregory the Great Surrounded by Other Saints was one of Rubens’s first major commissions for a religious work during his Italian period, a great coup for an enterprising artist seeking to make his name. The Counter-Reformation world of the Catholic nations was a fertile environment for his ambitions. The promulgation of the decrees of the Council of Trent (1545–63), the rise of religious orders such as the Jesuits (with whom Rubens developed a close relationship in Italy and Antwerp), and the desire of ecclesiastical and secular authorities to promote orthodox worship led to a rash of new commissions for devotional works, both public and private. Rubens’s journey to Italy was devised in part to take advantage of these opportunities, as well as to steep himself in the archaeology of the classical past and to see at first hand

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the works of the most renowned modern artists. Having completed his artistic training and established himself as a master in Antwerp, Rubens set off for Italy in the spring of 1600, travelling with an apprentice, Deodaat del Monte. He made his way directly to Venice, determined to study paintings by the celebrated exponents of colorito: Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto. Shortly thereafter, he entered the service of Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, dividing his time between Mantua, Genoa (where he compiled material for a short, illustrated book of the city’s architecture, the Palazzi di Genova, published in 1622) and Rome. In 1603 Rubens was entrusted with a diplomatic mission to Spain for his Mantuan patron, which afforded him a valuable opportunity to see the Spanish royal collections. As he wrote to Annibale Chieppio, an agent of the Gonzaga, he had seen ‘many splendid works of Titian, of Raphael, and others, which have astonished me, both by their quality and quantity, in the King’s palace, in the Escorial, and elsewhere’.6 Although Rubens received a handful of commissions for religious paintings, his first few years in Italy and Spain were mainly spent painting portraits of his patrons and associated noble families.7 Frustrated by what he considered to be employment unequal to his worth, Rubens longed for better commissions: of history paintings in general, but especially of altarpieces – the touchstone of success. As he wrote to Chieppio in late 1603: The pretext of the portraits, even though a humble one, would satisfy me as an introduction to greater things . . . I should not have to waste more time, travel,

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expenses, salaries . . . upon works unworthy of me, and which anyone can do to the Duke’s taste . . . I beg him earnestly to employ me, at home or abroad, in works more appropriate to my talent [al genio mio].8 By invoking his genio, Rubens implied both that his abilities were better suited to history painting and that he felt naturally inclined towards a grander, more elevated kind of painting than humble portraiture. His wish was soon granted. At the beginning of 1604, Rubens was commissioned to paint three large works as part of a frieze to decorate the principal chapel of the Jesuit church in Mantua. Since this church was dedicated to the Holy Trinity, that was the subject of the main painting – The Holy Trinity Adored by the Duke of Mantua and His Family (otherwise known as The Gonzaga Adoration) – accompanied by The Transfiguration and The Baptism of Christ, all of which were completed by 1605 (illus. 12). The main altarpiece, dismembered during the Napoleonic Wars, is indebted in both its palette and treatment of votive subject-matter to the Venetian tradition – Titian’s Vendramin Family Adoring the Cross (c. 1540–45), for example. Indeed, Rubens’s composition of the three members of the Trinity is likely modelled on Titian’s La Gloria (1554), painted for Charles v, which Rubens saw in the Escorial. Despite these precedents, Rubens depicted the Gonzaga family’s vision of the Trinity with considerable originality: as figures on a billowing tapestry, held aloft by angels against the backdrop of a colonnade of twisting, Solomonic columns.9 The rapt members of the noble house (the duke and his wife, accompanied by his deceased parents) who kneel in overleaf: 12 Peter Paul Rubens, The Holy Trinity Adored by the Duke of Mantua and His Family, also known as The Gonzaga Adoration, 1604–5, oil on canvas.

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adoration below thus witness a vision of the Trinity as a work of art: a miraculous artifice, woven from thread of celestial gold. Conventionally, only saints and the blessed dead are granted heavenly visions. By adding the duke’s dead parents to the devotees, Rubens overcame the theological problem of depicting still-living worshippers witnessing a vision. The ambiguous nature of the tapestry as both art object and vision aided this ingenious solution. The altarpiece boldly proclaims the efficacy of art as an inspiration to faith, in which, as the canons and decrees of the Council of Trent put it, ‘the honour which is shown them [sacred images] is referred to the prototypes those images represent; so that by the images which we kiss and before which we uncover our heads and prostrate ourselves we adore Christ, and we venerate the Saints whose likeness they bear.’10 In Rubens’s altarpiece, the ‘prototypes’ – God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit – are twice removed, for they appear in a meta-image: a divinely made work of art (the tapestry) feigned by Rubens’s mortal hands. Like St Gregory the Great Surrounded by Other Saints, this conceit honours both the subject and the painter, for it suggests a connection between God’s capacity for creation, as deus artifex, and his inspired servant’s Godgiven ingenuity.11 This connection is strengthened when we realize that the suspended tapestry is surely intended to recall those most iconic of images made materially but miraculously by God: the Sindone and the Sudarium, the ‘true likenesses’ of Christ imprinted on a shroud and veil respectively. Rubens may well have been inspired by the Turin Shroud (the Sancta Sindone) – at that time displayed in the Cathedral of San Giovanni – when painting the putto holding up Christ’s

13 Hendrik van Balen, The Holy Trinity, c. 1620, oil on panel.

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white robe.12 For the composition overall, he likely drew on the pictorial tradition in which the veil of Veronica (the Sudarium) was depicted suspended either by the saint or by a host of angels. Rubens’s Antwerpian colleague Hendrik van Balen (with whom he would later collaborate) made the connection with the Trinity explicit in a small devotional work, The Holy Trinity (c. 1620), in which an angel – to the right of God the Father, cradling Christ in a shroud – holds up Veronica’s veil (illus. 13). The Sudarium and Sindone attest to the Incarnation and the Passion physically – they were made by touch, the impression of Christ’s sweating and bloodied face and figure on fabric – while evoking the Saviour’s spiritual presence. In their creation, the subtle fluids which carried Christ’s spiritus throughout his body miraculously stained cloth with a holy image. Likewise, Rubens’s Holy Trinity probes the relationship between the material and the immaterial, but via the sense of sight. Do the Gonzaga family, naturalistically portrayed with exacting fidelity, witness the Trinity with their physical eyes or with the inspired eyes of faith? What is the relationship between their corporeal and mental or ‘spiritual’ vision? Such questions are especially fitting for the decoration of a Jesuit church, since the Jesuits, more than any other religious order, were invested in the power of images as a proselytizing tool and as an aid to meditation.13 This is evident not least in the Spiritual Exercises of their founder, St Ignatius of Loyola, whom Rubens portrayed in about 1620–22 (Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena) with eyes raised heavenwards towards a shaft of divine light. In fact, Ignatius himself had seen a vision of the Holy Trinity, an occasion depicted in an engraving in

14 Hieronymus Wierix after Peter Paul Rubens(?), ‘Ignatius Loyola Having a Vision of the Holy Trinity’, in Vita beati P. Ignatii Loiolae (1609), engraving.

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the illustrated biography Vita beati P. Ignatii Loiolae (1609), the designs for which are sometimes attributed to the young Rubens (illus. 14).14 In numerous treatises, Jesuit authors dwelled on the capacity of images – tangible or imaginary – to move the viewer to faith or intense devotion because they worked especially on the intellective part of the rational soul, which was sometimes conflated with the ingenium. In a long tradition stretching from Aristotle through Aquinas and his commentators down to the seventeenth century, sight was given primacy among the five senses and associated especially with intellection. Louis de Blois, a sixteenth-century Flemish mystic frequently drawn upon by Jesuit authors and for whose Opera (1632) Rubens designed a title page, explained this using the example of the Holy Trinity: The image of the Holy Trinity shines strongly in the soul of man. For the rational soul has three excellently formed natural forces, known as memory, intellect and the will . . . These three forces of the soul are the spiritual senses: for sight is given to the intellective power, hearing to the power of memory, smell, taste and touch to the affective or loving power, that is to say, the will.15 The connection of sight to the ‘spiritual sense’ of intellect returns us to St Gregory and his visionary experience, as depicted by Rubens for the Chiesa Nuova. This altarpiece was the artist’s breakthrough work, a hugely coveted commission with a high public profile. As Rubens wrote proudly

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to Chieppio in December 1606, a few months after winning the commission: when the finest and most splendid opportunity in all Rome presented itself, my ambition urged me to avail myself of the chance. It is the high altar of the new church of the priests of the Oratory, called Santa Maria in Vallicella – without doubt the most celebrated and frequented church in Rome today, situated right in the centre of the city, and to be adorned by the combined efforts of the most able painters in Italy. Although the work mentioned is not yet begun, personages of such rank are interested in it such that I cannot give up a contract obtained so gloriously, against the pretensions of all the leading painters in Rome.16 The ‘personages of rank’ referred to doubtless included the donor, Cardinal Giacomo Serra, the papal treasurer who had persuaded the Oratorians to give the commission to the largely unknown Fleming, presumably due to a personal preference for Rubens’s art, which he could have seen in his native Genoa. Yet the commission was not the triumph Rubens expected. He signed a contract with the Oratorian fathers in September 1606 and had completed the painting by the summer of 1607, only to have it rejected by the commissioners because its upper parts had not ‘pleased’ them. As Rubens explained in another letter to Chieppio: You must know, then, that my painting for the high altar of the Chiesa Nuova turned out very well, to the

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extreme satisfaction of the Fathers and also (which rarely happens) of all the others who saw it. But the light falls so unfavourably on this altar that one can hardly discern the figures, or enjoy the beauty of coloring, and that delicacy of the heads and draperies, which I executed with great care, from nature, and completely successfully, according to the judgment of all.17 Rubens was obliged to make a second version, very different to the first – The Madonna della Vallicella Adored by Angels (1608) – which he painted on slate (a less reflective support) and which was accepted by the commissioners (illus. 15). This second version emphasizes the ‘Madonna della Vallicella’, a miraculous icon that was the Chiesa Nuova’s most sacred treasure, and is set fully in the celestial realm. The feigned icon – which could revolve, seemingly miraculously, on holy days to reveal the actual icon on the reverse – is shown being adored by a host of kneeling angels. In contrast, Rubens’s first, more ambitious composition dramatizes the effects of this wondrous image and the means by which the Trinity and the Holy Spirit inspire the faithful. The original altarpiece – at more than 4.5 metres (15 ft) tall, larger than life-size – depicts St Gregory the Great beneath the arch of a ruined temple, perhaps intended to signal the need for renewal of the Catholic Church, a popular theme of the Counter-Reformation. Gregory, a revered leader of the early Church, was a saint and co-dedicatee of the Chiesa Nuova. He is accompanied by a group of early Christian martyr-saints (from left to right, Maurus, Papianus, Domitilla, Nereus and Achilleus) promoted in particular by

15 Peter Paul Rubens, The Madonna della Vallicella Adored by Angels, 1608, oil on slate.

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Cardinal Cesare Baronio, provost-general of the Oratorians, who very likely guided the commission before his death in late June 1607. Set above the ruined arch is the ‘Madonna della Vallicella’, which is being garlanded by putti much as facsimiles of the icon were adorned with flowers and silks on feast days in the church. Gregory stands with arms opened to receive a bright light that floods his body at a raking angle from the top left. With eyes raised heavenwards, his forehead is lightly brushed by the outstretched wing of a dove: the Holy Spirit, descending to strengthen Gregory in spiritual gifts (see illus. 1).18 It is as though God has stretched out his hand, here momentarily incarnated as the dove’s wing, to touch Gregory’s mind. Spiritus is shown enflaming ingenium, strengthening the intellectual virtues – the ‘spiritual gifts’ of sapientia (wisdom), intellectus (understanding) and scientia (knowledge) – for which the saint was revered.19 As Huarte de San Juan observed, ‘when a man standeth ravished in a contemplation, the natural heat that is in the vital spirits, and the arteriall blood, run forthwith to the head, and the temperature of the braine enhanceth itself.’20 Rubens has been very particular in his composition. The dove brushes with its wing the front and middle of Gregory’s head – the places, according to early modern medical and psychological theories, in which intellection occurred. A treatise on the subject by Nicholas of Cusa, Idiota de mente (1450), sets out clearly this tradition, which retained its currency well into the seventeenth century: In the front part of the head, in the chamber of imagination, there is a certain spirit that is much more

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refined and swift than the spirit diffused throughout the arteries . . . In the middle part of the head, in that chamber that is called the chamber-of-reasoning, there is a very refined spirit – even more refined than the spirit in the chamber of imagination.21 Gregory’s animal spirits have been rarefied by a divine spirit, his mind illuminated. Indeed, light and sight play a key role in his movement to inspiration. In the presence of a wondrous image of the Saviour and his mother, he witnesses the Holy Spirit’s descent. It is almost as though he meets the dove’s gaze as he looks heavenward, dramatically encountering one part of the Holy Trinity in a form that hovers between the corporeal and incorporeal. Something immaterial – spiritual, even – has affected his body. The saint is mentally and physically moved by what he sees. This transference of spirit to mind and body is achieved especially by means of light, an important aspect, actually and metaphorically, of intellection. As Huarte de San Juan explained: as the eies stand in need of light, and cleernesse, to see figures and colours, so the imagination hath need of light in the brain, to see the fantasies which are in the memory. This cleernesse, the sun giveth not, nor any lamp or candle, but the vital spirits which are bred in the heart, and dispersed throughout the body.22 Rubens has set the scene against a stormy background, the better to emphasize the power of the light, at once natural

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and celestial, that radiates from above. A shaft of divine light falls upon the icon, shining directly on the face of the Virgin, who holds the Christ Child in her lap. (Given this iconographical feature, it is ironic that the natural light entering the Chiesa Nuova and reflecting off the painting ruined the altarpiece’s effect.) Here, as in The Gonzaga Adoration, Rubens draws attention to the spiritual efficacy of a work of art while exploring ambiguities between spirit and matter. A putto to the left of the Virgin in the holy image, which at first glance seems to be resting on its frame, has actually put its elbow through the picture, a reminder both that Gregory is experiencing a vision and that we – the beholders of Rubens’s altarpiece – are looking at a counterfeit of the ‘Madonna della Vallicella’, not the real icon. In both cases, sight mediates between the prototype, the likeness and the viewer. Indeed, source and effect are pointedly connected via a line of sight: a vertical axis links the Virgin’s face, the blessing gesture of the Saviour, the dove of the Holy Spirit and the figure of Gregory, suggesting a chain of divine grace in which spiritus descends by means of a mystical process of incarnation. It was a commonplace of Catholic theology that God’s essential nature was an uncreated light, or lux: a dazzling, ineffable brilliance of which all other ‘created’ light, whether spiritual or natural, was a reflection, or lumen. Indeed, God’s first reflection, Christ, was called the ‘light of light’ (lumen de lumine). Rubens alludes to this doctrine in a painting made shortly after his altarpieces for the Chiesa Nuova: The Annunciation (1609), commissioned by the Sodality of Married Men attached to the Jesuit College in Antwerp soon after his arrival back in Flanders in late 1608 (illus. 16). The Virgin,

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kneeling in prayer, her devotion shown through lighted lamp and book, is visited by the Archangel Gabriel, who announces her pregnancy with the Christ Child. The miraculous conception is signalled by shafts of divine light that radiate, top right, from storm clouds akin to those in St Gregory the Great Surrounded by Other Saints. The lowermost shaft of light illuminates the Virgin’s abdomen, piercing her body and entering her womb. 16 Peter Paul Rubens, The Annunciation, 1609, oil on canvas.

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Christ, the lumen de lumine, has been incarnated from lux.23 Since this process is effected by spiritus, the dove of the Holy Spirit is shown descending in the uppermost shaft of light, passing through the Virgin’s breast and filling her heart with those ‘gifts of the spirit’ she will require – fortitude, piety and fear of the Lord – just as Gregory was suffused with the intellectual gifts. Here we find another example of demarcated gender roles in Rubens’s art: gifts of the mind for the male saint, those of the heart for the Virgin. Paintings such as The Annunciation need to be understood within the wider context of Counter-Reformation religiosity. In certain aspects, this religiosity was forcefully emotive. Much of its visual art aimed to evoke pathos or other feelings by portraying the passions of the soul in action, whether through exaggerated physical drama or striking facial expression. Rubens is held up as the master of this highly sensorial mode, with works such as The Raising of the Cross – the great altarpiece of 1609–11, made shortly after his return to Antwerp – considered exemplary of a baroque sensibility (illus. 17). While Rubens could not possibly have comprehended the anachronistic and overdetermined label ‘baroque’ (an invention of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics), he almost certainly conceived of his art within a theory of the passions, in which outward bodily forms were fixed signs of an internal condition. Roger de Piles claimed that through the expression of the passions, the character of an artist’s genius is revealed.24 For example, in his account of the Rubens pictures in the Duc de Richelieu’s collection, he described Christ in the House of Simon the Pharisee (c. 1618–20; State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg) as follows:

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The difference of characters and persons is readily recognized, not only by their costumes, which are exterior signs; but still more by the physiognomy and by their expressions, which are the portrait of the soul, and which reveal the core of hearts . . . The expressions of the passions of the soul are wondrous in this work . . . And for me, having seen all that is beautiful in France and in Italy by Titian and Giorgione, I swear there is nothing that has struck me as much as this painting.25 The effects of Rubens’s pictures were both enhanced and, to some extent, conditioned by the devotional habits of their contemporary viewers. Lay and clerical audiences came to Rubens’s pictures primed with expectations formed by an array of religious practices. Some of these were enacted in 17 Peter Paul Rubens, The Raising of the Cross, 1609–11, oil on panel.

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public – the processions and celebrations of holy days, for example, and communal experience of prayer before altarpieces in churches and chapels. Others were more private, such as reading devotional books and meditating on religious imagery in the home, especially single-sheet prints and book illustrations. In fact, Rubens’s religious works proved highly popular as subjects for prints, through which they were distributed to an extremely wide audience, not just in Europe but, through the Jesuit missions, to the Americas and Asia. The Jesuits were the most enthusiastic sponsors of printed devotional literature and imagery, the latter of which included not just narrative pictures of biblical subjects and portrayals of saints and martyrs, but also emblems. These were pithy combinations of image and text that married symbolic figures 18, 19 Volvelle in Jan David, Veridicus Christianus (1601), engraving.

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to maxims, in order (in devotional examples) to provoke thoughtful reflection on spiritual subject-matter. The Jesuits invested heavily in emblem books to explain their teachings, publishing hundreds in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. An example that Rubens probably owned is the Veridicus Christianus (1601) by the Antwerpian Jesuit Jan David.26 The reader was invited to navigate David’s book by means of a volvelle, a paper instrument (sometimes called an ingenium) with moving parts, printed at the back (illus. 18 and 19). Moving a wheel, numbers are revealed that direct the reader to particular sections of the book, where they are expected to ‘contemplate the image, and consider its explanation’. Although operated by using the sense of touch, a printed motto from Psalm 118 emphasizes the role of sight in this process: ‘Revela oculos meos: Et considerabo mirabilia de Lege tua’ (Open thou my eyes, and I will behold the wonders of thy law). The emblems in David’s book are, like Rubens’s art, naturalistic. Others, though, could be quite schematic, their form in sync with the abstract truths of theology. A good example is the volume composed by an Antwerpian Jesuit whom Rubens doubtless knew, the priest and architect Willem Hesius. His Emblemata sacra de fide, spe, charitate (1636) opens with an emblem of the Holy Trinity: a star-like geometrical solid fashioned from tetrahedrons with the motto ‘Summus in Tribus Subsistit Unus’ (One stands on top of Three) (illus. 20). Hesius’s emblem elaborates on the traditional symbol of the Holy Trinity, a triangle, to which Rubens alludes in the triangular void formed by the arrangement of the three members of the Trinity in The Gonzaga Adoration. He

20 Jan Christoffel Jeghers, after Erasmus Quellinus, ‘Emblem of the Holy Trinity’, in Willem Hesius, Emblemata sacra de fide, spe, charitate (1636), woodcut.

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deployed this figure inscribed within a circle (the symbol of divine perfection and of eternity), towards the end of his career, in a design made in 1632 for the title page of the Jesuit Balthasar Cordier’s Opera S. Dionysii Areopagitae (1634).27 Like the Jesuits for whom he worked, Rubens took a particular interest in the mystical signification of sacred geometry, specifically of the circle and the triangle. For example, his undated (but undoubtedly early) entry in the album amicorum (friendship book) of Filips van Valckenisse and his descendants is a compass-constructed drawing of a circle with the motto ‘God is everything in the centre of the field’ (Medio Deus omnia campo) (illus. 21).28 Elsewhere, he contemplated the mystery of the Trinity in terms similar to Hesius, referring in his Theoretical Notebook to three as the ‘number above all. Three gives one.’29 In the section titled ‘Why the human figure consists of three elements’, Rubens remarked: All things begin from One, the origin of all numbers, itself without beginning and from the image of God, uncreatable, indivisible unless found in a continuum . . . It is with reason that Pythagoras calls this number the mind and likeness of God. The number Three, though, according to Aristotle in the beginning of his first book on the Heavens, signifies all things, containing the beginning, and the middle, and end, and is of all numbers the most perfect.30 For Rubens, God is both one and three, which accords with the organization of the cosmos (the macrocosm), the structure of human form (the microcosm), Christian theology,

21 Peter Paul Rubens, contribution to Filips van Valckenisse’s Album amicorum, kbr Ms. ii. 1688, fol. 127v, pen and ink on paper.

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and ancient authority.31 He even compared the three basic geometric elements of the human figure (the circle, square and triangle) to the tria prima of Paracelsian alchemy: salt, sulphur and mercury.32 The metaphysical passages in Rubens’s so-called Theoretical Notebook – a diverse collection of notes and sketches that has come down to us only in fragments – are brief and of uncertain date. As such, we should be careful neither to overinterpret them nor to inflate the significance of their esoteric elements. After all, conceiving of the Holy Trinity in numerological terms was hardly unorthodox. Nevertheless, his notes point at least to a passing interest in the Kabbalah, Paracelsian alchemy and Pythagorean number symbolism – topics that may have been represented also in the artist’s library.33 Rubens might have encountered such ideas through one of his teachers, Otto van Veen, whose studio he entered aged seventeen or eighteen and whose scholarly art left a lasting impression on the young painter. Van Veen was a leading Antwerp artist and emblematist who had learned alchemical precepts while a page at the Bavarian court. He published anonymously in 1621 a short treatise on predestination and free will – the Physicae et theologicae conclusiones – in which he sought to reconcile Paracelsian theories of the tria prima with the doctrine of the Catholic Church. Innovatively, Van Veen advanced his argument through a series of diagrams, in which he presented an elaborate, geometrical formulation of theological truth. The number three was instrumental in his reasoning, since he argued that the tripartite make-up of man (comprising body, spirit and soul) granted him free agency in his dealings with both God and his peers.

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Certain aspects of this book were considered heterodox by the Church authorities, such that when Rubens enquired after a copy from the artist’s brother, Peter, he was circumspect: I hear that M. Otto van Veen, your brother, has published a little anonymous work on the Universal Theory, or something of the sort. I should like very much to see this, and if it should be possible for you to lend it to me (for doubtless you have a copy), this would be very agreeable to me. I should accept it on my word of honour to keep this favour a complete secret, without speaking of it to a living soul, in case secrecy is necessary.34 Rubens, clearly aware of the controversial nature of the work, was right to be cautious. The Conclusiones was subject to an inquisitorial investigation 1627–30, which decided that the book had the same ‘diabolical spirit’ as the works of the Paracelsian philosopher Johannes Baptista van Helmont. In 1630, shortly after Van Veen’s death, a written condemnation ordered copies of the book to be burned. However, Van Veen’s image theory is strikingly conventional. Chapter Twenty of the Conclusiones (‘How Corporeal Things and External Ceremonies Promote the Deity in Man’) treats how works of art act upon the human spirit (illus. 22). In the accompanying illustration, an effigy of the crucified Christ emits rays (labelled ‘Z’) – comparable to the invisible species of early modern theories of vision – that enter the soul of man, signified by a triangle labelled ‘A’.35 Sensorial and intellectual experience of the image inclines man’s soul

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towards God. Thus the soul rises up and out (the dotted lines ‘B’) of the compass of the world (the circle encompassing both crucifix and man) to the Holy Trinity in the heavens (‘AAA’). As Van Veen explained in the text accompanying his diagram, ‘Through images . . . certain rays can enter through the body and spirit into the soul, and to the Divine Nature of man, moving this to incline towards salvation.’36 This presentation differs little from Jesuit assumptions about

22 Otto van Veen, ‘How Corporeal Things and External Ceremonies Promote the Deity in Man’, illustration in Physicae et theologicae conclusiones (1621), engraving.

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the efficacy of images. Indeed, one could happily use Van Veen’s diagram to explain the spiritual efficacy of Christian art, as depicted in Rubens’s Miracles of St Ignatius of Loyola (illus. 11), where an image of the Crucifixion emits spiritus that frees the demonically possessed. Couched in the language of ‘spirit’, Van Veen sought to explain how, by means visible and invisible, works of art acted directly on the body and soul to move man closer to God.37 He offered a succinct, diagrammatic explanation of the effect a painting such as Rubens’s Christ on the Cross (c. 1610–12) was intended to have on the pious beholder (illus. 23). Images of the Passion were considered by many commentators to be the most efficacious in stirring viewers to piety. In this work, possibly the one described by Joachim von Sandrart in his biography of Rubens as ‘vigorous and spirited’,38 Rubens has intensified the pathos of the Crucifixion through Christ’s upward gaze and the background’s expanse of forbidding clouds in a reddening evening sky. The clouds may presage the peal of thunder that rent asunder the curtain of the Temple of Jerusalem (the city seen in the background) at the moment of Christ’s death. Indeed, it seems likely that Rubens depicts the very moment of Christ’s expiration, when ‘crying with a loud voice, he yielded up his spirit’ (Jesus autem iterum clamans voce magna, emisit spiritum) (Matthew 27:50).39 In Van Veen’s terms, this image, in which the suffering Christ gives up both his breath and his soul (each denoted by the word spiritus), pneumatically conveys its sentiment to the viewer. The invisible spirits emanating from the picture infuse the body and soul of the pious beholder, who is conformed to Christ and moved nearer to salvation, and thus to God.

23 Peter Paul Rubens, Christ on the Cross, c. 1610–12, oil on canvas.

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Rubens’s request for Van Veen’s book shows that he was, at the very least, curious about potentially heterodox ideas. While there is little reason to doubt Rubens’s general religious conformity, the intellectual company he kept would have provided opportunities to discuss unorthodox subjects. In Rome he had befriended members of the Accademia dei Lincei, such as Johann Faber, interested in the esoteric teachings of Hermeticism and Paracelsianism. However, Rubens had likely encountered such ideas already in Antwerp, not only through Van Veen but in the Neostoic circle of Justus Lipsius. In Antwerp, Rubens had received a humanist education in the school of Rombout Verdonck and, through his brother Philip, entered the philosophical circle of Lipsius and his colleagues, centred on the University of Leuven. His

24 Peter Paul Rubens, Self-portrait with Friends, also known as the Mantuan Friendship Portrait, c. 1602–4, oil on canvas.

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attachment to this circle during his time in Italy is evident from a Self-portrait with Friends (otherwise known as the Mantuan Friendship Portrait) (c. 1602–4), which shows Rubens and his circle against a view from the Ducal Palace in Mantua of the Ponte San Giorgio (illus. 24). While the identity of some of the sitters is uncertain, Rubens portrayed himself (in the centre, looking out of the image) accompanied by Philip Rubens (who was in Italy 1601–4), and Lipsius on the far right – the latter fictitiously, since the scholar was then in Leuven. Around the time this work was painted, Neostoics in Flanders and Italy were interested especially in the nature of spiritus, for in 1604 Lipsius published his study of Stoic physics, the Physiologia stoicorum (1604), a treatise Rubens probably owned.40 Lipsius sought an accord between Stoic ideas and Christianity that was relatively uncontroversial: patristic authors had sought a similar alignment, while Seneca’s teachings were considered so close to Christianity that the ancient philosopher was often considered an honorary Christian. Yet in the Physiologia stoicorum Lipsius violated aspects of Christian doctrine by defending the Stoic theory of spiritus mundi (world spirit), including the notion that the human soul is an extension of this spirit. Lipsius explained that the spiritus mundi was characterized by a fiery property, closely connected to God’s essence, which he called an ignis artificiosus (‘artful’ or ‘creative’ fire).41 If God was a deus artifex, then fire was his medium. It would naturally follow that creativity in man, made in God’s image, would be equally fiery. As we have seen, Rubens’s own spirit was defined in precisely these terms – as a flashing spark that powered the artist’s genius, his ‘fire to invent’.

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Lipsius argued that divine fire, or aether, was also the substance of the heavens.42 We catch a glimpse of this blazing realm in one of Rubens’s early altarpieces (illus. 25). In The Circumcision (1605), commissioned by Marcello Pallavicino for the Jesuit church in Genoa, the spiritual significance of Christ’s circumcision – attended by the Virgin, turning away from her child’s imminent pain – is signalled by a dramatic opening of the fiery heavens, painted in bright yellow-orange hues.43 The Circumcision is a somewhat unusual subject for an altarpiece, but a significant one. On the occasion of circumcision, Jewish boys were given their name – a fitting subject for a Jesuit church dedicated to the Holy Name of Jesus. Furthermore, in Catholicism the Circumcision prefigures the Sacrament of Baptism and, as the Jesuit Louis Richeome explained, it was a good example of a spiritual allegory: ‘If something is a mystery of religion, it is a sacred figure. Thus, manna was a sacred painting, not of colours or of words, but of signification. Equally, the Circumcision was a significant action and figure of the Baptism.’44 With this in mind, we may note that in The Baptism of Christ (1605; Royal Museum of Fine Art, Antwerp) that Rubens produced for the Jesuit church in Mantua (a companion to The Gonzaga Adoration), the dove of the Holy Spirit descends to the Saviour in a burst of flame comparable to the aethereal outpouring of The Circumcision. There was a long tradition that connected the Holy Spirit with fire and divine gifts. At Pentecost, the moment at which the Apostles were filled with the Holy Spirit, each of Christ’s disciples received the gift of tongues, to preach and prophesy (illus. 26). Rubens painted this subject in 1619 for Duke

25 Peter Paul Rubens, The Circumcision, 1605, oil on canvas.

26 Peter Paul Rubens, The Descent of the Holy Spirit, 1619, oil on canvas.

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Wolfgang Wilhelm of Neuberg, depicting the descent of the Holy Spirit as tongues of flame, as per the biblical account in Acts 2:3: and suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a mighty wind [spiritus] coming, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them parted tongues as it were of fire, and it sat upon every one of them: And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they began to speak with diverse tongues, according as the Holy Spirit gave them to speak.45 These extraordinary ‘spiritual gifts’ (sometimes called the ‘charismatic gifts’), granted also to select priests and prophets of the Church, tended to be sharply distinguished from natural ingenuity.46 As Huarte de San Juan explained: we must understand that there are Wits, and there are Abilities, which God bestoweth upon men besides natural order, as was the wisedome of the Apostles, who being simple and of base account, were miraculously enlightened and replenished with knowledge and learning. Of this sort of abilitie & wisedome, it cannot be verified, that nature makes able; for this is a worke which is to be imputed immediately unto God, & not unto nature.47 However, the potential for conflation of natural, human wit with divine gifts arose from the fact that the ecstatic rapture

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of heightened creativity, the furor poeticus, tended to be described as a divinely inspired fire. Ambiguity arose from the fact that this ‘fury’ was akin to inspiration – literally a ‘breathing into’, just as the Apostles were filled with the pneuma of the Holy Spirit – and because it was God-given. For example, in the entry for ‘furor poetico’ in a popular handbook of iconography, the Iconologia, Cesare Ripa explained that creative ecstasy was a ‘superabundance of liveliness of spirits’ that ‘it is impossible to have from nature alone, it is considered a particular gift, and granted only by Heaven’. 48 Rubens was familiar with this notion of furor, which had been widely disseminated by natural-philosophical and art-theoretical writings following the fifteenth-century Florentine Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino’s articulation of the different types of ‘divine fury’ in his commentary on Plato’s Symposium. For example, Rubens, who knew Ficino’s writings, could have read about artistic furor in the second edition of Giorgio Vasari’s Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti (1568), a copy of which he owned.49 Shortly after Rubens had returned to Antwerp, the Leidenbased scholar and poet Dominicus Baudius wrote to the artist about this very subject. Having set out to persuade the painter to honour him ‘with some example of your art’, Baudius flatteringly exclaimed, ‘It is impossible for me to contemplate without rapture the masterpieces that come from your hands, which will live for as long as art, the rival of nature, and human genius are praised on earth.’50 Turning to the amorous passions that had provoked him to write ‘a thousand lines’ of poetry, he remarked:

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Does not Plato, the prince of wit and learning, say that no one may knock on the doors of the temple of the Muses without being gripped by a sacred fury? But this fury is granted only to all those with a quick wit and a wise heart in their breast, such that they may proclaim with that most ingenious poet: There is a god within us. It is when he stirs us that our bosom warms. It is his impulse that sows the seeds of inspiration.51 Rubens was not a divinely mad artist, gripped by Neoplatonic furor. His art, indeed his whole intellectual outlook, is far too deliberative for that. Rather, we should understand his creativity as sitting at the intersection of natural talent and divine inspiration, his religious paintings forged from a wit that was fired by faith. In Rubens’s native Dutch, the same word – geest – was used both for ‘spirit’ and for ‘ingenuity’. Thus we could say that Rubens ingeniously harnessed his natural spirits to depict and to aid the workings of the Holy Spirit. His painting was not rhapsodic, but his subject-matter was, and it was intended to move his viewers to a heightened spiritual state. Thus St Gregory’s ecstasy is a sacred form of fury; the Gonzaga are inspired to a peak of adoration by witnessing the ineffable mystery of the Holy Trinity; the aethereal heavens grace Christ at his circumcision; the gifts of the Holy Spirit descend in fire and light to the Apostles and the Virgin. Conceived and viewed in a devotional and intellectual environment that privileged the powerful connections between mind, soul and matter, these pictures speak to the power of

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spiritus. It was the substance of God and the cosmos; the divine breath of artistic and religious inspiration; the physiological conduit of mental and physical motions; and the animating principle of devotional works of art. In Rubens’s hands, spiritus was the meeting ground for innate artistic ability and sacred ardour. His religious works were properly the products of geest: ingenious and spirited in equal measure.

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n 1628, Willem van Haecht the Younger– son of one of Rubens’s teachers, the landscapist Tobias Verhaecht – painted an ambitious portrayal of Antwerp’s elite art world (illus. 27). It shows a group of liefhebbers der schilderyen (lovers of painting) in a sumptuous constcamer (art cabinet), discussing a fine collection of paintings, statues and objets d’art.1 Rubens stands to the left of the gathered company, leaning over the shoulder of Archduke Albert, and in front of his celebrated painting The Battle of the Amazons (c. 1615) (illus. 44). Indeed, the gathering is a veritable who’s who of Rubens’s patrons and artistic colleagues. These connoisseurs’ lively appreciation of Antwerp’s artistic riches takes place beneath the banner of ingenium, for inscribed above the cabinet’s entrance portal is a motto: vive l’esprit. The inscription puns on the surname of the painting’s commissioner (who also owned the collection portrayed): Rubens’s close friend Cornelis van der Geest. The adopted surname (Geest) of this wealthy spice merchant translates into French as esprit, so the motto means both ‘Long Live Van der Geest!’ and ‘Long Live Ingenuity!’ Indeed, the painting not only honours Van der Geest’s enlightened patronage and discerning

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taste but also celebrates the collective wit of Antwerp’s nobles, merchants and artists. In the previous chapter, we saw that ingenium, especially when connected to artistic ‘fury’, was considered a divine gift. This is part of The Cabinet’s message, conceived as it was in the staunchly Catholic milieu of Counter-Reformation Antwerp. Surmounting the inscription ‘Vive l’Esprit’ is a cartouche bearing the collector’s coat of arms, above which a dove perches on a winged skull (illus. 28). The wings are the attribute of ingenium, signifying the elevated ingenuity of superior talent – the sublime wit of those artists, Rubens prominent among them, whose work Van der Geest collected.2 That such talent takes flight through God’s grace is denoted by the dove, symbol of the Holy Spirit, placed directly beneath the figure of Christ in a large painting: Christ in the House of Mary and Martha by Rubens’s teacher, Adam van Noort. Thus we find on a vertical axis a similar chain of associations between Christ, the Holy Spirit and inspiration to that depicted by Rubens in St Gregory the Great Surrounded by Other Saints (illus. 10). Yet this sacred iconography has a secular counterpart. While the dove of the Holy Spirit sits on a skull – a traditional vanitas motif of transience, for even the greatest art will decay – its mundane counterpart appears three times on Van der Geest’s coat of arms. In this way, the ensemble lauds the God-given abilities of Antwerp’s artists and simultaneously announces Van der Geest’s eternal fame.3 ‘Long Live Van der Geest!’, the motto proclaims: his renown as a patron will outlive both perishable works of art and his mortal frame. In this way, the picture establishes a dialogue between immaterial wit (the spirits of ingenium and the immortal soul) overleaf: 27 Willem van Haecht the Younger, The Cabinet of Cornelis van der Geest, 1628, oil on panel.

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and its tangible products: artistic commodities crafted by skilled hands. We – like the connoisseurs in the room – are invited to appreciate the singular talents and signature styles of the artists whose works are displayed on the cabinet’s walls. Paintings by renowned founders of the Netherlandish school such as Jan van Eyck and Quinten Matsys rub shoulders with those of their successors: luminaries such as Rubens, Jan Wildens and Frans Snyders, all of whom are personally present in the throng of liefhebbers. The collection also displays choice examples of other artistic schools. The German Adam Elsheimer, a friend of Rubens, is represented by The Mocking of Ceres (c. 1605) – a picture that Rubens acquired for his own 28 Detail from Willem van Haecht the Younger, The Cabinet of Cornelis van der Geest.

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collection from Van der Geest. Elsewhere are works by Italian artists, such as the revered Raphael, or northern artists working in Italy, such as Giambologna, whose lacquered bronzes populate the central table. The picture thus invites discussion about the nature – the ‘genius’ – of different schools of painting. What is the geest, the elusive spirit, that distinguishes one school – or even one artist’s hand – from another? To contemporary viewers, the picture might have brought to mind a quip in Dominicus Lampsonius’s eulogy of the Netherlandish painter Jan van Amstel: ‘not without reason is the Italian said to have his brain in his head, [while] the Belgian [has his] in his active hand.’4 Rubens was especially intriguing in this regard. Hailed by contemporaries as a ‘new Apelles’, he was lauded as proof that the moderns had surpassed the ancients.5 As the Jesuit-trained scholar Antoine Sanders put it in a patriotic poem sent to the artist in 1621, Rubens had eclipsed the past glories of Italy: ‘Weep, Rome: in our age, Rubens, the Fleming, has conquered Latium’s hand with his Flemish dexterity.’6 Yet for all of Rubens’s towering ability, Van der Geest’s picture presents him as one artist among many. The picture celebrates the variety of talents – mercantile, courtly, artistic and scholarly – through which art could thrive in the polis. It stresses the collaborative nature of productive wits. This message is critical for our understanding of Rubens’s achievements after his return from Italy. While the artist was singled out by his peers as exceptional, his ingenium was nurtured by and blossomed within a local community. Rubens, highly sociable and profoundly engaged in Antwerp’s civic life, frequently worked collaboratively. His extraordinarily prolific artistic

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output was facilitated by studio assistants or collaborations with established local masters. Equally, his diplomatic work for the Archdukes (on behalf of the Spanish cause) was by its very nature cooperative. Conversation, discretion and persuasion were prominent among Rubens’s gifts, blessed as he was with a ‘charming wit’.7 Rubens doubtless saw himself as a figure of ‘heroic’ abilities, underpinned by the good fortune of robust health and abundant energy. As the motto on the garden portico of his townhouse put it, the productive man required ‘a sound mind in a healthy body’ (mens sana in corpore sano).8 Yet we should temper his self-perception and selfpresentation with the reality of the context in which he worked. Ingenuity was singular, but it could equally be distributed. It determined an individual’s nature while also characterizing the collective esprit of a community. Antwerp, Van der Geest’s cabinet tells us, was the true nursemaid to Rubens’s ingenium. Rubens returned home towards the end of 1608, having hastily left Rome to attend his dying mother. While he was too late to see her alive, the painter arrived to find his native city on the brink of renewal.9 For many years Antwerp – once the great trading hub of the Netherlands – had languished economically due to prolonged conflict between Habsburg Spain, the Protestant Dutch Republic and the Catholic Southern Netherlands. In spring 1609, the signing of a peace treaty negotiated in Antwerp – the Twelve Years Truce – ushered in a much-desired period of stability and prosperity: fertile soil for a painter hungry to grow his business and reputation. As Rubens wrote to Johann Faber in April of that year, ‘The peace, or rather, the truce for many years, will without doubt be ratified, and during this period it is believed

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that our country will flourish again.’ As he explained, the inducements of Albert and his wife, Isabella (the Infanta of Spain), tempted him to abandon a burgeoning Italian career to settle permanently in Antwerp. But to come to my own affairs, I have not yet made up my mind whether to remain in my own country or to return forever to Rome, where I am invited on the most favorable terms. Here they also do not fail to make every effort to keep me, by every sort of compliment. The Archduke and the Most Serene Infanta have had letters written urging me to remain in their service. Their offers are generous, but I have little desire to become a courtier again. Antwerp and its citizens would satisfy me, if I could say farewell to Rome.10 Antwerp prevailed, for a few months later the Archdukes appointed Rubens their official court painter on exceptionally propitious terms. As their letter patent put it, he was permitted to live and work at home rather than at the court in Brussels, benefiting from all the ‘rights, honours, liberties, exemptions . . . of our attendants and servants’.11 Significantly, this freed Rubens from the usually obligatory membership of Antwerp’s painters’ guild, meaning he could take in as many students and assistants as he wished, all the while benefiting from a healthy stipend of 500 livres per annum (about the cost of a large painting) and payment for works executed for the Archdukes. Eyes trained keenly on such a lucrative business opportunity, Rubens swiftly established himself as a leading civic figure. In October 1609 he married Isabella

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Brant, daughter of Jan Brant the Younger, secretary to the town and one of Antwerp’s wealthiest men. Delighting in a favourable match, he commemorated this happy union in a double portrait, The Honeysuckle Bower (c. 1609), in which husband and wife are portrayed as affluent gentry in a ‘garden of love’ (see illus. 72). The following year, Rubens purchased a prominently located house on the Wapper (one of the city’s main squares), which he transformed into an Italian-style palazzo. This housed his spectacular collection of paintings and sculptures (described by Roger de Piles as ‘one of the most beautiful in Europe’) and a large studio to accommodate his rapidly growing workshop (illus. 29).12 We do not know precisely how many students and assistants Rubens had working in his studio at any one time, but it was an operation on an unprecedented scale. As early as 1611, Rubens wrote to Jacob de Bie that he was full to capacity. ‘It is impossible’, he wrote, for me to accept the young man whom you recommend. From all sides applications reach me. Some young men remain here for several years with other masters, awaiting a vacancy in my studio. Among others, my friend and (as you know) patron, M. Rockox, has only with great difficulty obtained a place for a youth whom he himself brought up, and whom, in the meantime, he was having trained by others. I can tell you truly, without any exaggeration, that I have had to refuse over one hundred, even some of my own relatives, or my wife’s, and not without causing great displeasure among many of my friends.13

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The expansion of Rubens’s studio was necessary due to his phenomenal success in securing commissions from Antwerp’s elite. He had barely set foot on home soil before Nicolaas Rockox, burgomaster of the city, commissioned an Adoration of the Magi (1609) to decorate the room in which the Twelve Years Truce was signed: the Statenkamer of Antwerp’s Town Hall. This was followed by a monumental triptych, The Raising of the Cross (1609–11), for the high altar of the (now destroyed) parish church of St Walburga (illus. 17). In the first monograph on Rubens, published in 1771, Jean-François-Marie Michel proclaimed this painting The first public work in which Rubens displayed the superiority of his genius in the town of Antwerp, after 29 Jacobus Harrewijn, after Jacques van Croes, View of Rubens’s House in Antwerp, 1684, engraving with etching.

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his return from Italy . . . this rich composition was vividly set forth in a new and forceful way . . . Rubens brought [painting] to perfection by the liveliness of the attitudes, the expression of the characters, the freshness of colour, and the striking distribution of the light.14 Where St Gregory the Great Surrounded by Other Saints had set Rubens’s reputation in Rome, The Raising of the Cross confirmed 30 Anthony van Dyck, Portrait of Cornelis van der Geest, c. 1620, oil on panel.

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him as the foremost painter in Antwerp. We know from a later engraving by Hans Witdoek (published in 1638) that the commission was secured by none other than Cornelis van der Geest, portrayed sensitively by Rubens’s pupil Anthony van Dyck in about 1620 (illus. 30). The print’s dedication describes Van der Geest not only as the altarpiece’s ‘promoter’ but as Rubens’s close friend: To Cornelis van der Geest, the best of men and the oldest of friends, and his [Rubens’s] constant supporter from the time of his youth, as well as a supreme devotee of the art of painting throughout his life: [Rubens] has gladly and duly offered and dedicated to him in death this monument to everlasting friendship which he had destined for him in life. [Engraved] after the picture in the Church of St Walburga, which he [Van der Geest] more than anyone prompted and promoted.15 Van der Geest is a prime example of the enterprising, mercantile spirit that ensured Antwerp prospered during the Twelve Years Truce. In his constcamer, the group of men deliberating over a terrestrial globe alludes to the source of his personal wealth and to Antwerp’s success: international maritime trade. Indeed, his cabinet overflows not only with locally produced commodities but with riches from overseas. The open door of a cabinet reveals porcelain from China, while nearby is an exotic turban shell from the Indies. In fact, Van der Geest’s cabinet is somewhat disingenuous in the abundant riches it displays. By the time it was painted

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in 1628, the Twelve Years Truce had lapsed and Antwerp had been plunged into economic depression. As Rubens put it in 1627: Public affairs are going along very quietly here, and we find ourselves rather without peace than at war; or, to put it better, we have the inconvenience of war without the advantage of peace. This city, at least, languishes like a consumptive body, declining little by little. Every day sees a decrease in the number of inhabitants, for these unhappy people have no means of supporting themselves either by industrial skill or by trade.16 Rubens, however, was prospering. By the 1620s he not only had established a large and profitable studio but had become a valued political aide. Called to Paris by Marie de’ Medici in 1621 to decorate the Palais du Luxembourg (see illus. 70), while in France he played an important role in the negotiations that followed the expiry of the Twelve Years Truce. Following Archduke Albert’s death in 1621, Isabella became Governor General of the Spanish Netherlands. Acting as her agent, Rubens spearheaded attempts to renew the truce and then, once hostilities had resumed in 1625, sought a route to peace. In late summer 1628 he was dispatched to Spain to continue negotiations. His efforts there and in London, which he visited from summer 1629 to spring 1630, contributed significantly to the eventual signing of a peace treaty between Spain and England, the latter of which had supported militarily its co-religionists in the Dutch Republic.17 An allegorical painting made around this time, Minerva Protects Pax from Mars

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(Peace and War) (1629–30), exemplifies the artist’s dedicated pursuit of peace and prosperity (illus. 31).18 In it, a kneeling satyr proffers an overflowing cornucopia – signifying the fruits of peace – to a group of children, protected from Mars’s wrath by Minerva’s wisdom. The artistic riches on display in Van der Geest’s cabinet were Antwerp’s rewards of peace. Just beyond its entrance portal, notably decorated with swags of fruit, marching soldiers may be glimpsed: a reminder of the constant threat to the city’s equilibrium. Ingenuity, the painting implies, prospers only through tranquillity. Rubens pressed this message constantly in his civil affairs and in numerous pictures. In addition to his several allegories of peace and war, he painted numerous scenes of peaceable abundance, sometimes in collaboration. For example, he painted a sumptuous Abundance (Three Nymphs with a Cornucopia) (c. 1625–8; Museo del Prado,

31 Peter Paul Rubens, Minerva Protects Pax from Mars (Peace and War), 1629–30, oil on canvas.

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Madrid) with Frans Snyders and Paul de Vos around the same time that Van Haecht painted Van der Geest’s cabinet.19 Rubens himself found ‘peace of mind’ only once he retired from public life. Writing to Peiresc in 1634, he remarked: Now, for three years, by divine grace, I have found peace of mind, having renounced every sort of employment outside my beloved profession. Experti sumus invicem fortuna et ego [Fortune and I have come to know one another]. To Fortune I owe great obligation, for I can say without conceit that my missions in Spain and England succeeded most favourably. I carried out negotiations of the gravest importance, to the complete satisfaction of those who sent me and also of the other parties.20 Rubens could be justifiably proud of his achievements, for which he was even knighted by the kings of England and of Spain. Indeed, de Piles opined that he was ‘as great a statesman as he was a painter’.21 The political and internal peace for which Rubens strove is an important element in Van der Geest’s cabinet. We have already seen that Rubens’s Four Philosophers depicts a portrait bust, at the time thought to be of Seneca, presiding over Lipsius and his friends: a reference to their pursuit of stoic constancy (see illus. 8). The self-same sculpture appears above the portal of Van der Geest’s cabinet, flanked by a bust of Seneca’s pupil, the emperor Nero (see illus. 28). Rubens had painted this very combination of characters circa 1616– 17, perhaps connected to his series of Roman emperors, and

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presumably to invite comparison between virtue and vice: Seneca’s tranquilitas animi (tranquillity of the mind) contrasted to Nero’s passions run amok (illus. 32).22 Given the presence in the cabinet of the rulers of the Southern Netherlands and the general of the Spanish army, Ambrogio Spinola, we may assume that the message extended from personal conduct to good governance and restraint in military matters, advocating the pursuit of peace rather than war. The Genoese general Spinola, hero of Breda (which he recaptured from the Dutch in 1625), stands in profile at the far left of the constcamer (illus. 33). A major figure in Rubens’s diplomatic labours, the artist had portrayed the general from life a year before Van der Geest’s cabinet was painted.23 In fact, most of the cabinet’s liefhebbers are based on portraits by the artist himself or his pupil Van Dyck. While Rubens had 32 Peter Paul Rubens, Seneca and Nero, c. 1616–17, oil on panel.

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sought to avoid portraiture when striving to make his name in Italy, in Antwerp he was a prolific portraitist, welcoming a constant stream of local and foreign dignitaries to his studio for sittings. A good example is Prince Władysław Sigismund of Poland (standing just behind Rubens), who visited Rubens’s studio and had his portrait painted there by the master in 1624.24 His appearance in the cabinet alongside Archduke 33 Detail from Willem van Haecht the Younger, The Cabinet of Cornelis van der Geest.

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Albert reminds us that the constcamer is something of a fiction. Not only had the Archdukes visited Van der Geest’s home many years earlier, in 1615, but Albert had in fact died in 1621, seven years before The Cabinet was painted. His likeness and that of his wife Isabella are based on models by Rubens, who frequently painted the Archdukes as their official court artist. Their depictions in the constcamer are especially similar in pose and costume to pendant portraits Rubens made of the couple about 1620, although the Archduke has been given a hat and the Infanta holds a small flower painting (in the manner of local artist Jan Brueghel the Elder) rather than a sheet of paper (illus. 34 and 35).25 The rulers of the Southern Netherlands are surrounded by a bevy of local nobles, merchants and artists. Anthony van Dyck – clearly copied from Rubens’s portrait of the man he called ‘the best of my pupils’ – stands immediately behind the treasured painting by Quinten Matsys (The Madonna of the Cherries, c. 1525) that Cornelis van der Geest displays to Archduke Albert (illus. 36).26 Van Dyck is chatting to Jan van Montfort, sculptor, medallist, Master of the Mint and majordomo to the Infanta.27 Like Rubens (who painted him), Van Montfort merged artistic with diplomatic service and was custodian of parts of the archducal collection.28 The objects in his charge included the polymath Cornelis Drebbel’s famous perpetual motion machine. A version of this device stands on a table at the far left of Van der Geest’s constcamer. A spherical mechanism enclosed in a glass tube, Drebbel’s invention was effectively a perpetual calendar powered by changes in air pressure: a forerunner of the modern barometer. Its appearance in a cabinet devoted to esprit is apt, for the perpetuum mobile

34 Peter Paul Rubens, Albert vii, Archduke of Austria, c. 1620, oil on panel.

35 Peter Paul Rubens, Isabella, Infanta of Spain, c. 1620, oil on panel.

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was an ingenium (a machine) powered invisibly by spiritus (in the sense of ‘air’). Rubens and his friends were fascinated by this artefact and the mystery of how it worked. Writing to Peiresc, who coveted the machine, Rubens explained: I am glad you have received the design of the perpetual motion; it is accurately done, and with the sincere 36 Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, c. 1627–8, oil on panel.

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intention of communicating the true secret to you. Moreover if, in Provence, you should try the experiment and it is not successful, I pledge to clear up all your doubts. Perhaps . . . I shall prevail upon my sponsor [Van Montfort] to have a complete instrument made here, with a case, as if to be kept near me in my private study. If I can obtain this, I shall gladly make you a present of it.29 Although by 1629, when he met Drebbel in London, Rubens had concluded that the perpetual motion was ‘only nonsense’, his fascination with the device typifies his curiosity about ingenious machines and the workings of nature.30 A few years later, he sent Peiresc a superior alternative to Drebbel’s discredited artifice: I enclose here a folio from the Reverend Father Sylvester de Pietra Sancta’s De symbolis heroicis, on the mysterious clock (or glass globe) in a decanter filled with water. You will see it reproduced in the engraving and described in the text. I think you will find this machine worthy of an Archimedes or an Archytas, and that you will laugh at the ‘perpetual motion’ of Drebbel, which he was never able to set into regular movement. You need not doubt the authenticity of the thing (the mystery consists in a certain attraction and magnetic power); I have talked with men of ingenuity [persone d’ingegno] who have seen and operated it with ease, and have the greatest admiration for it.31

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Just such conversations between ‘men of ingenuity’ are depicted in Van der Geest’s constcamer. Natural philosophical discussion, sometimes extending to experimentation, was a prime feature of the learned interests of liefhebbers such as Rubens. One of his neighbours, the merchant banker Emanuel Ximenez (who owned the artist’s Birth of Venus, c. 1613–14; formerly Bildergalerie Sanssouci, Potsdam), even had a fully functioning laboratory in his house. To Spinola’s right in The Cabinet is another of Rubens’s neighbours, Nicolaas Rockox. In addition to the Adoration of the Magi, he commissioned from Rubens a devotional picture (The Incredulity of St Thomas with Donors, otherwise known as the ‘Rockox Triptych’, c. 1613–15; Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp) and acquired also Samson and Delilah (c. 1609–10; National Gallery, London), which hung proudly above the fireplace in the great parlour of his Antwerp townhouse (illus. 37). In Frans Francken the Younger’s A Banquet at Burgomaster Rockox’s House (c. 1630–35), we are surely intended to equate feasting with the palate to feasting with the eyes: the consumption of fine foodstuffs with the sense of taste and refined artworks with the sense of sight. A similar message is suggested by Van der Geest’s cabinet, in which a large Monkeys Gorging on Fruit by Frans Snyders is held proprietorially by a sternly dignified woman, possibly the collector’s housekeeper, Catherine van Mokerborch.32 To her left, these uncontrolled animal urges are contrasted with the refinement of a group of local connoisseurs (including Peter Stevens, who acquired some of Van der Geest’s collection) honing their ‘taste’ for works of art. This notion – ‘taste’ – was inextricably bound up with emerging ideas about genius. As de Piles explained: ‘according

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to whether this genius [genie] is good, or bad in painters, so we say that their works are in good or bad taste’.33 Van der Geest’s picture shows how, in Antwerp’s civic environment, learned friendship supported the growth of tasteful discrimination. As we peer at the cabinet – Antwerp’s art world in miniature – we compare the different pictures on display, asking ourselves which works represent a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ genius. At the far right of the constcamer, a group of men display their erudition by taking measurements from a globe. They include several artists with whom Rubens collaborated. Jan Wildens, in a copy after Rubens’s portrait, leans over the globe while looking out of the picture at us.34 To his left, Frans Snyders – he of the Monkeys Gorging – is in conversation with Hendrik van Balen, whose Holy Trinity we encountered in Chapter One (illus. 13). Rubens’s collaborations with these artists were designed to capitalize on the varying specialisms 37 Frans Francken the Younger, A Banquet at Burgomaster Rockox’s House, c. 1630–35, oil on panel.

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of different painters, producing exquisite pictures in which the sum exceeded the parts. To some extent, these collaborations were geared to the market, taking advantage of Antwerp’s diverse pool of talent to supply the city’s annual fairs and the shops of its Bourse. But they must also surely have been intended to elicit connoisseur’s interest in the nature of collaboration itself, provoking comparison between each artist’s singular style, the trace of their ingenium. We have little direct evidence for how contemporaries evaluated artists’ differing contributions to collaborative works, although one instance may be telling. Rubens collaborated most frequently with Jan Brueghel the Elder, Antwerp’s leading specialist in small-scale ‘cabinet’ paintings of animals, landscapes and still-lifes, such as the flower piece held by Isabella in Van der Geest’s constcamer. The two artists were sufficiently close that Rubens stood godfather to Brueghel’s older children and acted as his secretary when corresponding with his principal Italian patron, Cardinal Federico Borromeo of Milan. Borromeo acquired one of the artists’ finest collaborations: a Virgin and Child in a Garland of Flowers (1621), which Brueghel described as ‘the most beautiful and rarest thing I have ever made’ (illus. 38).35 In this work, Rubens contributed the figural elements – the Virgin, Christ Child and putti – while Brueghel painted the elaborate floral garland, an astonishing range of specimens in full bloom. Although it seems that Brueghel initiated the work and was the one who offered it for sale, a letter to Borromeo from the Archbishop of Antwerp, Laurent Beyerlinck, casts Rubens as the senior partner. Beyerlinck, intervening on Brueghel’s behalf to speed up payment, described the picture as ‘made by the

38 Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder, Virgin and Child in a Garland of Flowers, 1621, oil on canvas (transferred from panel).

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artful brush of our friend Rubens, the Apelles of Flanders, decorated by a garland of all kinds of flowers by [Brueghel]’.36 This comment may simply reflect the hierarchy of genres, which placed the narrative and figural art of history painting above ‘decorative’ genres such as still-life and landscape. Yet Beyerlinck’s reference to Rubens as the ‘Apelles of Flanders’ speaks to the differing statures of the collaborators: in the eyes of senior prelates, Rubens was the loftier talent. Rubens doubtless held the same view. In a letter to the English ambassador, art agent and collector Dudley Carleton, he described the collaborative painting Prometheus Bound (c. 1611–12, which may be the painting now in Philadelphia) as an ‘Original, by my hand, and the eagle done by Snyders’ (illus. 39).37 Preliminary studies for the work, supported by technical analysis of the executed painting, indicate that Rubens was the dominant partner, conceiving the subject, designing the composition and directing the execution of the picture. It depicts the Titan Prometheus (painted by Rubens), punished for stealing fire from the gods by an eagle (painted by Snyders), which pecks out his liver. In this collaboration, Rubens’s talent for painting the heroic male nude is brilliantly complemented by Snyders’s vivid rendering of the magnificent bird of prey, which – in the words of Rubens’s correspondent Dominicus Baudius – terrifies the onlookers. Blood flows from the chest and every part where his claws leave their mark, and the piercing eyes of the swift bird dart savage flames. You might think that he moves, that his feathers tremble. Horror grips the onlookers.38

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One wonders what opinion Rubens, blessed with a Promethean ‘fire to invent’, had of this moralizing warning against excessive boldness, the very moment in which mortals steal the creative power of the gods. In his artistic collaborations with established masters, Rubens regularly revised the contributions of his colleagues, much as he would correct and polish the works produced collectively in his workshop by students

39 Peter Paul Rubens and Frans Snyders, Prometheus Bound, c. 1611–12, oil on canvas.

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and assistants. Moreover, he was in the habit of routinely retouching paintings and drawings by the renowned artists of ages past. Rubens, who amassed a large personal collection, ‘improved’ upon works by old masters by completing or adding to their compositions, amending certain passages or redesigning whole sections. It is a remarkable testament to his artistic self-confidence, signalling a belief in the superiority of his own ingenium even when in dialogue with art of the past. The late eighteenth-century Dutch collector Valerius Röver even coined a term for such changes: ‘Rubenized’ (Rubensiato).39 In the hundreds of examples known, Rubens’s retouching is often sensitive, such that it is hard to discern where the original ends and his intervention begins. For example, he only subtly amended an anonymous Figure of a Nude Man Lying on the Ground (c. 1609)(which provided the inspiration for the male nude in his Prometheus Bound), extending delicately the curls of the figure’s hair in order to enliven it (illus. 40).40 By way of contrast, he more visibly changed an anonymous drawing of God the Father, previously attributed to Taddeo Zuccaro and once owned by Röver himself (illus. 41). Rubens has emphasized passages of the costume, head and beard, adding volume through highlights in white body colour and strengthening the chiaroscuro with dark brown ink. While it is unclear precisely why Rubens made such changes, this activity probably formed part of his own creative process, connected perhaps to his extensive copying of ancient and modern works. Roger de Piles certainly saw Rubens’s practice in this light, writing that the artist copied many works ‘in Italy and elsewhere’ in order to ‘enliven his blood and fire his genius’.41

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A telling example is displayed in Van der Geest’s cabinet. At the top right-hand corner of the rear wall is a painting known as A Knight Accompanied by Two Pages (c. 1615–17) (illus. 42).42 It is a free interpretaton of Titian’s Portrait of Francesco Maria 1 della Rovere (c. 1537), which Rubens certainly knew through prints. Titian was the modern Italian master whom Rubens most admired. He owned a large number of his works – including his Self-portrait of circa 1562 – and made numerous copies of paintings by Titian that he saw in Italy and Spain. 43 40 Anonymous artist, possibly after Adriaen Thomasz. Key, with retouching by Peter Paul Rubens, Figure of a Nude Man Lying on the Ground, c. 1609, red chalk, retouched red ink, chalk and white body colour on paper.

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A comparison between Titian’s Francesco Maria i and Rubens’s invention is instructive as to his practice of emulation. While modelling the sitter reasonably closely on Titian’s picture, Rubens ‘improved’ upon the composition by adding narrative detail, inserting a pair of page boys buckling (or unbuckling) the condottiere duke’s armour and holding up his helm. If, as de Piles observed, Rubens copied in order to heat his genius, he did so not in slavish imitation but in friendly competition, entering into a lively pictorial dialogue with past generations to sharpen his abilities and prove his mettle. Much as he 41 Anonymous artist (Southern Netherlands?), with retouching by Peter Paul Rubens, God the Father, c. 1628–9, black chalk and oil colour, heightened with white and ruled in for copying, on paper.

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transformed imaginatively the poses of classical statuary into fresh compositions, Rubens’s study of old-master paintings was a digestive exercise in imitation in which he ingested the fruits of other men’s wit in order to concoct original works in his imagination. When it came to works made collaboratively – whether with his peers or members of his studio – Rubens clearly

42 Peter Paul Rubens, A Knight Accompanied by Two Pages, c. 1615–17, oil on panel.

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distinguished his own hand from others’. In his letter to Dudley Carleton, Rubens (who hoped to sell a large quantity of pictures to the Englishman) differentiated paintings ‘entirely by my hand’ from those begun by his pupils but ‘retouched by my hand’. Needless to say, there was a significant price differential between ‘original’ and ‘studio’ works. For instance, the business-savvy Rubens described a picture of ‘Achilles clothed as a woman’ (Achilles Discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes, c. 1615–17; Museo del Prado, Madrid) as ‘done by the best of my pupils [Van Dyck], and the whole retouched by my hand; a most delightful picture, and full of many beautiful young girls. 600 florins.’ Another is The Last Judgement, a copy of a work made for the Duke of Neuberg, ‘begun by one of my pupils . . . but this one, not being finished, would be entirely retouched by my own hand, and by this means would pass as original. 1200 florins.’44 Rubens’s comments reflect not only the scale of his studio operation but also the growing discrimination among connoisseurs keen to distinguish between ‘original’ and ‘copy’, and to identify the degree of a named artist’s involvement in the production of a work, which could make a significant difference to its value. Franciscus Junius, a scholar and art theorist with whom Rubens corresponded, summarized this pithily in his treatise On the Painting of the Ancients (1638): It is most wonderfull, how quickely those that have exercised their eyes, can know an originall from a copy . . . the sayd consuetude or accustomance of our eyes doth so much enable us, as that we can upon the first

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view readily discerne originall pictures from Copies, and antient workes from moderne.45 Such discernment is precisely what the liefhebbers of Van der Geest’s cabinet sought to cultivate. Indeed, the painting is itself a connoisseur’s game, for it parades a diverse array of copies of pictures in miniature, inviting the viewer to attribute and identify them, naming the artist responsible, the school to which they belong and the subject-matter at hand. This learned activity is alluded to in a piece of serio ludere (‘serious joking’) within Van der Geest’s constcamer. To the right of the entrance portal hangs Quinten Matsys’s Portrait of a Scholar (c. 1520–25). Interrupted from his reading by some sudden appearance, the scholar lowers his glasses in his left hand while making a gesture of surprise with his right. His gaze seems to be trained on another portrait at the opposite end of the room: of a man in a fur hat with a red sash, holding an open book. This is none other than Matsys’s now lost Paracelsus – the notorious alchemist to whose ideas Rubens alluded in his Theoretical Notebook. Perhaps the scholar is amazed to encounter an alchemist in the midst of lovers of art, his virtue affronted by such a figure. Yet the joke runs deeper, for the scholar’s surprise has been prompted by his encounter with a copy, when he expected an original. Both portraits were devised by Quinten Matsys, but where the Portrait of a Scholar is an original by the master, the Paracelsus is probably Rubens’s copy of that work (illus. 43). This is apparent in the palette, handling and detail of the image, including the absence of an inscription on the lintel that, in other copies, identifies the sitter as the ‘Famoso doctor Pareselsus’. If the

43 Peter Paul Rubens after Quinten Matsys, Paracelsus, c. 1617–18, oil on panel.

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Paracelsus in the constcamer is indeed Rubens’s, we are presented with a particularly piquant commentary on discrimination. It is a test of the viewer’s skill: whether we, too, can judge that the Paracelsus is in fact a copy by Rubens, feigned with mercurial wit. The Paracelsus hangs between a Fruit Harvest (or Homage to Ceres and Pomona) in the manner of Hendrik van Balen and a Venus at the Forge of Vulcan in the manner of Rubens’s teacher Otto van Veen. Beneath them is one of Rubens’s most celebrated paintings: The Battle of the Amazons (c. 1615), possibly painted for Cornelis van der Geest to thank him for securing the commission of The Raising of the Cross (illus. 44). The arrangement of the hang is by no means accidental; it suggests that through a form of alchemy, the fruits of nature are cunningly worked and transformed, thus producing great works of art such as Rubens’s battle picture.46 This kind of metamorphosis is particularly appropriate for a painting that celebrates the triumphs respectively of the ancient and modern geniuses of the Antwerp school. Quinten Matsys, repeatedly identified as ‘Vulcan’ owing to his humble origins as a blacksmith, has been succeeded by his heir, Rubens, the ‘Apelles of Flanders’. The Battle of the Amazons is a superlative example of Rubens’s geest: it is ingenious in conception and spirited in execution. Indeed, Roger de Piles claimed that its composition was ‘one of the most beautiful and ingenious that one can imagine’.47 In this picture, the energy of Rubens’s painting technique – what Bellori called the furia del pennello – is matched by an equal dynamism of composition. Rubens, conceiving the picture in the tradition of Renaissance battle paintings, likely made the work in competition with Leonardo’s famous Battle of Anghiari

44 Peter Paul Rubens, The Battle of the Amazons, c. 1615, oil on panel.

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(1503–5), which he may have copied (illus. 45).48 It depicts a swirling conflict between female Amazonian warriors and their Greek pursuers as they clash on a bridge over the river Thermodon. Rubens conveys the drama of armed conflict in a claustrophobically compact orchestration of figures that reverberates with the crash of weapons on armour: torsos twist, horses rear and the violently swirling river carries off the slain. In early modern artistic theory, the word furia had several senses. It could mean, on the one hand, the furor we encountered in Chapter One – artistic inspiration. Equally, it was used to denote style – a vigorous painting manner, which is how Bellori deploys it when describing Rubens. Yet it also referred more generally to movement, especially the motion of a body in torsion, which was thought to enliven figures in art. Thus, we might say that in The Battle of the Amazons Rubens 45 Attributed to (or retouched by) Peter Paul Rubens, after Leonardo da Vinci, The Battle of Anghiari, c. 1603, black chalk, pen and brown ink, brush in brown and grey ink, grey wash, heightened in white and grey-blue, on paper.

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painted furia with furia: his artistic style was fitted perfectly to his subject-matter. At the heart of this exercise is ingenuity, for it was geest – subtle spirit – that powered both artistic invention and physical motion. For early moderns, ingenuity was the arena in which the challenge of depicting bodies in motion could be met by the talented artist. The invisible yet violent force of movement manifested physically in bodies was a subject that had fascinated Leonardo, captured to such great effect in The Battle of Anghiari. He described ‘force’ in one of his notebooks as No more than a spiritual power [virtù spirituale], an invisible potency, which is created and infused by animated bodies in inanimate ones through acquired violence, giving to these bodies the appearance of life; this life is of marvellous efficiency, compelling and transmuting all created things from their places. It rushes with fury [furia] to its destruction and continues changing in accordance with the causes.49 Rubens was probably aware of Leonardo’s treatise on the human figure, which may have served as a model for his own treatment of the subject in his Theoretical Notebook. He was certainly familiar with discussions of furia in the writings of more recent theorists, such as Gian Paolo Lomazzo. In his Trattato dell’arte de la pittura (1584), Lomazzo associated furia both with the nature of motion and with its depiction in painting. In the chapter of his treatise on motion, described as ‘the spirit and life of art’, Lomazzo explained that knowledge of movement and the ability to depict it are

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reputed to be most difficult, and . . . considered a divine gift. Because of this aspect especially painting is akin to poetry. For, just as a poet is made by a combination of ingenuity [ingegno] together with a certain desire and inclination of the will by which he is moved to write verse, which is called by the ancients the fury [furor] of Apollo and the muses, so it is necessary also for the painter, who, along with the other things they must study, must have knowledge and force to express things, as it were generated out of himself, and brought up with him from the cradle[.] . . . But the strong and excellent painters, not so much aided by nature as consumed in their art, seek to elect the best gesture of whatever effect, restraining their superabundant natural fury with the deliberate reason they have in the ‘idea’; and with that they finish the figure with delight and beauty; always making visible in any member a certain fury conforming to the principal movement.50 Lomazzo’s words match perfectly not only the dynamic spectacle of The Battle of the Amazons, but its setting in The Cabinet of Cornelis van der Geest. For there, artistic ability is indeed presented as a ‘divine gift’, a lively spirit inspired by Apollo and the Muses – both present via statues of the Apollo Belvedere and the Capitoline Muse, standing either side of the cabinet’s entrance portal. The necessary restraint of ‘superabundant natural fury’ advocated by Lomazzo is similarly signalled by the busts of Nero and Seneca, while the ‘strong and excellent painter’ who puts such ideas into practice is represented by

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none other than Rubens himself. No artist better fits the ideal of potent natural talent guided, and thus enhanced, by study and reason. For Rubens, this meant in particular the study of antiquity in all its guises – its vast literature, in which he was deeply steeped, and its surviving artefacts. An assiduous student of classical sculpture, Rubens developed a theory and practice of imitation through which he gave renewed vigour to the ancient past. His ambition was to transmute the cold lifelessness of stone statuary into a vibrant pictorial art, in which the spirit of antiquity, fused with a modern sensibility, became an ingeniously new enterprise.

46 Anonymous (Roman), Centaur Tamed by Cupid, 1st–2nd century ad, marble.

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n the surviving fragments of his notes De imitatione statuarum (‘On the Imitation of Sculpture’, preserved in the Theoretical Notebook), Rubens advised on the best ways modern painters could make use of ancient sculptures. Both the talentless and the skilled had erred, he wrote, in basing their figures too directly on antique marbles. They copied slavishly rather than translating imaginatively, thus leaving their pictures ‘crude, liny, stiff, and of harsh anatomy’.1 Ancient sculpture, he argued, must be used judiciously, lest the results ‘smell of the stone’. Rubens recommended particular ways of copying after the antique that would render a statue more flesh-like in paint, softening distinctions between light and shade (that is, chiaroscuro) to achieve gentler, more naturalistic modelling. More broadly, he encouraged a deep and sustained engagement with ancient art, employing a traditional metaphor from classical theories of imitatio (imitation) in rhetoric. The remedy against lifelessness in imitation was, he opined, that one should ‘drink in’ (imbibere) ancient sculptures, allowing their spirit to suffuse the artist such that he might approach in his work the splendour of Graeco-Roman antiquity.2 In the right hands, ancient

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matter could be transformed alchemically from stone into flesh, even from the profane to the sacred, as his reworking of the famous sculpture Centaur Tamed by Cupid into a painted Ecce Homo (before 1612) shows (illus. 46 and 47). For Rubens, antiquity was a vital spirit that, properly digested, quickened both the mind and the painter’s art. 47 Peter Paul Rubens, Ecce Homo, before 1612, oil on panel.

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One of Rubens’s late works, Bacchus on a Barrel (c. 1636–40), embodies this principle (illus. 48). The bibulous god not only reflects Rubens’s interest in ancient mythology but stands for the artist’s creative process, in which a draught of art and nature stimulates the wits – Bacchus is a god of inspiration as well as drunkenness. Indeed, Rubens likely drew on the emblem ‘Vinum acuit ingenium’ (Wine sharpens wit) when conceiving the work (illus. 49). This might seem at odds 48 Peter Paul Rubens, Bacchus on a Barrel, c. 1636–40, oil on canvas (transferred from panel).

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with Rubens’s renowned abstemiousness. Philip Rubens, we may recall, said that his uncle ‘had a great aversion to drunkenness and carousing’. Yet it would be a mistake to interpret the Bacchus simply biographically. Rubens’s mythological paintings were not exercises in autobiography, at least not straightforwardly so. The Romantic notion that they offer a great outpouring of self-expression is at odds both with the climate in which they were made and with the evidence of Rubens’s own ideas and practice. Rubens’s talent was to be able, through a complex process of emulation requiring both learning and 49 Crispijn de Passe the Younger, ‘Emblem xix: Vinum acuit ingenium’ (Wine sharpens wit), illustration in Floris van Schoonhoven, Emblemata (1618), engraving.

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sensitivity, to place himself in the position of his subjects. Roger de Piles explained this neatly in his Dissertation sur les ouvrages des plus fameux peintres (1681) when arguing for Rubens’s superiority over other great masters. Having noted the particular abilities of artists such as Titian, Veronese, the Carracci, Raphael and Michelangelo for one aspect of painting or another, de Piles pronounced Rubens’s esprit to be ‘universal, and the expansiveness of his genius [genie] enabled him to enter completely into the actions that he had to treat; he transformed himself into every character, and for each subject made himself a new man’.3 This passage is striking not simply because it posits Rubens as a ‘universal’ genius – a novelty in itself – but because of its claim for the artist’s empathy. This enabled Rubens accurately to depict ‘actions’, through which the passions are shown in painting, by inhabiting the character of his figures. Rubens did not have to identify with his subjects to achieve his aims but to understand them, from within. Why, though, is his Bacchus remote from the classical ideal Rubens so admired in ancient sculpture, corresponding instead to the bloated bodies of the modern degenerates he derided in his writings? There, he touched on drinking as something that distinguished the ancients from the moderns, in a literal rather than metaphorical sense. Lamenting how the moderns are ‘diminished in ingenuity’ (imminutos ingenio) and weighed down by a ‘base Genius’ (vilis Genius), he explained: The chief reason why men of our age are different from the antients, is sloth, and want of exercise; for most men give no other exercise to their body but

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eating and drinking. No wonder, therefore, if we see so many paunch-bellies, weak and pitiful legs and arms, that seem to reproach themselves with their idleness: Whereas the antients exercised their bodies every day in the academies . . . See in Mercurialis de arte gymanstica, how many various exercises they took, how difficult, and what vigour of constitution they required. 4 Rubens’s morbidly obese Bacchus conforms not only to modern sloth but also, in his curvaceous form, to effeminacy. Elsewhere in his Theoretical Notebook, Rubens noted that the circle was the form of ‘all that is feminine and all that is of the flesh’. Given Rubens’s attitude to what he called the ‘weakness’ of the female sex, his Bacchus is thus a paradox: a celebration of artistic creativity expressed as an ancient figure who inverts all the artist’s professed beliefs about the robust virtue of the classical male form. The corpulent god invites a careful look at the relationship in Rubens’s art between dietetics, gender and genius. In Rubens’s Neostoic circle, extremes of passion – including the overly hot, ‘choleric’ fury of martial ferocity – were to be avoided. Having a naturally moderate temperament helped. Rubens’s engaging disposition, commented upon by his peers and witnessed in his diplomatic activities, suggests he had a sanguine temperament: sociable and active yet measured, its heat moderated by moistness. Yet in early modern humoral theory, a balance of the humours had to be sought through a healthy regimen, in diet and exercise for both body and spirit. De Piles, drawing on earlier biographies, described the artist’s healthy habits:

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As he loved his work, he lived in a way that enabled him to work easily and without injuring his health; that is why he ate very little at lunchtime, for fear that the smell of meat should prevent him from applying himself . . . He worked in this way until five in the evening, when he would mount his horse to take the air outside of town, or along the ramparts, or he would do something else to ease the spirit [faire delasser l’esprit]. Upon returning from his ride, he would normally find some of his friends at home, who had come to dine with him, and who would make good company. However, he had a great aversion to drunkenness and carousing, as well as to gambling.5 Rubens’s putative avoidance of meat accords well with theories about diet and ingenuity. Huarte de San Juan, for example, contrasted the spiritually nourishing manna eaten by the Israelites in exile to ‘gross meats’, which ‘have much excrements, and the stomach receive them not with such desire, as those that are delicat [sic] and of good relish’.6 In one of his designs for the Triumph of the Eucharist tapestry series, Rubens depicted manna as a subtle, quasi-spiritual substance raining down from heaven as a silver shower.7 Furthermore, the sort of dietetic advice given by Huarte de San Juan may underpin a picture Rubens made collaboratively with Frans Snyders: Pythagoras Advocating Vegetarianism (c. 1628–30; Royal Collection, UK). As we have seen, Rubens was interested in Pythagorean number theory, and he seems equally to have been taken by this physiological aspect of the ancient philosopher’s teaching, which appealed to his Neostoic colleagues.

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The healthy expansiveness of the artist’s regime – taking the air on horseback (a noble activity) to ease his spirits – accords with comments he made about his own temperamental inclination to a ‘heroic’ kind of large-scale painting. In a letter to King Charles i’s art agent, William Trumbull, written at a time when he was seeking to secure the commission for Whitehall’s Banqueting Hall ceiling, Rubens wrote: the large size of a picture gives one much more courage to express one’s ideas clearly and realistically . . . I confess that I am, by natural instinct [par un instinct naturel], better fitted to execute very large works than small curiosities. Everyone according to his gifts; my talent is such that no undertaking, however vast in size or diversified in subject, has ever surpassed my courage.8 If this sort of ‘courageous’ large-scale painting of impressive subject-matter suited Rubens’s sanguine temperament, what of its opposite? In Rome, Rubens had befriended the leading artist of ‘small curiosities’, Adam Elsheimer, who, he said, ‘had no equal in small figures, in landscapes, and in many other subjects’.9 Rubens admired especially Elsheimer’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt (c. 1609), which directly informed his own treatment of that subject.10 Yet upon hearing the news of Elsheimer’s untimely death, Rubens wrote to Johann Faber that Elsheimer had brought about his own demise by indulging a slothful and melancholy temperament: I pray that God will forgive signor Adam his sin of sloth, by which he has deprived the world of the most

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beautiful things, caused himself much misery, and finally, I believe, reduced himself to despair; whereas with his own hands he could have built up a great fortune and made himself respectable to all the world.11 Elsheimer was conscious of his own malaise, allegorizing the melancholy induced by financial woes, which had been brought about by a slow pace of working and a needy family (illus. 50). The Artist in Despair (early 1600s) depicts a poor painter, head in hand, seated at a cluttered desk. His children, naked and starving, scour the empty cupboards for a scrap of food. A sculpture, perched precariously on a stack of books, reveals the subject. It is a putto, one of whose winged hands 50 Adam Elsheimer, The Artist in Despair, early 1600s, pen and brown ink on paper.

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is raised heavenwards, while the other is weighed down by a heavy stone. The wings are those of ingenium, which we encountered previously in The Cabinet of Cornelis van der Geest (see illus. 28). Indeed, Elsheimer has drawn on a well-known emblem, ‘Paupertatem summis ingeniis obesse ne provehantur’ (‘Poverty Hinders Even the Greatest Wits from Advancing’), depicted in Andrea Alciati’s popular emblem book, the Emblematum liber (first published 1531; emblem 15). Little could be more different to Rubens’s own situation. A successful, profitable and sociable painter of large pictures,

51 Peter Paul Rubens, Drunken Silenus, c. 1616–18, with later additions, oil on panel.

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he was the very antithesis of the sloth he despised. Indeed, he worked, as William Sanderson observed, at a rapid pace: ‘the commotions of the mind are not to be cooled by slow performance.’12 Rubens depicted the modern vices he decried in De imitatione statuarum in his numerous Bacchic works, several of which feature a ‘paunch-bellied’ Silenus, the tutor and companion of the wine god (illus. 51). Drawing on an antique marble that he copied several times and from multiple angles, Rubens painted his Drunken Silenus (c. 1616–18, with later additions) inebriated and staggering, cheered on mockingly by a gaggle of rustic followers. Like Bacchus, though, Silenus is an ambivalent figure. In Alcibiades’ account of Socrates in Plato’s Symposium, Silenus’ ugly outward appearance hides jewels of wisdom buried inside him, while in Virgil’s Eclogues he is a drunkard who sings Orphic hymns – wine has stimulated his wit (illus. 52).13 Rubens focused on this aspect of Silenus in an early drawing, Silenus and Aegle (c. 1612–15), in which the sleeping 52 Peter Paul Rubens, Silenus and Aegle, c. 1612–15, pen and brown ink with brown wash, on paper.

53 Peter Paul Rubens, detail from The Fall of the Damned, c. 1620, oil on panel.

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drunk, ‘his veins swollen, as ever, with the wine of yesterday’, is laughed at by companions.14 Rubens depicts Silenus bound by the mischievous boys Chromis and Mnasyllos, while his face is daubed by the Naiad Aegle. It is the moment just before Silenus awakes and, to secure his release, sings songs of creation and procreation. Yet the cause of his slumber – the pleasures of the night before – is also hinted at by a loose sketch in the bottom right-hand corner, showing the drunken Silenus supported by a pair of revellers. An inscription by Rubens at the top of the page alludes both to the joy of debauchery and to the delight of Silenus’ song: ‘vitula gaudium’, probably referring to Vitulina, goddess of joy (gaudium).15 Silenus seems, in Rubens’s eyes, to be a genial figure – a topic to which we shall return. While Rubens’s treatment of Bacchic subjects was indulgent, even celebratory, his depiction of vice in sacred works was, predictably, anything but (illus. 53). Take, for example, The Fall of the Damned (c. 1620). Its cascading bodies include an enormous woman, flopped heavily on the back of a devil, accompanied by an equally fat man whose rolling stomach is being devoured by a hungry demon. De Piles described this corpulent figure as a personification of ‘heavy and flabby sloth, and insatiable gluttony’.16 For the ancient opposite, Rubens referred in his notebook to Girolamo Mercuriale’s De arte gymnastica (1569), with its descriptions and illustrations (by Pirro Ligorio) of ancient exercises, such as boxing and wrestling.17 The latter seems to have fascinated Rubens: he made multiple drawings of wrestlers, probably inspired by a Roman sculpture that he had encountered in the Villa Medici (illus. 54 and 55). He surely had such images in mind when

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depicting the heroic figures of antiquity, of whom the most exalted example was Hercules. For Rubens, as for many early moderns, there was no better example of an athletic physique paired with a noble soul than Hercules, a figure renowned as much for his virtue as for his martial prowess. Rubens depicted him numerous times throughout his career, often in the throes of wrestling an opponent: Achelous in the form of a bull, the Nemean lion, Antaeus (illus. 56). Most importantly, in his Theoretical Notebook Rubens treated Hercules’ body as exemplary of virile masculinity. One of only two surviving sheets from the original manuscript is a cubic, structural treatment of the Farnese Hercules (which Rubens saw in Rome), annotated on the verso (illus. 57). Rubens, perhaps drawing on similarly

54 Anonymous (Roman), Wrestlers, 1st century ad, Parian marble, lychnite variant.

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cuboid studies by earlier artists such as Luca Cambiaso, has divided up the sculpture’s bulk into a series of interconnected squares, which map out the canonical proportions of an ideal masculine figure. In the verso annotations and in other passages of the notebook, Rubens observed both that Hercules represented the form of a ‘most strong man’ and that ‘from the cube, or the figure that is completely square, comes everything that is masculine, virile, and therefore heavy, robust, compact and athletic’, quoting Quintilian on geometry by way of support.18 Indeed, he may well have associated Hercules’ masculine ‘robustness’ with Quintilian’s remarks that ornament in eloquent speech ‘must be manly, strong, and chaste. It must not favour effeminate smoothness or the false colouring of cosmetics; it must shine with health and vigour.’19 In contrast to the quadrilateral Hercules, the ‘perfect sphere’ was the form of ‘all that is feminine and all that is of 55 Peter Paul Rubens, Two Men Wrestling, c. 1602–8, charcoal, pen and bistre ink, brown wash, heightened with yellow ochre on paper.

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the flesh, muscular, flexible, twisting, round, curved and arched’, and (quoting Cicero) ‘most beautiful’.20 Rubens was clearly attentive to the aptness of different forms for different qualities and quite obviously appreciated beauty in the female figure. Yet remarks in his letters about the ‘faults’ of women suggest a tendency to equate vice with the feminine and virtue with the masculine.21 This distinction was by no means absolute, for there are plenty of virtuous women in Rubens’s art, including those who exhibit, in his terms, ‘masculine’ qualities despite their sex. An example to which Rubens returned repeatedly is Judith, defined in one early modern dictionary as exemplifying ‘virility’ for the killing of Holofernes.22 His brother Philip’s poem on the engraving after a lost painted version of this subject (known as The Great Judith, c. 1616; illus. 58) makes clear that the act of decapitation with a sword (the early modern sign of the gentleman) proved Judith’s mettle 56 Peter Paul Rubens, The Labours of Hercules, c. 1630–35, red chalk, pen and brown ink on paper.

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as being equal to, even exceeding, that of the male heroes of antiquity: Give way, you Roman and Greek leaders. This woman has eclipsed your brightness. Your victory was won by great force of men, And the better part of the praise for it went to the soldiers.

57 Peter Paul Rubens, Study of the Farnese Hercules, early 1600s(?), pen and ink on paper (The Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, ms Johnson, no. 427v).

58 Cornelis Galle the Elder, after Peter Paul Rubens, Judith Beheading Holofernes, also known as The Great Judith, c. 1616, engraving.

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The barbarous commander falls at the right hand of one person, A single hand defends the country from ruin.23 Similarly, in Achilles Discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes (c. 1615–17), the cross-dressing hero’s virility – and hence correct, masculine sex – is revealed through the sword.24 An inscription on an engraving after the painting reads, ‘Aeacus’ grandson draws the sword with fearsome hand, / Revealing at once his valour and virility’.25 In the context of Rubens’s theory of the human form, such notions of virility point to a gendered association of masculinity with both physical and moral health, expressed in terms of ‘robustness’. In medicine and natural philosophy, these ideas were linked firmly to spirit and ingenuity by way of heat. The sign of robustness in a human body was a healthy glow or ‘reddening’ of the flesh: robor (robust) signalled by rubor (red).26 This derived from an ‘innate heat’ (calor innatus), generated by the heart, which converted ‘natural’ spiritus into ‘vital’ spiritus, the latter of which mingles with blood and, flowing through the arteries, enables animation of the body. Given the tendency of heat to rise, ‘vital spirits’ ascend into the ventricles of the brain, where they are transformed into the ‘animal’ spirits through which the mind operates. Rubens could have read extensively about these aspects of spiritus in books by medical authors both ancient and modern, with which his library was well stocked.27 He owned some important treatises on the subject: Girolamo Cardano’s De subtilitate and Jean Fernel’s De abditis rerum causis, in the latter of which Rubens would have learned that innate heat was essential for

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generation, conveying spirit through semen. Fernel, drawing on Aristotle’s De generatione animalium, writes: In the seed of all things is something that makes seeds fertile, namely something called heat, a heat that is not fire, nor some faculty of that sort, but a spirit, which is present in seed and the foamy body, and a nature that is in spirit, corresponding to the element of the stars.28 This, too, was a major topic in Lipsius’s Physiologia stoicorum, with which Rubens was certainly familiar. Heat was present in both male and female bodies but was generally considered to be more of a masculine quality, in accord with the humoral theory that men tended to be hotter and drier, while women were moister and colder. Male heat was necessary for successful procreation, while its tendency to rise upwards to the brain led many early modern commentators to argue for men as intellectually superior, endowed with a greater capacity for reason and creativity. Thus men were considered better suited to scholarly and artistic careers. Put simply (for theories of the humours in relation to talent were endlessly debated in the period), the procreative heat of men was said to endow them with a superior ingenium. Their physiological generative powers were connected to and matched by their mental capacity to create. It seems very likely that Rubens thought of himself in these terms. The father of a large brood, he would have considered his procreative power to beget children to be connected to his artistic potency. Even his name was providential of genius: ‘Rubens’, the man ‘tinged with red’, glowing with a

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physical, intellectual and moral health that manifested in his art as vibrant colour. Bellori noted this conjunction in his biography of the artist, citing the epitaph of a now lost (if it ever existed) funerary monument: Iris herself and Aurora too gave you their hues; Night her shadows; and the Sun its clear light, While you, Rubens, bestow life and spirit upon your figures, And by your hand light, shade and colour come to life. Why, O Rubens, has Death enshrouded you? When life still endures in the glowing colour of your very name.29

 

The artist may hint at such associations in his Self-portrait of 1622–4 (see illus. 7), its sky just beginning to redden, the sitter’s beard and hair streaked with auburn, his lips a healthy carnation. In this case, Rubens’s hat may serve not to conceal but to draw attention to his baldness: a consequence of virile heat as it ascended upwards was the burning away of hair, exposing the high temples of a noble mind. As Huarte de San Juan put it: The fourth sign [of superior imagination and ingenuity] is to have a bald head, and the reason hereof may soon be learned: for this difference of imagination, resideth in the forepart of the head, as doe all the rest, and excessive heat burneth the skin of the head, and closeth the poares, through which the haire is to passe. Besides that the matter whereof the hair is engendered

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(as the physitions avouch) are those excreme[n]ts which the brain expelleth in time of his nourishing and by the great fire that there is, they are consumed and burned up, and so the matter faileth whereof they may breed.30 With these associations between masculine form, virtue and virility in mind, it is curious that when Rubens came to paint pendants of virtue and vice for his own pleasure – and for display in his home – he cast Hercules in the latter role. The protagonist of The Coronation of a Hero (c. 1615–16) – a

59 Peter Paul Rubens, The Coronation of a Hero, c. 1615–16, oil on canvas.

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bearded (and thus virile) warrior, dressed in all’antica armour – triumphs over sloth and vice in the form of a slumped, intoxicated Silenus, who has evidently succumbed to his ‘base Genius’ (illus. 59). Where we might expect the companion piece to be a Bacchic figure, the pendant instead is Drunken Hercules (c. 1613–15; illus. 60), composed very similarly to the sketch in the corner of Silenus and Aegle. Supported on either side by a satyr and satyress, Hercules staggers backwards, wine jug in hand. He treads underfoot musical instruments and an upturned basket of grapes – both symbols of the Bacchic rites – and is mocked on all sides by the wine god’s followers, one of whom mimics the hero’s temporarily lost ferocity in his stolen lion’s pelt. There are various reasons why Rubens might have chosen Hercules to antithesize virtue in this pair of pictures, displayed in his own home. First, it was a classical subject, illustrated among his reconstructions of antique paintings on the facade of his house in Antwerp. Hercules’ drunkenness, the demigod having challenged Bacchus to a drinking contest, is attested in ancient sources, and Rubens modelled his painting on a Roman relief of ‘Drunken Hercules’ that he saw in the Mattei collection in Rome. More significantly, though, there could be no better figure through which to convey the pathos of a fallen hero. Famously, and as dramatized by Seneca in Hercules furens, Hercules switched in an instant from virtue to vice: having completed his twelfth labour and returned from the underworld, he slaughtered his family in a moment of madness. Rubens’s Drunken Hercules is more tragi-comic than tragic, but as in Hercules and Omphale (c. 1602–5; illus. 71), the picture emphasizes the upturning of established order and the

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potential in all of us – even those of uppermost ‘masculine’ virtue – for debasement. Indeed, while the picture may have been intended to evoke sympathetic laughter, it very likely had a moralizing intent also. Pictures such as Mars, Venus and Bacchus (otherwise known as Allegory of Intemperance, or Bacchanal, c. 1632–5; illus. 61), also kept at home by Rubens, are similar in tone. In this painting, the hero is undone (perhaps even

60 Peter Paul Rubens, Drunken Hercules, c. 1613–15, oil on panel.

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unmanned) by love and wine, as Cupid slips his sword from his belt (illus. 61). What are we to make of the fact that these works were displayed in his house, along with the Drunken Silenus (see illus. 51), which de Piles claimed he painted ‘for his family’?31 It is hard to escape the idea that they were intended, on one level, as warnings against immoderation. But we must not forget that Rubens also painted to delight and, we may assume, to provoke discussion in his audience. Indeed, the Drunken Silenus is doubtless more than a simplistic warning against inebriation. The gesture of the intoxicated satyress in the foreground of the picture, who fondles the 61 Peter Paul Rubens, Mars, Venus and Bacchus, c. 1632–5, oil on panel.

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penis of her suckling child, surely alludes to the commonplace association of pissing with fertility – an apt subject for Rubens’s wife and daughters.32 Equally, the tiger gently holding a vine in its soft maw has been pacified by wine: a symbol of peace, in sympathy with Rubens’s political outlook and comparable to the recumbent leopard playfully exposing its belly in Minerva Protects Pax from Mars (see illus. 31). There are, then, multiple valences in these mythological works, consistent at once with Rubens’s personal conduct and with his capacity to inhabit the mores and sensibilities of others, including – and perhaps especially – the mythical figures of antiquity. This ability was an aspect of Rubens’s capacious imagination, called in his era ‘fantasy’. Rubens was familiar with fantasy’s treatment by art theorists such as Lomazzo and Karel van Mander, who discussed it in relation to faculty psychology, classical theories of imitation and (especially in Van Mander) depiction ‘from the life’ (naer het leven) versus ‘from the imagination’ (uit de geest). It is surely no accident that William Sanderson’s account of fantasy (‘fancie’) in Graphice comes straight after his account of Rubens’s working habits and that he connects it directly to imitation. The force of imitation of nature is in the fancie, which worketh with the more wisdome. It being an imaginative faculty or wit, [it] is set to work to imagine what we have seen (or at least made up with some other sense), being the print or footstep of sense. It is the treasury of the mind . . . Imagination moves the passion and affections of the soul; and can provoke the

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body to change the accidents, as to make a man sick or well; sorrow, joy, fear. We may paint a conceived or intelligible thing perfect, by the idea of fancie: but, by imitation we may fall short of perfection. Hence it was that the Antients, intending to excell in the forms and figures of their Jupiters, would not imitate or take a pattern generated, but rather, by a perceived description of him, out of Homer and other poets. There is in the form and shape of things a certain perfection and excellencie; unto whose conceived figures such things by imitation are referred, that cannot be seen.33 As Sanderson explains, in a rather jumbled way, fantasy was critical for the creative act, serving as a conduit between sensory data and those things conceived only ‘in the imagination’. It enabled the depiction of things, such as gods, that cannot be seen (or not simply) in nature. This, plainly, is why fantasy was so important for Rubens in the creation of his mythological works. Sanderson’s account drew heavily on a book that Rubens read towards the end of his life: Franciscus Junius’s De pictura veterum (1637). Junius has much to say about imitation, but upon receiving the book from its author Rubens responded to one passage in particular. Having discoursed on imitation of works of art and literature, as well as on the imitation of nature, in his second chapter Junius turns to imitation and the imagination. Seeking to explain how an artist could paint things that ‘doe not offer themselves to the mind of men’

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(which would include the mythological figures of Rubens’s art), he writes: we are also to marke another sort of imitation, by which the Artificer emboldeneth himselfe to meddle also with such things as doe not offer themselves to the eyes of men: and although the chiefest force of this imitation doth consist in the phantasie, so we must for all this thanke our eyes for the first beginnings as well of the phantasie as of the imitation itself. For the inward imaginations that doe continually stirre and play in our minds, cannot be conceived and fashioned therein, unless our eyes some manner of way are made acquainted with the true shape of the things imagined, or at least that we have felt them with some of our senses . . . ‘the phantasie,’ [Strabo says], ‘is like a print or footstep of sense’.34 Rubens, evidently keenly interested in how the senses and the imagination worked together when creating mythological pictures, responded in terms that link the imagination, genius and drinking. Having thanked Junius for the book, he wrote: But since those examples of the ancient painters can now be followed only in the imagination . . . I wish that some such treatise on the paintings of the Italian masters might be carried out with similar care. For examples of their works are publicly exhibited even today; one may point to them with a finger and say,

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‘There they are.’ Those things which are perceived by the senses produce a sharper and more durable impression, require a closer examination, and afford a richer material for study than those which present themselves to us only in the imagination, like dreams . . . We can say this from experience; for how few among us, in attempting to present in visual terms some famous work of Apelles or Timanthes which is graphically described by Pliny or by other authors, will not produce something that is insulting or alien to the dignity of the ancients? But each one indulging his own inclination [Genio suo quisque indulgens], will offer an inferior wine as a substitute for that bittersweet vintage, and do injury to those great spirits whom I follow with the profoundest veneration. It is rather that I adore their footsteps, than that I ingenuously [ingenue] profess to be able to follow them, if only in thought.35 Perhaps picking up the ‘footsteps’ metaphor from Strabo that Junius deployed, in this letter Rubens professed his preference for the real over the merely imagined in processes of imitation. He stressed the value of the modern Italian masters, since their works were available to the senses and could be copied, which he did extensively. When it came to antiquity, its ‘bittersweet vintage’ could be imbibed in a variety of draughts: classical literature, which fired the imagination but which was ultimately intangible, and ‘those things which are perceived by the senses’, that is, the surviving corpus of ancient (and modern) art. Examples of ancient sculpture could be scrutinized, walked around, studied from various

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angles and copied in drawings. They could also be retained in the memory. This was vital to Rubens’s creative process, as the painter and art theorist Samuel van Hoogstraten relayed in a famous anecdote. When in Rome, Rubens was rebuked by a colleague because ‘he copied or drew after so few Italian paintings and only spent his precious time wandering, looking, and sitting quietly’. Laughing, Rubens retorted, ‘I am most busy when you see me idle’, adding ‘I believe that I have better retained that which I have looked at, than you who have drawn it.’ There followed a competition to see which of them could reproduce most faithfully a work of art which Rubens had only looked at where his adversary had drawn it: Rubens surpassed his rebuker, out of the treasure of his imagination, as far in this as in the rest of art. A painter may, like a useful bee that flies onto all kinds of flowers and sucks nothing but honey, extract all kinds of usefulness from the examples of others. To copy everything is too slavish, even impossible: and to entrust everything to one’s imagination really requires a Rubens.36 In line with classical theories of rhetoric, Van Hoogstraten drew attention to Rubens’s prodigious memory as indicative of a unique, special ingenuity: Quintilian claimed that, although trainable, a good memory was an innate gift, a sign of ingenium.37 He also set it alongside a commonplace in rhetoric: Seneca’s metaphor for imitatio of a bee collecting nectar from diverse flowers. Yet ancient art was not merely source material to be consumed willy-nilly and heedlessly regurgitated. Rather, as

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Quintilian advised, past art had to be carefully and critically selected.38 It had also to be savoured in the mind in order to hone one’s artistic and critical faculties; in short, to develop ‘good taste’. Just a few decades after Rubens’s death, Roger de Piles paraphrased his hero’s words in De imitatione statuarum: ‘In truth, the antique is a remedy against bad taste. But if it is taken raw, and without the necessary seasoning of the lively beauties of nature, its use can be dangerous.’39 The noble austerity of ancient art must, in this view, be filtered through experience of nature if it is to be productively digested and transformed into good, modern painting. For de Piles, the acid test was whether the results conveyed esprit: the lively essence of a painter’s génie.40 With this in mind, we may assay a summary of Rubens’s creative process. When inventing a picture, the artist’s ‘fantasy’ drew multiple images from the rich storehouse of his mind. These were images provided by his study of nature and art – those ‘sharp’ things ‘perceived by the senses’, which the artist selected by exercising his judgement. Such images were combined with and distilled through ‘imaginary’ ones, such as those furnished by classical literature. Fired by innate heat and the right temperament – balanced and moderated by a healthy regimen – Rubens’s capacious ingenium worked upon these digested forms through the fantasy, to produce original and well-judged compositions, executed swiftly and easily. The rapidity of this process, of which only a superior wit was capable, ensured the immediate translation of spirits from the artist’s imagination into spirited facture, describing figural forms in vivid colours and dynamic brushwork that excite the passions of the viewer.

62 Peter Paul Rubens, Helena Fourment in a Fur, also known as Het Pelsken, with led light mapping, 1636–8, oil on panel.

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The late Bacchus on a Barrel (see illus. 48) exemplifies this process. In designing the god’s figure, Rubens distilled elements of classical statuary and his drawings after the live model to create a new and naturalistic depiction of a figure that may only be conceived in the imagination. He did so through rapid brushwork, applying saturated sweeps of richly hued paint, the substance of which matches the wine dribbled from Bacchus’ tazza into the mouth of an intoxicated satyr child. Indeed, we should recall that Rubens’s inventiveness was a bodily process that used its own material ‘spirits’ – pigments bound in oil. It is as though Bacchus, his cup brimming over, stands for the abundant, embodied creativity of the painter, who drinks in the ‘bittersweet vintage’ of art and nature, digests it, then releases it spontaneously. The peeing boy (also based on an ancient sculpture) who replicates this cyclical activity, draws the picture even more firmly into the orbit of genius. The puer mingens was a long-standing symbol of fertility and fecundity, such that Bacchus stands not only for a creative ingenium but also for a procreative geniality. In the background of Rubens’s late portrait of his second wife, Helena Fourment in a Fur (also known as Het Pelsken, 1636–8), a statue of a puer mingens has recently been discovered (illus. 62). Although he later changed his mind and painted it out, Rubens surely added this feature to an unashamedly erotic yet private picture to signal his young wife’s fertility. Not only had she borne him many children, she had also fired his imagination as a muse, serving repeatedly as the model for figures in subjects both sacred and profane. Perhaps an appreciation of what Rubens might have considered ‘womanly’ genius encouraged him to depict Bacchus with a rounded, ‘female’

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form, his genitals disguised by a flourish of fur that peeks out from between his thighs. Bacchus’ ambivalence – drunken wit, womanly man – undercuts gendered divisions of vice and virtue, strength and weakness in favour of a more capacious, joyful expression of the creative spirit: a genial kind of painting.

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n the first few years after his return to Antwerp from Italy, Rubens made a quick sketch of Venus mourning the dying Adonis (illus. 63). The young hunter, fatally wounded in the groin by a wild boar, expires in a graceful, serpentine pose. His right arm hangs limply beside a cursorily drawn Cupid, who tends his wound with a cloth; his left arm is feebly raised, cupping Venus’ cheek and drawing her near. Above, Rubens has added the next moment in the narrative, as Venus brings her lips close to her dying lover to take a parting kiss. He has annotated the scene with a Latin tag: ‘spiritum morientis excipit ore’ (she draws out his dying spirit with her mouth). Rubens, who painted the subject of Venus and Adonis several times throughout his career, had encountered this scene in ancient art. Indeed, his drawing was likely inspired by a detail at the right-hand edge of a sarcophagus he studied in Rome, in the house of Lelio Pasqualino, and which he described in his ‘Roman Itinerary’: The complete tale of Adonis, firstly discouraged by Venus from going to the hunt, leaving armed with a

63 Peter Paul Rubens, Venus Mourning Adonis, c. 1608–12, pen and brown ink on paper.

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hunter’s spear and accompanied by hunters wearing caps. The struggle with the wild boar. His injury on the thigh, which is treated by applying a sponge, Venus supporting his head. His death while Cupid continues to sponge his wound. His passing out and last breath as it were into the mouth of Venus who approaches him to receive it.1 Rubens was thoroughly familiar with this tale from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but his interest in the ‘last breath’ of the dying hero probably derived from a different source. His Latin inscription may have been prompted by one of Cicero’s speeches, which, touching on the last wishes of mothers whose sons have been killed, includes the phrase ‘postremum spiritum ore excipere’ (to catch on their lips the final breath).2 Such a source would seem strange were it not for the fact that Rubens’s drawing recalls depictions of mourning for the dead Christ. Adonis’ pose, with its lifeless right arm, resembles that of Christ in the slightly later The Descent from the Cross (c. 1617; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille), while the treatment of the lovers’ heads is comparable to Rubens’s depictions of The Lamentation (c. 1614), made around the time he was painting another version of Venus Mourning Adonis (c. 1614; also known as The Death of Adonis) (illus. 64 and 65). The artist may have connected in his mind these very different subjects – one profane, the other sacred – not only because they involve expiration and mourning but by virtue of the objects that occur in both. Cupid’s sponge and Adonis’ spear (the latter prominent in the mythological painting) are, albeit in a radically different context, instruments of the Passion.

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We are left in no doubt, though, as to the erotic subjectmatter of the drawing. Rubens’s Venus is voluptuous and her kiss, while solemn, is not chaste. Rubens might have known the Greek poet Bion’s celebrated elegy on the death of Adonis, which, in the Latin translations circulating during the artist’s lifetime, lingers on the hero’s dying breath using the language of spiritus. Although the exact phrase Rubens used does not appear in the poem, Bion describes Venus ‘drinking in’ Adonis’ love through his departing soul.3 Whatever the source, Rubens’s drawing and inscription partake of the ambivalence of ‘spirit’, as something that hovers between the material and the immaterial. As we have seen, in early modern natural philosophy spiritus was a subtle, imperceptible entity conveyed throughout and beyond the body by material substances such as blood and breath. Animating both the sinews and the brain, it was the very thing through which the soul functioned. In the painting Venus Mourning Adonis, one of Adonis’ hunting dogs sniffs at the trail of fresh, crimson-coloured blood left by his master’s fatal wound. This serves as a reminder of the tragedy’s cause (an ill-advised hunt) but the dog, ever a symbol of fidelity, might also have caught the scent of its master’s essence, as his very being seeps away into the soil. Likewise, in the drawing, as Venus inhales Adonis’ last breath she imbibes three kinds of spirit: a material exhalation, Adonis’ immortal soul and (perhaps most ambiguously) the love that binds her to him. In Ovid’s account, Venus’ love for the mortal Adonis begins with a piercing scratch and concludes with Adonis gored by a boar’s tusk, his spear shattered. 4 Cupid, while kissing his mother, inadvertently grazes her breast with one of

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his arrows, such that she is ‘smitten with the beauty’ of the youth. Her lust is excited by the sight of Adonis’ physical beauty, and it is through the loving gaze – as well as a desperate embrace – that she seeks to restrain the ill-fated hunter in Rubens’s Adonis Departing from Venus (c. 1610–14) (illus. 66). Rubens was certainly aware of the commonplace that love’s ‘spirits’ were conveyed by the sense of sight, vision being the subtlest of the senses. He was also familiar with Van Mander’s account of the eyes as a window onto the passions (affecten, in Dutch), especially when it comes to love. ‘There is a pertinent proverb that runs,’ Van Mander says, ‘“Where the hand is, is pain; where love is, are the eyes.”’5 Rubens had 64 Peter Paul Rubens, The Lamentation, c. 1614, oil on panel.

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also read one of the most important optical treatises of the era, the Flemish Jesuit François d’Aguilon’s (Aguilonius) Opticorum libri sex (1613), for which he provided illustrations. His immersion in such material may have informed his creation, in collaboration with Jan Brueghel the Elder, of an encyclopaedic allegory of sight, in which Venus and Cupid take centre stage (illus. 67). Surrounded by an eclectic array of constcamer objects that rely on sight for their production and appreciation (Rubens’s own paintings prominent among them), the goddess of love gazes upon an image of amor sacra pertinent to the allegory’s theme: Christ Healing the Blind Man. Parodying this vignette, below Venus a monkey – standing for art, the ‘ape of nature’ – uses spectacles to peer at Rubens’s Bacchanal (c. 1615; Pushkin Museum, Moscow). His cheeky curiosity encourages the spectator to compare virtuous viewing with the erotics of immoderation, spiritual sight 65 Peter Paul Rubens, Venus Mourning Adonis, also known as The Death of Adonis, c. 1614, oil on canvas.

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with the lustful gaze. Rubens did not shy away from depicting the latter, painting numerous subjects of erotic desire, some biblical (for example Susanna and the Elders, c. 1609–10; Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid; Lot and His Daughters, c. 1610–16; private collection), others derived from his wide reading in contemporary literature, such as Angelica and the Hermit (c. 1626–8) from Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (illus. 68).6 Although a ‘modern’ theme, Rubens’s inspiration for the latter picture’s composition was probably an ‘ancient’ erotic scene: Agostino Carracci’s Venus and a Satyr (etched and engraved by Annibale Carracci in 1592), in which a lascivious

66 Peter Paul Rubens, Adonis Departing from Venus, c. 1610–14, oil on panel.

67 Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder, The Sense of Sight, 1617, oil on panel.

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satyr pulls aside a blanket in order to ogle the sleeping goddess’s naked beauty. In early modern theories of vision, it was debated whether sight operated by means of intromission (the eye as a receiving instrument of sensory data, known as species, that radiated from external objects) or extramission.7 In the latter, it was thought that the eye sent out imperceptible ‘feeling’ rays, which would touch the object of vision and send back information to the viewer. Rubens’s teacher Otto van Veen drew on this theory to depict love’s rays as arrows emanating from the eyes of Venus, piercing a fainting lover’s breast while Cupid sleeps (illus. 69).8 As the accompanying text to his emblem ‘Looks Are Love’s Arrows’ from the Amorum emblemata (1608) explains: My love’s looks unto me, the force of love imparts, Each glance an arrow is, which from her eyes proceed, 68 Peter Paul Rubens, Angelica and the Hermit, c. 1626–8, oil on panel.

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Now Cupid rest thyself, to shoot thow haste no need. For her lookes wound my harte aswell as do thy dartes.9 Such piercing spirits could emanate not only from a human object of love but from a work of art. Rubens drew deftly on this notion to depict a pivotal moment in one of his most prestigious commissions: the Marie de’ Medici cycle (c. 1622– 5). One of the paintings in this cycle shows the moment at which King Henry iv of France first sets eyes on his future bride, via a portrait sent to conclude the marriage negotiations between Paris and Florence (illus. 70). The king, guided by a personification of France, is presented with a bust-length portrait of his betrothed by Hymen, the god of weddings. The latter’s flaming torch illuminates the portrait while alluding to the ardour sparked in Henry’s breast by the sight of the Medici princess, whose virtues are extolled by Cupid, hovering nearby.

69 Cornelis Boel, after Otto van Veen, ‘Les regards dards’ (‘Looks Are Love’s Arrows’), illustration in Otto van Veen, Amorum emblemata (1608), engraving.

70 Peter Paul Rubens, The Presentation of the Portrait of Marie de’ Medici, c. 1622–5, oil on canvas.

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The king seems even to breathe in his bride – his breast swells in its cuirass, his body begins to rise onto tiptoe – as the portrait works its magic and the hero is conquered by amor. Thus a pair of amorini drag off the king’s shield and helmet – it is time for him to leave aside the business of war and turn to the peaceable pursuit of love, as even blazing Jupiter did for Juno. In a witty twist, the king and queen of the gods, who preside over the presentation scene, are later transformed into the mortal lovers themselves. In The Meeting of Marie de’ Medici and Henry iv (Musée du Louvre, Paris), Rubens gives Juno and Jupiter the features of the queen and king, the lightning god tamed by love much like the pacified lions who (punningly) pull the chariot of the city where the mortal monarchs met: Lyon. The subject doubtless resonated with Rubens. On the occasion of his marriage to Isabella Brant in 1609, both his brother Philip and the celebrated scholar Daniel Heinsius composed verses in honour of the wedding, which comment wryly on how the heroic painter had been conquered by love. As Heinsius wrote, Like Apelles and Parrhasius He has triumphed over heroes and kings in daring to paint them with unrivalled skill, Even he yielded to love (and who has not been so enthralled?) And became the plaything of tender maidenhood.10 Taking up a similar theme, Philip Rubens joked that his brother’s wit had been overcome by the lure of the nuptial bed, pitting ingenium against a genialis lectus:

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The power of his wondrous ingenuity [vis ingenii mirabilis] and hand rival those Of Polygnotus and Apelles, of whom the poets sing, But now the god [Hymen] is impatient to light the nuptial torch And enter the domestic chamber, Where the nuptial bed [genialis lectus] appears, The arena of the Cyprian [Venus], Destined for harmless bloodshed.11 Rubens depicted this ‘power of love’– or, more specifically, ‘power of women’– theme through classical and biblical subjects such as Hercules and Omphale (c. 1602–5; illus. 71) and Samson and Delilah (c. 1609–10; National Gallery, London). In the short poem ‘On Samson, Overwhelmed by a Woman’, appended to an engraving after Rubens’s original composition, Philip Rubens connected the two subjects: Samson, who surpassed the human race in strength, Is finally conquered by a feminine trap So, too, the force of Hercules succumbed to female craft and guile. You women, baneful to great men!12 Rubens’s Hercules and Omphale may have been used to celebrate the marriage of the Genoese nobleman Gian Vincenzo Imperiale, serving as a pendant to an earlier, and now lost, Venus Lamenting Adonis (c. 1602). In this youthful but highly accomplished picture, Hercules has been unmanned by the beguiling Omphale, queen of Lydia in Asia Minor and as such

71 Peter Paul Rubens, Hercules and Omphale, c. 1602–5, oil on canvas.

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considered an ‘exotic’ figure in contrast to the Greek hero. Towering over Hercules and mantled by his lion’s pelt, she tweaks the ear of the unmanned demigod, whose feminized state is signalled by spindle and thread, the latter held delicately between thumb and forefinger, where his club should be grasped in a powerful fist. Hercules is shown splay-legged, his genitals coyly draped by a flimsy piece of eastern cloth that also cowls his head in womanly fashion. Rubens implies that Hercules’ bewitchment – alluded to by the shadowy, grinning features of an unfamiliar idol in the background niche – is of his own making. In the bottom right-hand corner, the pedestal on which Omphale stands shows a pair of putti in a fastmoving chariot; one of its horses surges forward, the other crashes to the ground. This refers to an allegory in Plato’s Phaedrus in which a chariot stands as a metaphor for the human soul’s twin capacities for base passion and reasoned restraint: We will liken the soul to the composite nature of a pair of winged horses and a charioteer . . . first the charioteer of the human soul drives a pair, and secondly one of the horses is noble and of noble breed, but the other quite the opposite in breed and character. Therefore in our case the driving is necessarily difficult and troublesome.13 Hercules has abandoned reason and allowed his passions to rule him, with disastrous consequences. Rubens, interested as he was in the Neostoic doctrine of measured constancy, appears to warn of the dangers of concupiscence. Yet the matter is not so straightforward, for Rubens himself confessed to

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a fiery passion in matters of love. Writing to Johann Faber about Philip Rubens’s romantic affairs, he remarked: my brother has been favoured 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. It was a fortunate hour when he laid aside the scholar’s gown and dedicated himself to the service of Cupid . . . I find by experience that such affairs should not be carried on coolly [freddamente], but with great fervor [con ogni fervore]. My brother has also proved this, for since my arrival he has changed his tactics, after pining for two years in vain.14 This relationship between heat and love accords broadly with the flame of ingenuity and an artist’s creative capacity. More particularly, though, the biographical significance of Rubens’s remarks is emphasized by the letter’s date: 10 April 1609. Rubens had been back in Antwerp for just half a year. He mourned the loss of Rome and was considering how best to re-establish himself in Flemish society and its art world, having received ‘generous’ offers from Archdukes Albert and Isabella. In the letter to Faber, the artist explains: ‘I myself will not dare to follow him [Philip, into marriage], for he has made such a good choice that it seems inimitable.’ Yet just a few months later he married into the same family as his brother, wedding Isabella Brant, a niece of his brother’s wife, on 3 October 1609. It was a sensible marriage into a distinguished Antwerp family (Isabella’s father, Jan Brant, was a prominent lawyer and

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secretary to the city). Notably, neither the fervour of amorous pursuit nor the anxiety of love and women’s power are on display in Rubens’s marriage portrait, which instead exudes nonchalant confidence and tranquillity. In Self-portrait with Isabella Brant (also known as The Honeysuckle Bower) of circa 1609, Rubens and Isabella are shown settled against a backdrop of 72 Peter Paul Rubens, Self-portrait with Isabella Brant, also known as The Honeysuckle Bower, c. 1609, oil on canvas mounted on panel.

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the sweet-smelling plant, its entwined tendrils signifying the embrace of love and the knots of wedlock (illus. 72). Their hands are clasped in the traditional symbol of marriage, the dextrarum iunctio. In stark contrast to the simpering hero in Hercules and Omphale, Rubens sits comfortably with legs crossed in a gentlemanly pose; his left hand rests casually on a sword, denoting his elite status. Where Omphale loomed mockingly over the submissive Hercules, Rubens has positioned himself above Isabella, who kneels humbly below him on the ground. The couple are paragons of bourgeois respectability and – in early modern terms – the ‘correct’ hierarchy of the sexes. Moreover, where Hercules’ love for Omphale was an illicit lust without purpose, the flowering honeysuckle speaks to the proper and virtuous function of marriage: begetting children. For early moderns, marriage was not only associated with the efficacy of love’s spirits, but with genius – the god of generative power. The expected outcome of a marriage was procreation. As such, the festivities of a wedding were ‘genial’ in two senses: merry and fecund. Rubens, fluent in Italian, would have nodded at John Florio’s definition in his Italian– English dictionary A Worlde of Wordes (1598): ‘Geniale: whatsoever pertaines unto a mans genio. Also pleasant, blithe, bucksome, merie, given to pleasure and recreation. Also pertaining to mariage, houshould, and procreation.’ Half a decade later, Thomas Blount was blunter, defining ‘genial’ as ‘full of mirth: pertaining to marriage; the marriage-bed was of old called the Genial-bed, quasi Genital-bed.’15 Rubens availed himself of a comparable innuendo in his very last letter, in a period of his life made fruitful and happy by his second

73 Peter Paul Rubens, Kermis, c. 1635, oil on panel.

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marriage, to Helena Fourment. Writing to one of his favoured students, Lucas Faydherbe, he complemented the sculptor fondly on the consummation of his marriage: I have heard with great pleasure that on May Day you planted the may in your beloved’s garden; I hope that it will flourish and bring forth fruit in due season. My wife and I, with both my sons, sincerely wish you and your beloved every happiness and complete, longlasting contentment in marriage . . . your mother . . . must be laughing in her sleeve, now that your Italian journey has fallen through, and instead of losing her dear son, she has gained a new daughter who will soon, with God’s help, make her a grandmother.16 The festivities of the seasons and of the maypole were a long-standing tradition in Flemish popular culture. Rubens’s contemporary Pieter Brueghel the Younger depicted a dance about the maypole in his St George’s Kermis (1627), while Rubens’s interest in this festive genre is well known.17 He not only studied and made copies after the works of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (famous for his peasant scenes) but also produced his own Kermis (c. 1635) (illus. 73).18 In this painting, peasants drink, dance, laugh, kiss, fondle, vomit and relieve themselves in a riot of abandonment to sensual pleasures. Probably painted in the mid-1630s and for his own interest, this large work sets many complicatedly posed figures in front of a farmhouse and in an extensive landscape. Although no specific festival is depicted, we may surmise from the sheaves of wheat on which several of the foreground figures sit that

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it is harvest time. A tapestry bearing what may be a wedding crown, hanging at the left of the farmhouse, perhaps suggests a marriage feast; indeed, in early inventories the painting is described as ‘The Village Wedding’.19 No matter what the precise subject (and it seems that Rubens has kept this intentionally vague), the artist here celebrates the joyous and liberating effects of food and drink, emphasizing the very human nature of these bodily delights. Despite his own apparent aversion to festive excess, it is difficult to detect any opprobrium from the painter, whose emphasis seems instead to be on the happy loosening of spirits, especially in the dancers who occupy the picture’s middleground. This is a prime example of the imaginative empathy Roger de Piles attributed to Rubens, discussed in the previous chapter. In a related work painted around the same time, The Dance of the Villagers (c. 1635), it is as though Rubens has magnified a vignette from the Kermis to depict a swirling knot of entwined, syncopated bodies, which career into the landscape in a perfect fusion of form and subject (illus. 74). The merriness of the dancers is expressed in an undulating composition of serpentine figural postures that Rubens and his peers would have described using the language of spirit and fire. For instance, in L’idea de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti (1604), a book Rubens almost certainly read, Federico Zuccaro observed: ‘Spirit [spirito] is that liveliness and boldness of motion that the figure must have in the glance and gestures, to perform its duty according to its subject.’20 When Gian Paolo Lomazzo came to discuss the furia evident in serpentine figures, he compared its apparent self-motion to a flickering flame.21 Zuccaro’s and Lomazzo’s mannerist aesthetics is quite different to

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Rubens’s art; indeed Lomazzo introduced furia in the context of grace and ease in figurative painting – neither entirely apt for the carousing peasants of the Dance. Nevertheless, they share the underlying principle that a fiery spirit animates the body and is revealed through the figure in torsion. Given the association of a lively flame both with the furia of bodies (and souls) in motion and with ingenium, Rubens’s strikingly vernacular Dance may be understood as a masterful exercise in ingenuity. The liveliness of its subject is matched by the vibrancy of the artist’s handling – Rubens’s brushwork is loose and animated, his palette fresh and varied. Moreover, his inclusion in the picture of certain figures all’antica aligns the picture with the determined ambiguity of the Kermis. Where that painting leaves open the precise subject to enable the viewer’s participation in an ur-ritual of nature’s fertility, so the Bacchic male figures in the Dance – one bare-chested and wearing a laurel, the other crowned with vines and clothed

74 Peter Paul Rubens, Dance of the Villagers, c. 1635, oil on panel.

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in a leopard skin – shift the image from straightforward genre scene towards something more complex. Are these figures peasants who have donned fancy dress for the carnival, or are they the companions of Bacchus, encountered by the villagers in the woods? It is as though Rubens has conjured a scene in and out of time, a fusion of ancient and modern rites both learned and popular, in a prime example of what we may call ‘genial painting’. This ‘genial painting’ is a spirited treatment of festal subject-matter in which themes of fertility, abundance and creation are combined in a celebratory mode. A near contemporary print by the Flemish engraver Crispijn de Passe the Elder indicates that we may associate such subject-matter both with humanity and with genius (illus. 75). De Passe has depicted a putto or ‘genius figure’, presumably doubling as the infant Bacchus, against a landscape background with harvesting figures. At his feet are ripe produce, a tazza of fruit and a jug of wine. The Latin inscription on the engraving explains his attributes: Who are you, merry boy? genius. Why does your right hand hold ears of corn, and your left hand bunches of grapes? And why is your head crowned with poppies? These three are the gifts of the gods: Ceres, Bacchus and Somnus. Without these three, every man is dead. Poppies, the flower of Somnus, signify sleep, a requirement and reward of labour, without which nature cannot be cultivated. The work of agriculture brings forth food (Ceres) and

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drink (Bacchus), which sustain man and give him joy – these are the very fruits of labour enjoyed by the peasants in their Kermis. Genius, conflated with the infant Bacchus, is an apt figure in which to combine such ‘gifts of the gods’, for he is synonymous with not only nature but, specifically, fertility. Rubens painted many works that fall within the compass of genial painting, not least the mythological pictures we have already encountered: Bacchus on a Barrel and Drunken Silenus (see illus. 48 and 51). He was fond, too, of painting Ceres and her bounty, as in the Homage to Ceres (c. 1612–15; State Hermitage 75 Crispijn de Passe the Elder, ‘Genius’, from the series De essentie van het menselijk bestaan (The Essence of Human Existence), c. 1600, engraving.

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Museum, St Petersburg), a collaboration with Frans Snyders. Bacchus and Ceres return us directly to the theme of love, for they were the necessary companions of Venus in the popular adage ‘Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus’: without food and wine (that is, nourishment) love grows cold. This motto, an adaption of a line from Terence’s comedy Eunuchus, widely treated in northern art of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, was decidedly ambivalent.22 It could be put to moralizing purposes as a warning against the libidinous effects of intoxication, or as encouragement not to neglect 76 Jan Saenredam, after Abraham Bloemaert, Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus (Without Ceres and Bacchus, Venus Freezes), c. 1600, engraving.

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love. The inscription on Jan Saenredam’s engraving after Abraham Bloemaert’s depiction of the subject expresses this neatly, using the language of genius and ingenuity (illus. 76): Venus, and Venus’ son, grow cold with sloth, If genial [genialis] Bacchus and kindly Ceres are absent. He who is sensible will not however indulge overmuch in alluring love, Nor will he indulge to excess in frequent cups of wine. For an immoderate craving for Venus and Bacchus Enervates the strength, and kills the wit [ingeniumque necat]. Then honesty, all shame, and respect withdraw, And in their place come thefts and deceits. Rubens treated this subject a number of times in very different ways, but his Shivering Venus (signed and dated 1614) captures expertly the ambivalence of the topos (illus. 77). In a gloomy landscape (extended, but not by Rubens, on both sides of the initial composition), Venus and Cupid huddle together for warmth. The goddess, her back to us in a pose based on the Roman sculpture Crouching Venus, has covered her child ineffectually with a diaphanous cloth. At Cupid’s feet are the literally stone-cold remnants of a fire, at which the boy looks as if willing it to spark back into life. Yet help arrives, in the form of a satyr – a servant of Bacchus – bearing a cornucopia overflowing with grapes, fruit and corn: the produce of his master and of Ceres. Peering concertedly at Venus with narrowed eyes and tongue out, he points directly out of the canvas, seeking to draw the goddess’s attention to our

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presence. Yet our role in the scene is ambiguous. Are we being reprimanded for neglecting love? Shamed for leering, satyrlike, at Venus’ exposed flesh without her knowledge? We may recall here Rubens’s admission that love should be pursued ‘with great fervor’, not coldly. While lust is sparked by the sight of Venus’ naked body, our duty is surely to kindle the fire that will warm and protect, moving, in effect, from eros to amor. Thus Rubens’s treatment of this theme prompts a reflection on different kinds of love, on the concupiscent effects of sight and the moral obligations that arise from desire. Ceres and Bacchus are present, too, in Rubens’s expansive treatment of love’s variety The Feast of Venus (c. 1637–8), in which they can be glimpsed as statues reclining atop the arch of the grotto at the left-hand side of the painting (illus. 78). One of the artist’s most important late works in terms of both 77 Peter Paul Rubens, Shivering Venus, 1614, oil on panel.

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scale and ambition, it is arguably his fullest exploration of the theme of profane love. Painted for his own pleasure in a series of campaigns during the 1630s, Rubens expanded the canvas twice. First, he enlarged it on both sides and at the top, adding a nymph and satyr at the left while modifying the couple next to them. He extended our view of the woman at the right, introducing a tree trunk, while increasing at the top the number of putti who bear swags of fruit and foliage. Second, he added a smaller strip of canvas at the top, introducing a further expanse of sky in the left-hand corner and an increase in the foliage of the trees. Rubens was likely inspired to paint this subject in response to Titian’s The Worship of Venus (1518–19), which he copied around the same time as painting the Feast. Titian’s painting, with its charming profusion of playful amorini, was based on one of the ekphrases in Philostratus the Elder’s Imagines, which describes a picture with a ‘whole band’ of ‘untramelled’ Cupids, gathering apples in a garden sacred to Venus.23 Rubens has adopted aspects of his Italian predecessor and rival’s composition, including certain specific details, such as the worshipper who holds up to Venus a mirror – one of the goddess’s attributes. Yet he departs from Titian in significant ways. The action takes place in a wooded grove, with a vista towards a grotto or nymphaeum and a domed temple. Putti still jig and frolic around the pedestal of the statue, but they also bring – or perhaps remove – festal garlands to adorn Venus’ grove; one even lowers a crown of flowers onto the statue’s head.24 This sculpture is, importantly, quite different to Titian’s: Venus is in a pudica pose, wears a necklace of pearls and has been mantled in a blue cloth (although much of her is still naked). A worshipper polishes her with a white cloth

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– indeed, we may interpret the trio of female figures that surround the statue as performing a ritual libation, since one holds a brush and the other a flask of oil. The woman in a headscarf presiding over an archaeologically precise tripod of blazing coals enacts another ritual by burning incense.25 These are not the only worshippers Rubens has added to the scene: a pair of scantily clad young women, accompanied by a satyr, dance like Bacchantes around Venus to the sound of a tambourine, while a pair of more soberly dressed women arrive from the right bearing dolls. At the left, three couples – nymphs and satyrs – dance, leap and kiss, their poses comparable to those of the dancing villagers in Rubens’s Kermis. While Rubens frequently reused poses and gestures across pictures of differing subject-matter, the celebratory mood of both the Kermis and the Feast suggests that these works were connected in his mind. Indeed, the Feast may be characterized as an ‘antique’ example of genial painting, in which Rubens has imaginatively drawn on a range of classical sources to produce an image that rejoices in love’s variety. Among the several handbooks he likely drew upon was the aptly titled Dies geniales (1594) by the Italian humanist Alessandro Alessandri, which describes Roman women donating dolls in a passage of the temple of Venus Erycina, outside Rome.26 In Rubens’s picture, these dolls may refer to their bearers’ coming of age, thus discarding childish things, or to respectable married women’s prayers for fertility. Rubens’s main source, however, was Ovid’s Fasti, the fourth book of which describes a variety of rituals in honour of Venus. Ovid opens with the following advice to the women of Rome:

78 Peter Paul Rubens, The Feast of Venus, c. 1637–8, oil on canvas.

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Duly do ye worship the goddess, ye Latin mothers and brides, and ye, too, who wear not the fillets and long robe. Take off the golden necklaces from the marble neck of the goddess; take off her gauds; the goddess must be washed from top to toe. Then dry her neck and restore to it her golden necklaces; now give her other flowers, now give her the fresh-blown rose. Ye, too, she herself bids bathe under the green myrtle, and there is a certain reason for her command; learn what it is. Naked, she was drying on the shore her oozy locks, when the satyrs, a wanton crew, espied the goddess. She perceived it, and screened her body by myrtle interposed: that done, she was safe, and she bids you do the same. Learn now why ye give incense to Virile Fortune in the place which reeks of warm water. All women strip when they enter that place, and every blemish on the naked body is plain to see; Virile Fortune undertakes to conceal the blemish and to hide it from the men, and this she does for the consideration of a little incense. Nor grudge to take poppy pounded with snowy milk and liquid honey squeezed from the comb; when Venus was first escorted to her eager spouse, she drank that draught: from that time she was a bride. Propitiate her with supplications; beauty and virtue and good fame are in her keeping.27 Drawing freely on this passage, Rubens has concocted a visual hymn to Venus as the goddess of love who brings fertility, joy and honour. Respectable matrons, young women, even prostitutes – those who ‘wear not the fillets and long robe’, the

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‘Bacchantes’ of Rubens’s picture – join to worship ‘Virile Fortune’ in a place that, with its plashing stream, ‘reeks of warm water’. There can be little doubt that the picture had particularly personal significance for Rubens, recently remarried to a young wife and enjoying an immensely fertile period of creativity. This is signalled by his decision, when extending the painting, to portray his wife, Helena, in the embrace of a lusty satyr (illus. 79). Rubens used Helena repeatedly as a model for a variety of works both profane and sacred, such as St Cecilia Playing the Virginals (1639–40), one of his last paintings (illus. 80). Indeed, her resemblance to the figure of Venus in The Judgement of Paris (1637–8; Museo del Prado, Madrid), made for Philip iv of Spain at around the same time as the Feast, was the cause of much gossip in the Spanish court. Rubens may even have intended a pun in the Judgement, since the outcome of Paris’ choice was Venus’ gift of Helen of Troy to Paris, albeit this sort of indecorous allusion ill fits his public dignity. Certainly, in Rubens’s mind his young wife was a source not of shame but of joyful liberation. As he explained in a letter to Peiresc: I made up my mind to marry again, since I was not yet inclined to live the abstinent life of the celibate, thinking that, if we must give the first place to continence, fruimur licita voluptate cum gratiarum actione [we may enjoy licit pleasures with thankfulness]. I have taken a young wife of honest but middle-class family, although everyone tried to persuade me to make a Court marriage. But I feared commune illud nobilitatis malum superbiam praesertim in illo sexu [pride, that inherent vice of the nobility,

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particularly in that sex] and that is why I chose one who would not blush to see me take my brushes in hand. And to tell the truth, it would have been hard for me to exchange the priceless treasure of liberty for the embraces of an old woman.28 Thus the rough and tumble of the satyr’s embrace surely meant for Rubens the ‘licit pleasure’ of the genial-bed, alluding perhaps to the euphemistically ‘harmless bloodshed’ of Philip Rubens’s nuptial poem to his brother. Lest we be in 79 Detail from Peter Paul Rubens, The Feast of Venus.

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any doubt of the nymph’s complicity in the amorous exchange, we should note that the purposely erotic gesture of her right arm – gripping the satyr’s horns – derives from a Bacchic sarcophagus that Rubens knew well, either from the original or an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi (illus. 81). Rubens copied into his Theoretical Notebook a scene from the extreme left of the sarcophagus, in which a satyress pleasures herself on a priapic herm, steadying herself with his horn. Re inforcing the gender norms of early modern society, Rubens’s Feast is capaciously genial in the period senses of the word: 80 Peter Paul Rubens, St Cecilia Playing the Virginals, 1639–40, oil on panel.

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‘bucksome, merrie, given to pleasure’. Its procreative imagery is purposefully spirited, replete with fiery animation. In this magisterial late work, we may properly understand Rubens’s genius: his natural inclination for the ancient rites of the classical world, for the licit pleasure of profane love within marriage, and for grand painting on a heroic scale. His ingenium is fully revealed in the treatment of a classical literary subject using a modern idiom. His wit is proved by seamless emulation of renowned artists of the past – Titian, the sculptors of ancient sarcophagi – through selective and transformative imitation. His spiritus, fiery and restless, powered his brush as it described the serpentine figures of dancing putti, nymphs and satyrs. His palette, rich and saturated, pulsates with the healthy tints of warm flesh that Roger de Piles so admired in his hero of coloris. 81 Marcantonio Raimondi, detail from A Bacchanal, c. 1510–13, engraving.

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It is clear from Rubens’s letter to Peiresc that he associated freedom both with his sexual self – the pleasures of the flesh – and with his profession. He refused to abandon the ‘priceless treasure of liberty’, marrying a wife who ‘would not blush’ to see him take his brushes in hand. Rubens’s personal liberty was intimately bound up with his artistic freedom, and we may recall Bellori’s praise for his ‘wondrous assuredness and freedom of the brush’. Yet it is de Piles who captured most eloquently this foundational aspect of Rubens’s character and art, writing in his Dissertation: Rubens painted [flesh tones] with swiftness, with learning and with freedom, as the master and sovereign of his art. His genius, too, as high as it was, enabled him to descend often to the details that make imitation more perfect . . . He knew how to distribute his colours in exactly the right place; he used them with greater immediacy and freedom, and in this way gave them all the brilliance they might need to feign perfectly the lively beauties of nature.29 For de Piles, there could be no better example of the lofty yet exacting nature of Rubens’s genius than his rendering of flesh, the highest aspect of the art of painting. Yet Rubens also deployed this combination of freedom and precision in what was traditionally a lowly genre: landscape. In his late landscapes, Rubens lovingly described the ‘lively beauties of nature’ for his own delight, free from the market and in the liberty of his own estate.

82 Peter Paul Rubens, A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning, c. 1636, oil on panel. 83 Peter Paul Rubens, A Landscape with a Shepherd and His Flock, c. 1638, oil on panel.

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riting to Peiresc in September 1636, Rubens apologized for having been a poor correspondent of late, explaining that he had been ‘living in retirement somewhat for several months, in my country house, which is rather far from the city of Antwerp’.1 Rubens purchased the estate of Het Steen, nestled in the wooded landscape of Brabant, in 1635, spending increasing amounts of time in this peaceful retreat until his death in 1640 (illus. 82). These five years of semi-retirement saw Rubens at his most active as a landscape painter. Ranging over the grounds of his estate, Rubens explored artistically the copses, streams and pastures of the Flemish countryside in a series of pictures apparently intended not for the market but for his own enjoyment, since most remained in his possession up to his death (illus. 83). Often adopting the Arcadian mode of the rural idyll, they are intensely personal works that reflect the artist’s biography in his later years: a happy marriage to his second wife, Helena Fourment; fertility, embodied by his growing family, with whom he was eager to spend time away from the bustle of Antwerp; the contentment of a professionally successful landowner; the comfort of natural beauty for an increasingly

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ill man (Rubens was badly troubled by gout and arthritis in his old age); the yearning for peace of a diplomat weary of international conflict. Rubens’s acquisition of Het Steen was the summation of a life of remarkable achievement. Made wealthy by his painting and diplomacy, Rubens purchased an entrée into the ranks of landed gentry, for with his estate came the title Lord of Steen. In a long tradition stretching back to antiquity, nobility granted freedom and was a mark of good character. It was the nominally inborn state of liberty called ingenuus, which also meant ‘trustworthy’ or ‘honest’: apt words for a diplomat. Yet Rubens, born into a respectable but not aristocratic house, had to buy this status through the fruits of his ingenium. One might say that he became ingenuous by being ingenious: his ‘freedom of the brush’ bought official social freedom. Notably, the artist’s contemporaries regularly conflated these two notions, innate wit and noble birth. ‘Ingenious and ingenuous’, the English etymologist Elisha Coles remarked, ‘are too often confounded.’2 Given his newly acquired standing, it is unsurprising that Rubens devoted so much time to painting the rich and diverse landscape of Het Steen. Delighting in the fruits of his labour, he trained his ingenuity back onto the very soil that proclaimed his dignity to the world. Fittingly, he did so free from the baggage of trade. Painting landscapes was not so much an escape from the world as the transcending of it: a statement of artistic and personal autonomy. On the other hand, his landscape oeuvre is in a sense supremely worldly – many of the landscapes depict agriculture and husbandry, the commercial produce of the landowner’s tenanted fields. Yet this was

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more than simply an exercise in self-satisfaction at successful social climbing. For Rubens, landscape went deeper; it meant digging into the depths not just of social but of national identity. He was well aware that landscape as an independent genre was effectively a Flemish invention, created a generation or so previously by the likes of Joachim Patinir, Herri met de Bles and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. In the eyes of Rubens’s contemporaries, landscape, more than anything else, was artistically Flemish by nature. Rubens was equally well informed about the ancient notion of the genius loci, the ‘spirit of the place’. In Virgil’s Georgics, which inspired the late landscapes, he could have read of ‘the genius of soils, the strength of each, its hue, its native power for bearing’.3 Rubens was doubtless familiar with the passage in the Aeneid in which Aeneas lands upon the shores of Latium, and wreaths his temples with leafy bough and prays to the genius of the place, and Earth, first of gods; to the nymphs and the rivers yet unknown; then to Night and Night’s rising signs, and to Jove of Ida and the Phrygian Mother, each in order, and his two parents, in heaven and in the underworld.4 In the early modern period, the genius loci was connected to the ingenium of a region’s populace. Cosmographers and physicians argued that the environmental conditions of different places produced different wits: people were naturally a product of their birthplace. Thus to understand what it meant to be Flemish, you had to start with the land. Rubens, of course, was Flemish by parentage but had been born abroad.

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Perhaps he sought his own identity in the genius loci of the Brabant countryside, pursuing his own ingenium, his artistic character, through the Flemish landscape traditions to which he was heir. Rubens had begun to explore these ideas earlier in his career. Among the handful of landscapes he made prior to the purchase of Het Steen is Landscape with a Cart Crossing a Ford, otherwise known as La Charrette Embourbée (c. 1620) (illus. 84). In this remarkable picture, a pair of labourers struggle to ford a stream with their laden (and vernacularly Flemish) cart. Straining to pass from one side to the other, they cross in front of a forbidding rocky mass, fissured down the middle. Their attempted passage is symbolized by the atmospheric sky, in which day on the right is changing to night on the left, where a full moon rises over the water. It is tempting to read the picture as an allegory of life, the struggle of man in 84 Peter Paul Rubens, Landscape with a Cart Crossing a Ford, also known as La Charrette Embourbée, c. 1620, oil on canvas (transferred from panel).

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and against nature, passing through different ‘ages’ of his life as the seasons change, diminutive against the eternal revolving of the heavens. There is a deliberate air of mystery to the scene, especially in the looming rock, sprouting a profusion of twisted and broken trees. In painting this craggy mass, 85 Herri met de Bles, An Extensive Rocky Landscape with the Flight into Egypt, c. 1540s?, oil on panel. 86 Peter Paul Rubens, The Return of the Farm Workers from the Fields, c. 1640, oil on canvas.

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Rubens was indebted to the capriciously anthropomorphic landscapes of one of the founders of the Flemish landscape tradition, Herri met de Bles. A broken rock sporting trees is one of Herri’s signature motifs – the example in An Extensive Rocky Landscape with the Flight into Egypt (c. 1540s?) is especially similar to Rubens’s in La Charrette (illus. 85). The fractured base of Rubens’s rock is agape, a mouthlike entrance to a cavern hidden within. Modelled on Herri’s example, its monstrous form recalls also the artificial mounds popular in European courtly gardens, such as those published by the ingenieur Salomon de Caus in Les Raisons des forces mouvantes (1615), a book Rubens owned (illus. 87).5 De Caus’s ingenious garden features concealed rustic grottoes with wondrous automata – apparently self-moving scenes of nymphs and river gods, powered by running water. They were intended to evoke the mythical sprites inhabiting the secret places of the earth: those nature spirits that are the embodiment of the genius loci. Rubens, always curious about the hidden workings of nature, prompts us to imagine something similar in La Charrette. In this landscape, a mundane episode – two carters stuck in a flowing stream – belies the shadowy mystery of nature’s secrets, the hidden ‘spirit of the place’ to which the painter lures our eyes. La Charrette seems at once natural and artificial. Painted with great fidelity to nature, its composition is nevertheless curious, from the tilt of the sloping landscape through the artifice of the grotto-like rock and, not least, the suspension between night and day. Rubens toyed similarly with the tense relationship of nature to art in one of his late landscapes: The Return of the Farm Workers from the Fields (c. 1640) (illus. 86). It

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depicts an extensive vista of pastures and woods, through which a track winds into the hazy distance. Conceived in the Bruegelian tradition of the harvest scene, it shows peasants transporting their produce from the fields. In the foreground, a group wends its way homewards, weighed down by the harvest, while a shepherd drives his flock to their enclosure before nightfall. Yet the lighting of this evening scene is ambiguous – its shadows are cast in two different directions. The clump of trees to the right throws thick umbrage towards us and to the left, while the shadows cast by the foreground figures fall away from us to the right. Commenting on this strange feature, Goethe, one of Rubens’s most insightful critics, wrote: 87 Engraving from Salomon de Caus, Les raisons des forces mouvantes (1615).

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It is thus that Rubens proves himself great, and shows the world that he has the freedom of spirit [mit freiem Geiste] to stand above nature, and handle her according to his higher purposes. The double lighting is certainly a violation of nature, and you may well say that it is contrary to it. But if it is against nature, I must say at once that it is higher than nature. It is the bold stroke of the master, by which he, as a genius, shows that art is not subject to natural demands, but has its own laws.6 We have seen that Rubens was a master of the passions, in two senses. His brilliance, according to de Piles, lay in capturing the motions of the soul as they moved body and mind. He was also, reputedly, the sovereign of his own passions: an equanimous stoic, who restrained the vim of his natural spirit with reason and learning. For Goethe, Rubens’s mastery went even further: he commanded nature. In Goethe’s hands, Rubens’s landscapes announce the triumph of aesthetics: the Romantic ideal of Promethean artistic freedom, unconstrained by divine or natural law. For the devout Rubens, this would have been a step too far. But it is not difficult to see how his ingenuity was transformed into a Romantic ideal. As the artist himself said, ‘my talent is such that no undertaking . . . has ever surpassed my courage.’7 Rubens, the hero of his own narrative, was the living embodiment of early modern ingenuity: prime matter for the wit of critics, who turned him into a genius.

references

Translations of classical texts are from the Loeb editions. Other translations are by the author unless otherwise noted.

Preface 1 It is apt that the series in which this book appears is called Renaissance Lives. Rubens, a master of emulation and steeped in the classical past, would have been far more comfortable being called a Renaissance artist than a Baroque one. 2 Peter Paul Rubens to Franciscus Junius, Antwerp, 1 August 1637, in The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens, ed. and trans. Ruth S. Magurn (Evanston, il, 1991), p. 407. Original in Max Rooses and Charles Ruelens, eds and trans., Codex diplomaticus Rubenianus, 6 vols (Antwerp, 1887–1909), vol. vi, pp. 179–80. 3 ‘inter caeteras quibus ad miraculum / excelluit doctrinae historiae priscae / omniumq[ue] bonarum artiu[m] et elegantiaru[m] dotes / non sui tantum saeculi, / sed et omnes aevi / Appelles [sic] dicit meruit’.

Introduction 1 An ingenium could also be a device or instrument; such meanings are found equally in the vernacular. See for example a letter from Rubens to Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc: ‘He [Cornelis Drebbel] also constructed several machines [mac[c]hine] and devices [ingegni] for the aid of La Rochelle.’ Peter Paul Rubens to Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, London, 9 August 1629, in The

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Letters of Peter Paul Rubens, ed. and trans. Ruth S. Magurn (Evanston, il, 1991), p. 323. All subsequent citations of this volume will be indicated by the abbreviation lppr. Original in Max Rooses and Charles Ruelens, eds and trans., Codex diplomaticus Rubenianus, 6 vols (Antwerp, 1887–1909), vol. v, p. 153. All subsequent citations of this series will be indicated by the abbreviation cdr. See, by way of comparison, Rubens’s sketch of Daedalus and the Labyrinth for the Torre de la Parada, in which the ancient engineer carries a set square and compasses in his belt. Svetlana Alpers, The Decoration of the Torre de la Parada, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, part ix (Brussels, 1971), no. 14a. In the early modern period, the name Daedalus was synonymous with ingenuity: ‘Dédalo: Dedalus, a proper name signifying ingenious. Of that name was a most cuning [sic] builder of Athens.’ Richard Perceval, A Dictionarie in Spanish and English (London, 1599), p. 85. Rubens was familiar with Ovid’s description (Metamorphoses, vii, 159): ‘Daedalus ingenio fabrae celeberrimus artis’ (Daedalus, a man famous for his skill in the art of making). Peter Paul Rubens to Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Antwerp, August[?] 1630. lppr, p. 367; translation slightly modified. ‘Il ritratto di V[ostra] S[ignoria] e stato gratissimo a me et a questi Signori che l’hanno veduto e restono interramente sodisfatti della somiglianza ma io confesso non mi parere di relucere in questa faccia non so che di spiritosa, et una certa emphasi nel sembiante che mi pare propria del Genio di V[ostra] S[ignoria] laquale però non si acerta facilmente in pittura di ogniuno.’ cdr, vol. v, p. 312. Compare, for example, the portrait of Rubens’s near contemporary John Donne in the National Portrait Gallery, London. The full sentence reads, ‘Cave tamen ne tempus tibi prorogetur, per mutuam hoc caritatem “Perque tuos oculos per Geniumque rogo”.’ Philip Rubens to Peter Paul Rubens, 15 July 1602, quoting Tibullus, Elegies, iii.2, 8; cdr, vol. i, p. 60. See De Bibliotheek van Pieter Pauwel Rubens: een reconstructie, compiled by Prosper Arents (Antwerp, 2001): b3, a1, h93. L. R. Lind, ‘The Latin Life of Peter Paul Rubens by His Nephew Philip: A Translation’, Art Quarterly, ix (1946), pp. 37–44, at

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pp. 1–2. The original reads: ‘Sed statim aulicae vitae pertaesus et a genio suo ad picturae studium impulsus . . . ut Adamo van Noort, pictori Antverpiensi, instituendus traderetur.’ Philip Rubens, ‘Vita Petri Pauli Rubenii (1676)’, in Frédéric de Reiffenberg, ‘Nouvelles recherches sur Pierre-Paul Rubens contenant une vie inédite de ce grande peintre’, Nouveaux mémoires de l’Académie des Sciences et Belles-Lettres de Bruxelles, x (1837), pp. 3–13, at p. 5. Sir Joshua Reynolds, A Journey to Flanders and Holland, ed. Harry Mount (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 144, 145, 146. Reynolds’s late encounter with Rubens resulted in a more favourable attitude towards the artist than the one he had held previously (and expressed in his Discourses): ‘Though I still entertain the same general opinion both in regard to his excellences and his defects; yet having now seen his greatest compositions . . . my estimation of his genius is of course raised.’ Ibid., p. 145. ‘in vero che alla copia dell’inventioni, e dell’ingegno, aggiunto la gran prontezza, e la furia del pennello, si stese la mano del Rubens, à tanto gran numero d’opere . . . Si può opporre nondimeno al Rubens di haver mancato alle belle forme naturali, per la mancanza del buon disegno, per la quale, e per un certo suo genio, che non pativa riforma, veniva egli rimosso dalla venustà dell’aria delle teste, e dalla gratia de’ contorni, che egli alterava con la sua maniera.’ Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Le vite de pittori, scultori et architetti moderni (Rome, 1672), pp. 247–8. Translation adapted from Giovanni Pietro Bellori, The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects, ed. Alice S. Wohl with notes by Hellmut Wohl and an introduction by Tomaso Montanari (Cambridge, 2005), p. 205. ‘Espose il Rubens in questi componimenti, la gran prontezza, e ’l fuoco del suo spirito, havendo usato una maravigliosa sicurezza, e libertà di pennello.’ Bellori, Vite, p. 232. ‘les premieres pensées et les esquisses. Et de ses esquisses il y en a de fort legers & d’autres assez finis, selon qu’il possedoit plus ou moins ce qu’il avoit à faire, ou qu’il estoit en humeur de travailler.’ Roger de Piles, Conversations sur la connoissance de la peinture, et sur le

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jugement qu’on doit faire des tableaux: Où par occasion il est parlé de la vie de Rubens, et de quelques-uns de ses plus beaux ouvrages (Paris, 1677), p. 220. ‘l’ame de la Peinture est le Coloris’ (colour is the soul of painting). Ibid., p. 272. ‘Le génie est la première chose que l’on doit supposer dans un peintre’ (Genius is the first thing one should expect of a painter). Roger de Piles, Abrégé de la vie des peintres avec des réflexions sur les ouvrages (Paris, 1699), p. 1. ‘l’inclination n’est plus qu’un simple amour pour une chose plustost que pour une autre. Et le Genie est un talent qu l’on a receu de la Nature, afin de reüssir en quelque chose. Ce talent languit quelquefois dans la paresse, s’il n’est échauffé par l’ardeur qui accompagne l’inclination: & l’inclination est inutile, si elle n’est conduite par la lumiere de l’esprit.’ De Piles, Conversations, p. 19. ‘Il est constant que la nature & le genie sont au dessus de regles, & sont ce qui contribuë d’avantage à faire un habile homme . . . Il faut donc une ame qui ait les mouvemens prompts & faciles, qui ait du feu pour inventer & de la fermeté dans l’execution . . . Le genie de Rubens estoit capable de produire luy seul & sans l’aide d’aucune preceptes des choses extraordinaires; mais comme il estoit naturellement éclairé, & de plus Philosophe, il a bien crû que la Peinture estant un Art, & non pas un pur effet du caprice, elle avoit des principes infaillibles dont il tireroit bien-tost la quintessence par l’ordre qu’il sçavoit donner à ses estudes.’ Ibid., pp. 226–7. J. Richard Judson and Carl van de Velde, Book Illustrations and Title Pages, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, part xxi, 2 vols (Brussels and London, 1978), no. 69. ‘Titulus Libri; et in eo Ingenium hinc a Natura, hinc ab Arte materiam accipiens, ad Scribenda Symbola Heroica’ (The title of the book; and in it Ingenium receives material now from Nature, now from Art, to write Heroic Symbols). Silvestro da Pietrasanta, De symbolis heroicis (Antwerp, 1634), [Index]. As he wrote, ‘L’Invention demande beaucoup de feu et de Genie’ (Invention requires great fire and genius); ‘Un Genie de feu donne de la facilité’ (A fiery genius bestows aptitude). De Piles, Conversations, pp. 67, 68. ‘Ingenium ceu flamma salit, ceu flamma coruscat / Iccirco innocuo circuit igne comas.’

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20 Balthasar Moretus to Philip Rubens, 3 November 1600. cdr, vol. i, p. 1. Moretus was Peter Paul Rubens’s friend and schoolmate. See also Philip Rubens to Petrus Pecquius, 5 November 1609: ‘[Peter Paul Rubens] has an elegant and razor-sharp wit, and in the art of Apelles, which he professes, he has most singular skill’ (‘ingenio peracri et eleganti, et Apelleae, quam profitetur, artis peritia singulari’). cdr, vol. ii, p. 14. Philip described him similarly as possessed of a ‘keen and elegant talent’ (‘peracri . . . et eleganti ingenio’). Lind, ‘The Latin Life’, p. 39. 21 ‘alsobald ein sonderbares Ingenium, Witz und Verstand verspüren’. Joachim von Sandrart, Teutsche Akademie (Nuremberg, 1675), p. 290. 22 cdr, vol. ii, p. 156. Original Royal Library, Copenhagen, Gl. kgl. Samling 3094, 4o. I am grateful to Nils Büttner for providing me with the original text. 23 William Sanderson, Graphice: The Use of the Pen and Pensil (London, 1658), p. 34. I have silently emended Sanderson’s tortuous punctuation. 24 Lord Danvers to Sir Dudley Carleton, 27 May 1621. cdr, vol. ii, p. 227. 25 Peter Paul Rubens to Pierre Dupuy, Antwerp, 15 July 1626. lppr, p. 136; cdr, vol. iii, p. 444. 26 ‘Il avoit neantmoins une grande aversion pour les excés du vin & de la bonne chere, aussi bien que du jeu.’ De Piles, Conversations, p. 215. 27 ‘nam quid in hoc erroneo saeculo degeneres possumus quam vilis Genius nos humi detinet ab heroico illo imminutos ingenio iudicio’; ‘Causa precipua qua nostri aevi homines differunt ab Antiquis est ignavia & inexercitatum vivendi genus; quippe esse, bibere nulla exercitandi corporis cura.’ Peter Paul Rubens, De imitatione statuarum, quoted in Jeffrey M. Muller, ‘Rubens’s Theory and Practice of the Imitation of Art’, Art Bulletin, lxiv/2 (1982), pp. 229–47, at pp. 231–2. 28 Robert Estienne, Dictionarium, seu latinae linguae thesaurus (Paris, 1531), p. 339. 29 Peter Paul Rubens to Pierre Dupuy, Antwerp, 15 July 1626. lppr, p. 136; cdr, vol. iii, p. 446.

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1 Holy Spirit 1 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Nach Falconet und über Falconet [1776], in Goethe on Art, selected, ed. and trans. John Gage (London, 1980), p. 20. 2 Thomas Aquinas, Scriptum super libros sententiarum magistri Petri Lombardi episcopi Parisiensis, quoted in Christine Göttler, ‘Preface: Vapours and Veils: The Edge of the Unseen’, in Spirits Unseen: The Representation of Subtle Bodies in Early Modern European Culture, ed. Christine Göttler and Wolfgang Neuber (Leiden and Boston, ma, 2008), pp. xv–xxvii, at pp. xx–xxi. Aquinas’s commentary on Peter Lombard remained a staple theological textbook well into the seventeenth century. 3 Juan Huarte de San Juan, The Examination of Men’s Wits, trans. Richard Carew (London, 1594), pp. 30–31. Technically, the vital spirits contribute to the powers of the mind also, for when rising to the head they are concocted in the brain and refined to become the animal spirits. 4 ‘Il se levoit tous les jours à quatre heures du matin, & se faisoit une loy de commencer sa journée pour entendre la Messe’. Roger de Piles, Conversations sur la connoissance de la peinture, et sur le jugement qu’on doit faire des tableaux: Où par occasion il est parlé de la vie de Rubens, et de quelques-uns de ses plus beaux ouvrages (Paris, 1677), p. 213. De Piles got his information from the artist’s nephew, Philip, who wrote: ‘he was always accustomed both winter and summer to attend the first mass’. L. R. Lind, ‘The Latin Life of Peter Paul Rubens by His Nephew Philip: A Translation’, Art Quarterly, ix (1946), pp. 37–44, at p. 41. 5 See John Rupert Martin, The Ceiling Paintings of the Jesuit Church in Antwerp, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, part i (Brussels and London, 1968). 6 Peter Paul Rubens to Annibale Chieppio, Valladolid, 24 May 1603, in The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens, ed. and trans. Ruth S. Magurn (Evanston, il, 1991), p. 33. All subsequent citations of this volume will be indicated by the abbreviation lppr. Original in Max Rooses and Charles Ruelens, eds and trans., Codex diplomaticus Rubenianus, 6 vols (Antwerp, 1887–1909), vol. i, p. 146. All subsequent citations of this series will be indicated by the abbreviation cdr.

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7 Rubens’s first religious commission came in 1602 from Archduke Albert of the Netherlands, for the altarpieces of the subterranean chapel of St Helena in the church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, in Rome. 8 Peter Paul Rubens to Annibale Chieppio, Valladolid, November[?] 1603. lppr, p. 33; cdr, vol. i, p. 226. 9 Rubens may have intended to evoke the Temple of Solomon. He deployed similar columns in perspective in his designs for the Triumph of the Eucharist tapestries, commissioned by the Infanta Isabella in 1625. See Nora De Poorter, The Eucharist Series, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, part ii, 2 vols (Brussels and London, 1978). The Gonzaga tapestry recalls somewhat the cloth, suspended by angels, in which God the Father cradles the crucified Christ in Albrecht Dürer’s Adoration of the Trinity (1511), although it is unclear whether Rubens was familiar with this work. 10 Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, Session xxv, Tit. 2, quoted in Anthony Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450–1600 (Oxford, 1962), p. 108. 11 The patron is honoured also for his ‘invention’ of the image: Christ gestures towards Federico Gonzaga (kneeling at far left) with his right hand, interceding with his Father on the family’s behalf. 12 Rubens’s placement of a nail between the carpal bones in the hand of Christ in his Christ on the Cross (c. 1610–12; illus. 23) perhaps indicates that he was familiar with this relic, which displays the same configuration. He may have consulted Justus Lipsius’s De cruce libri tres (Antwerp, 1593) on this matter. See J. Richard Judson, The Passion of Christ, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, part vi, 2 vols (Turnhout, 2000), pp. 32–3. 13 Rubens became well read in Jesuit theology and natural philosophy; he designed the title pages for numerous Jesuit books in these fields. For instance, he purchased theological works by the Jesuits Leonard Lessius and Étienne Binet from the Plantin bookshop in Antwerp, and he discussed the astronomical work of Dionysius Petavius with Pierre Dupuy. De Bibliotheek van Pieter Pauwel Rubens: een reconstructie, compiled by Prosper Arents (Antwerp, 2001), e14–16, 88 (Lessius), e161 (Binet), h86

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(Petavius). All subsequent citations of this text will be indicated by the abbreviation bppr. The library of Rubens’s son Albert lists numerous other works by Jesuit authors. It is likely that Albert inherited many of his books from his father. Comparable images find their way into illustrated examples of the Spiritual Exercises, for example the ‘Contemplation of Paradise’ in Les exercises spirituelles (Antwerp, 1673). A Vita S. Ignatii Loiolae, probably the 1609 illustrated edition, is listed in the library catalogue of Albert Rubens (bppr, p. 342). ‘Fort bien reluit en l’ame de l’homme l’image de la saincte Trinité. Car l’âme raisonnable a trois puissances naturelles moult excellentes, sçavoir est, la memoire, l’intellect, & la volonté . . . Ces trois puissances de l’âme sont les sens spirituels: car la veue est attribuee à la puissance intellective, l’ouye à la puissance memorative, l’odorement, le goust, & le touchement, à la puissance affective, ou amative, c’est à dire, à volonté.’ Louis de Blois, Miroir spirituel (Paris, 1576), pp. 75–6, quoted in Ralph Dekoninck, Ad imaginem: Statuts, fonctions et usages de l’image dans la littérature spirituelle jésuite du xviie siècle (Geneva, 2005), p. 86. Rubens produced designs for the frontispiece of an edition of Louis de Blois’s Opera (1632): J. Richard Judson and Carl van de Velde, Book Illustrations and Title Pages, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, part xxi, 2 vols (Brussels and London, 1978), no. 61. All subsequent citations of this volume will be indicated by the abbreviation crlb, part xxi. Peter Paul Rubens to Annibale Chieppio, Rome, 2 December 1606. lppr, p. 39; cdr, vol. i, p. 354. Peter Paul Rubens to Annibale Chieppio, Rome, 2 February 1608. lppr, p. 42; cdr, vol. i, p. 403. Rubens tried unsuccessfully to sell the work to his patron the Duke of Mantua. In the end, he hung it above his mother’s tomb in Antwerp – a reflection of his evident pride in the work, despite its failure in situ. For the seven spiritual gifts see Isaiah 11:1–2. Thomas Aquinas elaborates on the gifts of the Spirit in his Summa theologiae. The Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit are different to the Charismatic Gifts, for which see below, p. 80. In two letters to Serenus, Bishop of Marseilles, Gregory condemned idolatry but supported the use of images to teach ‘the

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ignorant’ and ‘pagans’ about the Christian faith. See Gregory the Great, Epistolae, 9.209 and 11.10. Huarte de San Juan, Examination, p. 87. Nicholas of Cusa, Idiota de mente [1450], in Jasper Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusa on Wisdom and Knowledge (Minneapolis, mn, 1996), pp. 564–5. Huarte de San Juan, Examination, p. 233. See also Christ’s description of himself as the ‘light of the world’ in John 8:12 and 9:5. De Piles, Conversations, p. 74. ‘La différence des caractéres & des personnes se donne facilement à coinnoistre non seulement par les habits qui en sont les marques exterieures; mais encore par la phisionomie & par les expressions qui sont la pourtrait de l’ame, & qui decouvrent le fond des coeurs . . . Les expressions des passions de l’ame sont merveilleuses dans cet ouvrage . . . Et pour moy qui ay veu tout ce qu’il y a de beau en France & en Italie du Titien & du Georgion, j’avouë que rien ne m’a tant frappé pour la force que ce tableau.’ Roger de Piles, Dissertation sur les ouvrages des plus fameux peintres (Paris, 1681), pp. 128–31. De Piles notes that the only other painting by Rubens comparable in greatness is the Drunken Silenus (see illus. 51). This work, published in Antwerp by the Plantin press, is listed in Albert Rubens’s library catalogue: bppr, p. 342. Balthasar Moretus, the publisher of the Plantin press, wrote to Cordier that Rubens only produced title page designs outside his normal working hours: ‘Rubens refuses to design them [book illustrations], if the design cannot be postponed for three months. I usually warn him six months in advance, so that he can think about a title and work it out fully in his free time and on sacred days. For he spends no working days on such work, or he would have to charge 100 guilders for one drawing.’ Balthasar Moretus to Balthasar Cordier, Antwerp, 13 September 1630. crlb, part xxi (vol. ii), p. 385. This is comparable to the lines in the Theoretical Notebook: ‘deus Harmonia rerum omnium, Circulus includens omnia, / Extra quem nihil est’ (God is the harmony of all things, the Circle embracing all, / Without which there is nothing). Peter Paul Rubens, Théorie de la figure humaine, ed. Nadeije Laneyrie-Dagen

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(Paris, 2003), p. 200. All subsequent citations of this text (a sideby-side edition of the original Latin and the French translation (published 1773) of Rubens’s Theoretical Notebook) will be indicated by the abbreviation tfh. The style of the handwriting in Rubens’s entry in the album amicorum suggests an early date. ‘Tris Numerus super omnia./ Ter des unus.’ Ibid. The dating of Rubens’s theoretical notebook is uncertain, but it seems likely it was written early in his career, probably during his Italian period. ‘Incipiunt autem omnia ab uno, numerorum omnium principio, ipso sine principio divinitatis imagine, ingenerabili, indivisibili nisi in continuo insit . . . Quem numerum recte Pythagoras, mentem vocavit et Dei similitudinem. Ternarius autem numerus, Aristotelis testimonio in principio primi voluminis de Coelo, omnia significans itemque principium et medium et finem continens, omnium numerorum perfectissimus est.’ Ibid., pp. 196–8. I have slightly adapted the translation given by Tine Meganck in ‘Rubens on the Human Figure: Theory, Practice and Metaphysics’, in Rubens, a Genius at Work: The Works of Peter Paul Rubens in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium Reconsidered, ed. Arnout Balis et al. (Brussels, 2007), pp. 52–64. In addition to Pythagoras, Rubens cites Virgil on the number three: ‘Terna tibi haec primum triplici diversa colore, / Licia circumdo: terque haec altaria circum / Effigiem duco: numero Deus impare gaudet’ (Three threads here I tie first round you, marked with three different hues, and three times round this altar I draw your image. In an uneven number Heaven delights). tfh, p. 198. The quote is Eclogues viii, 73–5. ‘Sic etiam faciente Natura ipsa, quae rerum omnium principia tria esse voluit, scilicet, Sal, Sulphur, et Mercurium.’ Ibid., p. 196. See bppr, h17–18. The library catalogue of Albert Rubens includes anonymous alchemical works (Ars alchymia and Ars chemica, bppr, pp. 345–6), occult scientific works by Levinus Lemnius, Giambattista della Porta, Paracelsus, Raymond Lull, Jean Fernel and Girolamo Cardano (bppr, p. 346), and the complete works of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino (bppr, p. 366). Peter Paul Rubens to Peter van Veen, Antwerp, 19 June 1622. lppr, p. 88; cdr, vol. ii, pp. 444–5. It is worth noting that the

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original French editor of Rubens’s Theoretical Notebook, CharlesAntoine Jombert, suppressed the esoteric passages in his printed version of parts of that text, Théorie de la figure humaine (Paris, 1773). Van Veen used a triangle because, so he argued, man was composed of a triumvirate – body, soul and spirit – that replicates in a microcosm the three persons of the Holy Trinity. ‘Per imagines . . . influere possunt per corpus & spiritum radij Z, adusque animam, tum & Deitatem hominis, illamq[ue] movere ad inclinandum versus salvatorem.’ Otto van Veen, Physicae et theologicae conclusiones (Orsellis, 1621), p. 43. Rubens offers a similarly tripartite account of man – comprised of mind, word and breath – in his notes on Kabbalah: ‘Echeia, sive corona caput est in homine cui verba seu sermones inhabitant, quae est filius Gosmath. Tum omnis vita trahetur et spiraculum ejus per habitum, qui est Spiritus Sanctus seu mensura Binach. Haec tria sunt unum et inseperabilia, ut ∆’ (Eyeh, or the crown, is in man the head, where words and speech live, which is Gosmath, the son. All life and breath is characterized by its disposition, which is the Holy Spirit, that is Binach, the measure. These three are one and inseparable, as is ∆). TFH, pp. 202–4. I am grateful to Richard Oosterhoff for his assistance with this translation. ‘herzhaft und Geistreich’. Von Sandrart, Teutsche Akademie, p. 291. An engraving (1631) by Paulus Pontius after one of Rubens’s drawings of this subject is inscribed with the passage from Luke 23:46, in the Vulgate: ‘Clamans voce magna Iesus ait, Pater in manus tuus Commendo spiritum meum, et haec dicens expiravit.’ The work is listed in the sale catalogue of Albert Rubens, along with Lipsius’s other works: bppr, p. 351. Justus Lipsius, Physiologia stoicorum libri tres (Antwerp, 1604), p. 12. In his account of spiritus, aether and fire, Lipsius drew not only on Stoic physics but on the controversial Corpus Hermeticum. The Stoic theory of spiritus is addressed also in Seneca’s Natural Questions, published by Lipsius in his edition of the Opera omnia the following year: Justus Lipsius, L. Annaei Senecae philosophi opera, quae exstant omnia (Antwerp, 1605). Lipsius, Physiologia stoicorum, dissertation xii.

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43 The Hebrew name of Jesus, Jehua, was not painted by Rubens but added much later. Hans Devisscher and Hans Vlieghe, The Life of Christ before the Passion: The Youth of Christ, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, part v(1), 2 vols (London, 2014), vol. i, p. 103. 44 ‘Si c’est mystere de religion, c’est une figure sacree. Ainsi la manne estoit une sacree peinture, non de couleurs ou de paroles, mais de signification. Ainsi la Circoncision estoit une action significant & figurant le Baptesme.’ Louis Richeome, Tableaux sacrez des figures mystiques du très auguste sacrifice et sacrament de l’Euchariste (Paris, 1601), quoted in Dekoninck, Ad imaginem, p. 73. Richeome continues: ‘This figure is also called Allegory, mystical painting and explanation, containing in itself a spiritual sense, understood by spiritual men, and hidden from the ignorant.’ (Ceste figure est autremont nommee Allegorie, peinture & exposition mystique, contenant en soy un sense spiritual, cogneu au gens spirituels, & cache aux grossiers). 45 ‘et factus est repente de caelo sonus, tamquam advenientis spiritus vehementis, et replevit totam domum ubi erant sedentes. Et apparuerunt illis dispertitae linguae tamquam ignis, seditque supra singulos eorum: et repleti sunt omnes Spiritu Sancto, et coeperunt loqui variis linguis, prout Spiritus Sanctus dabat eloqui illis.’ For the commission, see Peter Paul Rubens to Duke Wolfgang Wilhelm of Neuberg, Antwerp, 7 December 1619. lppr, pp. 72–3; cdr, vol. ii, pp. 237–8. He also painted a Last Judgment for the duke. 46 See the biblical verses Romans 12:6–8; 1 Corinthians 12:8–10 and 28–30; Ephesians 4–11. 47 Huarte de San Juan, Examination, pp. 19–20. Despite this distinction, Huarte de San Juan still fell foul of the censor, the Roman Jesuit Roberto Bellarmino, who in 1587 criticized the author for his argument that God adapted the supernatural graces according to individual human temperaments. The book was subsequently placed on the Index of prohibited books. Coincidentally, in a series of lectures on Genesis, delivered in Leuven (at which Lipsius was probably present), Bellarmine argued that the cosmos is made of fire, citing the Bible, Church Fathers and Stoics as his sources.

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48 ‘Una soprabondanza di vivacità di spiriti, che arricchisce l’anima dei numeri, e dei concetti meravigliosi, i quali parendo impossibile che si possino havere solo per dono della natura, sono stimati doni particolari, e singolar gratia del Cielo’. Cesare Ripa, Iconologia , revd edn (Padua, 1618), p. 212. 49 bppr, b3. For example, in the biography of Paolo Uccello, Vasari explains that ingenuity (ingegno) is activated when ‘the intellect wants to work, and when fury is kindled, because then one sees excellent and divine results, and marvellous conceits’ (l’ingegno vuol essere affaticato qua[n]do l’intelleto ha voglia di operare. E, che’l furore è acceso; perché allora si vede uscirne parti eccellenti, e divini; e concetti meravigliosi). Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti, 2 vols (Florence, 1550), vol. i (book 2), p. 269. 50 ‘non possum sine horrore contemplari monumenta tuarum manuum, quae vivent quamdiu ars aemulatrix naturae et humanitatem genius, in terris celebrabuntur.’ Dominicus Baudius to Peter Paul Rubens, Leiden, 11 April 1612. cdr, vol. ii, p. 52. 51 ‘Negat enim princeps ingenii et doctrinae Plato quemquam absque sacro furore Musarum unquam pepulisse fores Poëticas. Sed furor hic optandus est omnibus quibus cor sapit, et acetum acre est in pectore, ut cum ingeniosissimo vate gloriari possint: Est deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo. / Impetus hic sacrae semina mentis habet.’ Ibid. Baudius quotes Ovid, Fasti, vi, 5–6. He ends his letter with an ekphrastic poem in praise of Rubens’s The Honeysuckle Bower (c. 1609; illus. 72) – a literary gift, celebrating the ‘genius of love’, that he doubtless hoped the painter would reciprocate with a pictorial offering.

2 Vive l’Esprit 1 ‘Liefhebbers der Schilderyen’ were particular to the Antwerpian milieu: they had become a named category of member in the city’s Guild of St Luke in the first decade of the seventeenth century, used to admit connoisseurs such as Van der Geest to the ranks of practising artists. 2 Notably, in the initial design for the frontispiece to da Pietrasanta’s De symbolis heroicis, Rubens portrayed Ingenium with

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wings sprouting from the head. J. Richard Judson and Carl van de Velde, Book Illustrations and Title Pages, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, part xxi, 2 vols (Brussels and London, 1978), no. 69a. The motto alludes to the first half of a famous line from PseudoVirgil’s Elegiae in Maecenatem: ‘Vivitur ingenio, caetera mortis erunt’ (We live by wit, the rest belongs to death). In its original context, this line praises Maecenas, the patron of Virgil and Horace, in terms that pit the material against the literary arts: ‘books will conquer marble monuments: we live by ingenium, the rest belongs to death’. This is reversed in The Cabinet, in which works of visual art – the fruits of ingenium – apparently triumph. ‘Nec mirum in capite Ausonius, sed Belga cerebrum / Non temere in guava fertur habere manu’. Dominicus Lampsonius, entry for Jan van Amstel in Hendrik Hondius, Pictorum aliquot celebrium, praecipué Germaniae inferioris, effigies (The Hague, 1610), trans. Joanna Woodall and Stephanie Porras, in Picturing the Netherlandish Canon (London, 2015), at https://sites.courtauld.ac.uk/netherlandishcanon. See, for example, Antoine Sanders’s Neo-Latin eulogy, which casts Rubens in these terms, albeit through the example of Parrhasius rather than Apelles. Antoine Sanders to Peter Paul Rubens, Antwerp, September[?] 1621, in Codex diplomaticus Rubenianus, Max Rooses and Charles Ruelens, eds and trans., 6 vols (Antwerp, 1887–1909), vol. ii, p. 288. All subsequent citations of this series will be indicated by the abbreviation cdr. Examples of Rubens described as Apelles abound in his correspondence. See cdr, vol. i, p. 239; vol. ii, pp. 12–14, 22, 44, 56, 128, 364; vol. iii, pp. 170, 305; vol. v, pp. 302, 344–5, 361, 364–5, 394. ‘Roma dole: vicit nostro Rubenius aevo / Advatica latiam dexteritate manum.’ Antoine Sanders to Peter Paul Rubens, Antwerp, September[?] 1621. cdr, vol. ii, p. 288. The adjective advaticus was derived from Caesar’s reference to the Advatici (e.g. De bello gallico ii.4) of Gallia Belgica. I am grateful to Liz McGrath for this observation. Balthasar Moretus to Philip Rubens, 3 November 1600. cdr, vol. i, p. 1. The motto is a quotation from Juvenal, Satires, x, 356.

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9 As Rubens wrote to Chieppio: ‘The reason [for my departure] is that the day before yesterday I received very bad news concerning my mother’s health. She is so ill from a serious attack of asthma that, considering her advanced age of seventy-two years, one can hope for no other outcome than the end common to all humanity.’ Peter Paul Rubens to Annibale Chieppio, Rome, 28 October 1608, in The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens, ed. and trans. Ruth S. Magurn (Evanston, il, 1991), p. 45; cdr, vol. ii, p. 427. All subsequent citations of this text will be indicated by the abbreviation lppr. Maria Rubens died a few days before he arrived home. 10 Peter Paul Rubens to Johann Faber, Antwerp, 10 April 1609. lppr, p. 52–3; cdr, vol. vi, p. 324. 11 Letter patent of 23 September 1609, quoted (in translation) in Anne T. Woollett, ‘Two Celebrated Painters: The Collaborative Ventures of Rubens and Brueghel, ca. 1598–1625’, in Rubens and Brueghel: A Working Friendship, ed. Anne T. Woollett and Ariane van Suchtelen (Los Angeles, ca, 2006), pp. 1–41, at p. 24. 12 ‘son cabinet, qui estoit un des plus beaux de l’Europe’. Roger de Piles, Conversations sur la connoissance de la peinture, et sur le jugement qu’on doit faire des tableaux: Où par occasion il est parlé de la vie de Rubens, et de quelques-uns de ses plus beaux ouvrages (Paris, 1677), p. 217. 13 Peter Paul Rubens to Jacob de Bie, Antwerp, 11 May 1611. lppr, p. 55; cdr, vol. ii, p. 36. 14 ‘Le premier ouvrage public, dans lequel Rubens étala la supériorité de son génie dans la ville d’Anvers, après son voyage d’Italie . . . car cette riche composition se trouva contrastée d’une maniére nouvelle et frappante . . . Rubens venoit de la perfectionner par la vivacité des attitudes, l’expression des caractères, la fraîcheur du coloris, & la frappante distribution des lumières.’ Jean-FrançoisMarie Michel, Histoire de la vie de P. P. Rubens, chevalier & seigneur de Steen (Brussels, 1771), pp. 74–5. 15 ‘D[omino] cornelio vander geest virorvm optimo et amicorvm vetvstissimo svoqve ab adolescentia perpetvo favtori artisqve pictoriae svmmo dvm vixit admiratori monvmentvm hoc aeternae amicitiae qvod svperstiti destinarat defvncto l. m. d. d. [Libens/Lubens merito dedit dedicavit]. Ex Tabula Walburgensis Ecclesiae cuius

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ipse praecipuus Author et promotor fuit.’ I am grateful to Liz McGrath for providing the full transcription and translation, which corrects those provided in J. Richard Judson, The Passion of Christ, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, part vi (Turnhout, 2000), p. 108; and Julius Held, ‘Artis pictoriae amator: An Antwerp Art Patron and His Collection’, Gazette des beaux-arts, l (1957), pp. 53–84, at p. 54. Peter Paul Rubens to Pierre Dupuy, Antwerp, 28 May 1627. lppr, pp. 184–5; cdr, vol. iv, p. 265. See Gregory Martin, The Ceiling Decoration of the Banqueting Hall, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, part xv, 2 vols (London, 2005). See also Giordano’s allegory (illus. 13), in which Rubens is shown painting an Allegory of Peace. For the attributions, see Nils Büttner, Allegories and Subjects from Literature, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, part xii (London, 2018), no. 8. All subsequent citations of this text will be indicated by the abbreviation crlb, part xii. Peter Paul Rubens to Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Antwerp, 18 December 1634. lppr, p. 392; cdr, vol. vi, p. 81. The quote is from Tacitus, Historiae, ii, 47. De Piles, Conversations, ‘table des matieres’ and pp. 203–5. See Koenraad Jonckheere, Portraits after Existing Prototypes, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, part xix(4) (London, 2016), no. 52. All subsequent citations of this text will be indicated by the abbreviation crlb, part xix(4). ‘I have indeed painted the portrait of the Marquis Spinola from life, but up to now it has not been engraved on copper, due to other occupations that have prevented it.’ Peter Paul Rubens to Pierre Dupuy, Antwerp, 2 September 1627. lppr, pp. 199–200. cdr, vol. ii, p. 299. Hans Vlieghe, Portraits of Identified Sitters Painted in Antwerp, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, part xix(2) (London, 1987), no. 148. All subsequent citations of this text will be indicated by the abbreviation crlb, part xix(2). Bellori says of this visit, ‘He [Rubens] was visited by Sigismund, Prince of Poland, who went to see the Siege of Breda, [and] he portrayed him from the life’ (Visitato da Sigismondo Principe

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da Polonia, che andò à vedere l’assedio di Bredà, lo ritrasse al naturale). Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Le vite de pittori, scultori et architetti moderni (Rome, 1672), p. 245. For Rubens’s portraits, see crlb, part xix(2), nos. 113–14. It has been suggested that these portraits are the ones recorded in Rubens’s studio at his death, which would mean they were available to Van Haecht to copy. crlb, part xix(2), nos. 68 and 69. Apparently, during Albert and Isabella’s visit Van der Geest refused to give the painting to the archdukes, enduring a loss of favour as a result. See Franchoys Fickaert, Metamorphosis, ofte wonderbaere veranderingh’ ende leven vanden vermaerden Mr. Quinten Matsys, constigh grof-smit, ende schilder binnen Antwerpen (Antwerp, 1648). ‘Il meglior mio discepolo’. Peter Paul Rubens to Sir Dudley Carleton, Antwerp, 28 April 1618. cdr, vol. ii, p. 137; lppr, p. 61. Van Montfort is based on Van Dyck’s portrait (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), made about 1628, the date of The Cabinet of Cornelis van der Geest. Rubens painted Van Montfort wearing an elaborate fur-trimmed cloak (c. 1635, Courtauld Institute, London). Peter Paul Rubens to Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Antwerp, 3 August 1623. lppr, p. 91; cdr, vol. iii, p. 215. Peter Paul Rubens to Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Antwerp, 9 August 1629. lppr, p. 323; cdr, vol. v, p. 153. Peter Paul Rubens to Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Antwerp, 18 December 1634. lppr, p. 394; cdr, vol. vi, p. 83. The ‘mysterious clock’ was invented by the English Jesuit Francis Line, resident in Liège. See cdr, vol. vi, pp. 93–4. The other women in the picture are difficult to identify with any certainty, although they are clearly of high rank. The lady immediately behind the Infanta Isabella is comparable to Rubens’s Portrait of a Lady (c. 1625, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London). ‘selon que ce genie est bon, ou mauvais dans les peintres, nous disons que leurs ouvrages sont d’un bon ou d’un mauvais goust.’ De Piles, Conversations, p. 11. crlb, part xix(2), no. 157. ‘Il più bello et rara cosa che habbia fatta in vita mia’. Jan Brueghel the Elder (with Rubens as amanuensis), letter to Ercole Bianchi

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(art agent of Borromeo), Antwerp, 5 September 1621, in Giovanni Crivelli, ed., Giovanni Brueghel pittor fiammingo o sue lettere e quadretti esistenti presso l’Ambrosiana (Milan, 1868), p. 272. ‘Ductam artifice penicillo nostri Rubenii, Belgici Apellis, et corollis omnigenarum florum a se [Brueghel] adornatam’. Laurent Beyerlinck to Federico Borromeo, Antwerp, 1 April 1622. cdr, vol. ii, p. 364. Peter Paul Rubens to Sir Dudley Carleton, Antwerp, 28 April 1618. lppr, p. 60; cdr, vol. ii, p. 136. ‘pectore ebullit cruor, / Et parte ab omni qua pedes signant notam, / Trucesque flammas vibrat acies luminum/ Rapidae volcuris; hanc moveri, hanc tu putes / Quassare pennas; horror adstantes habet.’ Dominicus Baudius, Poematum, nova editio (Leiden, 1616), p. 578, quoted in Woollett, ‘Two Celebrated Painters’, pp. 172–3. Valerius Röver, handwritten inventory of his art collection, Universiteitsbibliothek, Amsterdam, inv. ii A 18, album 39, p. 194. Cited in Anne-Marie Logan in collaboration with Michiel C. Plomp, Peter Paul Rubens: The Drawings (New York, ny, 2005), p. 310. The amended drawing, based on Michiel Coxie’s The Death of Abel (after 1539; Museo del Prado, Madrid), may be after Adriaen Thomasz. Key. See Kristin Lohse Belkin, Copies and Adaptations from Renaissance and Later Artists: German and Netherlandish Artists, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, part xxvi(1), 2 vols (London, 2009), no. 113. ‘Quoy qu’il eût dessiné et copié beaucoup de choses en Italie & ailleurs . . . pour exciter sa veine & pour échauffer son genie.’ De Piles, Conversations, pp. 217–18. The painting in Van der Geest’s cabinet may be the version illustrated, a studio work now in the Detroit Institute of Arts. The version in the Tomlinson Hill Collection, New York, is probably Rubens’s original. See crlb, part xii, nos. 15 and 15a. As the Spanish painter and theorist Francesco Pacheco wrote in his Arte de la pintura (1649), Rubens ‘copied every work by Titian owned by the King [of Spain]’ (copio todas las cosas de Ticiano que tiene el Rei). Francesco Pacheco, Arte de la pintura (Seville, 1649), p. 100. Pacheco praised also the ‘grandeur, beauty and expanse of his wit, which shines forth in his pictures’ (la

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grandezza, hermosura, i caudal de su ingenio, que resplandece en sus pinturas). Ibid., p. 101. See Jeremy Wood, Copies and Adaptations from Renaissance and Later Artists: Italian Masters, ii. Titian and North Italian Art, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, part xxvi(2.2), 2 vols (London, 2010). Peter Paul Rubens to Sir Dudley Carleton, Antwerp, 28 April 1618. lppr, p. 61; cdr, vol. ii, p. 137. Franciscus Junius, On the Painting of the Ancients (London, 1638), p. 348. The treatise was first published in Latin in 1637, with the title De pictura veterum. Rubens seems to have been intrigued by some of the naturalphilosophical aspects of alchemy, but he was disdainful of its wilder claims. Notably, he dismissed the esotericism of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood as ‘nothing but a kind of alchemy, pretending to possess the Philosopher’s stone, but in reality a mere hoax.’ Peter Paul Rubens to Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Antwerp, 10 August 1623. lppr, p. 93; cdr, vol. iii, p. 229. ‘une des plus belles & des plus ingenieuses que l’on puisse imaginer’. De Piles, Conversations, p. 125. On the complicated attribution of this work, probably a sixteenthcentury copy that Rubens retouched, see Jeremy Wood, Copies and Adaptations from Renaissance and Later Artists: Italian Masters, iii. Artists Working in Central Italy and France, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, part xxvi(2.3), 2 vols (London, 2011), no. 165. ‘Forza non è altro che una virtù spirituale, una Potenza invisibile, la quale è create e infusa per accidental violenza da’ corpi sensibili nelli insensibili, dando a essi corpi similtudine di v[i]ta; la qu[a]l vita è di meravigliosa operazione. Costrigendo e stramutando di sito e di forma tutte le cose, corre con furia a sua disfazione e vassi diversificando mediante le cagioni.’ Leonardo da Vinci, Codex Atlanticus, quoted (in translation) in Martin Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man (Cambridge, 2006), p. 123. ‘Ora la cognitione di questo moto, è quella come dissi poco sopra, che nell’arte è riputata tanto difficile, & stimata come un dono divino. Imperoche per questa parte peculiarmente la pittura si paragona alla poesia. Che si come al Poeta fà di mestiero

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ch’insieme con l’eccellenza dell’ingegno habbia certo desiderio & una inclinatione di volontà onde sia mosso à poetare, il che chiamavano gl’antichi furor d’Apollo, & delle muse; cosi ancora al Pittore conviene, che con le altre parti che si gli ricercano habbi cognitione, & forza d’esprimere i moti principali quasi come ingenerate seco, & accresciuta con lui fino dalle fascie[.] . . . Mà i valenti, & eccellenti pittori non tanto aiutati dalla natura quanto consummati nell’arte, cercano di elegere il miglior gesto per qualunque effetto raffrenando la furia soprabundante naturale con la ragione deliberata c’hanno nell’idea, & con quello finiscono la figura con diletto, & piacere; facendo sempre in qualunque membro vedere non so che di furia conforme al moto principale.’ Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Trattato dell’arte de la pittura (Milan, 1584), pp. 108–9. My translation is adapted from David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton, nj, 1981), pp. 69–70.

3 Vital Spirits 1 ‘Nam tyrones ex iis nescio quid crudi, terminati, & difficilis molestaque anatomiae dum trahunt’. Roger de Piles, The Principles of Painting, trans. anon. (London, 1743), p. 87. 2 ‘Concludo tamen ad summam eius perfectionem esse necessariam earum intelligentiam, imo imbibitionem’. Ibid., p. 86. The English translation (presented side by side with the Latin) glosses rather than translates ‘imbibitionem’, but nevertheless conveys the sense of thorough digestion: ‘I conclude, however, that in order to attain the highest perfection in painting, it is necessary to understand antiques, nay, to be so thoroughly possessed of this knowledge, that it may diffuse itself everywhere.’ Ibid. 3 ‘Celui [esprit] de Rubens estoit universel, & l’étenduë de son génie le faisoit entrer tout entier dans les actions qu’il avoit à traiter; il se transformoit en autant de caractéres, & se faisot à nouveau sujet un nouvel homme.’ Roger de Piles, Dissertation sur les ouvrages des plus fameux peintres (Paris, 1681), p. 68. 4 ‘Causa praecipua qua nostri aevi homines different ab antiquis est ignavia & inexercitatum viviendi genus; quippe esse, bibere,

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nulla exercitandi corporis cura. Igitur prominet depressum ventris onus, semper assidua repletum ingluvie, crura enervia, & brachia otii sui conscia. Contra antiquitus omnes quotidie in palaestris & gymnasiis exercebantur violenter . . . Vide Mercurialem de arte gymnastica, quam varia laborum genera, quam difficilia, quam robusta habuerint.’ Peter Paul Rubens, De imitatione statuarum, quoted in de Piles, The Principles of Painting, p. 91. ‘Comme il se plaisoit extremement à l’ouvrage, il vivoit d’une maniere à pouvoir travailler facilement & sans incommoder sa santé; & c’est pour cela qu’il mangeoit fort peu a disner, de peu que le vapeur des viandes ne l’empeschast de s’appliquer . . . Il travailloit ainsi jusqu’à cinque heures du soir, qu’il montoit à cheval pour aller prendre l’air hors de la ville ou sur les remparts, ou il faisoit quelqu’autre chose pour faire delasser l’esprit. A son retour de la promenade, il trouvoit ordinairement en sa maison quelques-uns de ses amis qui venoient souper avec luy, & qui contribüoient au plaisir de la table. Il avoit neantmoins une grande aversion pour les excés du vin & de la bonne chere, aussi bien que du jeu.’ Roger de Piles, Conversations sur la connoissance de la peinture, et sur le jugement qu’on doit faire des tableaux: Où par occasion il est parlé de la vie de Rubens, et de quelques-uns de ses plus beaux ouvrages (Paris, 1677), pp. 214–15. Huarte de San Juan, The Examination of Mens Wits, trans. Richard Carew (London, 1594), p. 198. God-given manna was thought to prefigure the Eucharist. Nora De Poorter, The Eucharist Series, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, part ii, 2 vols (Brussels and London, 1978), no. 8b. Peter Paul Rubens to William Trumbull, Antwerp, 13 September 1621, in The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens, ed. and trans. Ruth S. Magurn (Evanston, il, 1991), p. 77. All subsequent references to this text will be indicated by the abbreviation lppr. Original in Max Rooses and Charles Ruelens, eds and trans., Codex diplomaticus Rubenianus, 6 vols (Antwerp, 1887–1909), vol. ii, pp. 286–7. All subsequent citations of this series will be indicated by the abbreviation cdr. For the Banqueting Hall ceiling, see Gregory Martin, The Ceiling Decoration of the Banqueting Hall, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, vol. xv, 2 vols (London, 2005).

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9 Peter Paul Rubens to Johann Faber, 14 January 1611. lppr, p. 53; cdr, vol. vi, p. 327. 10 Rubens told Faber to advise Elsheimer’s widow to send the picture to Antwerp, where ‘there are countless number of people interested in works of small size. I shall take particular care of it and serve as curator with all my ability.’ lppr, p. 54; cdr, vol. vi, p. 328. 11 Ibid. 12 William Sanderson, Graphice: The Use of the Pen and Pensil (London, 1658), p. 34. 13 Rubens certainly knew Plato’s dialogue (and illustrated it once), but he also owned Jacob Cats’s Silenus Alcibiadis, a book of emblems so titled because it treats of hidden meaning. De Bibliotheek van Pieter Pauwel Rubens: een reconstructie, compiled by Prosper Arents (Antwerp, 2001), e54. All subsequent citations of this text will be indicated by the abbreviation bppr. 14 Virgil, Eclogues, vi, 15. No painting of this subject by Rubens survives, although it may be connected to the Dream of Silenus (c. 1610/12) in Vienna. 15 The word vitula appears in Virgil’s third Eclogue (lines 77 and 109), and was glossed by Pontanus in the 1599 edition of Virgil’s works as a reference to Vitulina. We may note also that Eclogue vi includes the word gaudet, for example at line 29: ‘Nec tantum Phoebo gaudet Parnasia rupes’ (Not so does the rock of Parnassus rejoice in Phoebus). 16 ‘la pesante & lâche paresse, & l’insatiable gourmandise’. De Piles, Dissertation, p. 82. 17 The copy listed in Albert Rubens’s library sale catalogue is probably Rubens’s own, although the edition is not specified. bppr, p. 345. 18 Translation in Tine Meganck, ‘Rubens on the Human Figure: Theory, Practice and Metaphysics’, in Rubens, a Genius at Work: The Works of Peter Paul Rubens in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium Reconsidered, ed. Arnout Balis et al. (Brussels, 2007), pp. 52–64, at p. 54. Rubens quotes Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, i.10, 44: ‘So the size of the enclosed area will diminish the more you depart from the square shape.’ This comes in the context of Quintilian’s

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discussion of the relationship between geometrical proofs and proof in oratory. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, viii.3, 6. Both male and female forms, he wrote, derived from the triangle, which ‘forms the thorax in robust bodies’. Ibid. See the comments about his late wife, Isabella Brant, above, p. 33. In the entry for ‘viril’ in Furètiere’s Dictionnaire universel, we find ‘Judith fit un action virile en tuant Holofernes’. Antoine Furètiere, Dictionnaire universel (Paris, 1690), vol. iii, p. 827. ‘Cedite Romani ductores, cedite Graij; / Obstruit haec vestris femina luminibus. / Vestra fuit magna victoria parta virum vi, / Et cessit laudis pars bona militibus; / Barbarus unius dextra cadit Induperator, / Defendit patriae pernicem una manus.’ Original and translation in Hans Jakob Meier, ‘Peter Paul Rubens and His Brother Philip’s Poems on Samson and Judith’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, lxxvii (2014), pp. 241–5, at p. 242. Rubens claimed the picture of Achilles (or a similar work) was begun by Van Dyck and retouched extensively by himself. See Elizabeth McGrath, Gregory Martin, Fiona Healy, Bert Schepers, Carl van de Velde and Karolien De Clippel, Mythological Painting: Achilles to the Graces, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, part xi(1), 2 vols (London, 2016), vol. i, p. 74 and, for the uncertainty around the identification, p. 75. All subsequent citations of this text will be indicated by the abbreviation crlb, part xi(1). ‘Aeacides ferrum stringit atroce manu,/ Virtutem simul ostentans sexumque virilem.’ Original and translation in crlb, xi(1), vol. 1, p. 72. Relatedly, in his discussion of God’s fiery spirit, Lipsius noted that God appeared to Moses ‘in rubo ardento’. Justus Lipsius, Physiologia stoicorum (Antwerp, 1604), p. 14. Rubens probably bequeathed most of the medical books listed in Albert Rubens’s library sale catalogue to his son. See bppr, pp. 345–6. Spiritus was also a major topic in the writings of Marsilio Ficino, whose Opera is listed in Albert Rubens’s library and whose commentaries on Plato Rubens read: bppr, pp. 284, 366. Theories of calor innatus were to be found in the writings of Aristotle and Galen, through which they were widely disseminated.

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28 ‘Inest in semine omnium, quod facit ut foecunda sint semina, videlicet quod calor vocatur, idque non ignis, non talis aliqua facultas est, sed spiritus, qui in semine spumosoque corpore continetur, et natura quae in eo spiritu est, proportione respondens elemento stellarum.’ Original and translation in John M. Forrester and John Henry, eds and trans., Jean Fernel’s On the Hidden Causes of Things: Forms, Souls and Occult Diseases in Renaissance Medicine (Leiden and Boston, ma, 2005), pp. 254–7. 29 ‘Ipsa suos Iris, dedit ipsa Aurora colores. / Nox umbras, Titan lumina clara tibi / Das tu Rubenius vitam, mentemque figuris, / Et per te vinit lumen, si umbra color. / Quid te Rubeni nigro mors funere voluit: / Vivis, vita tuo picta colore rubet.’ Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Le vite de pittori, scultori et architetti moderni (Rome, 1672), p. 246. Translation in Emilie Bergmann, ‘Art Inscribed: El Greco’s Epitaph as Ekphrasis in Góngora and Paravicino’, Modern Language Notes, xc/2 (1975), pp. 154–66, at p. 165. 30 Huarte de San Juan, Examination, p. 213. 31 ‘le Siléne pour sa famille’. De Piles, Dissertation, p. 25. 32 De Piles praised the flesh tones of the drunken satyress and her children as ‘so true to life, that you can easily imagine that if you were to reach out and touch them, you would feel the warmth of their blood’ (La carnation de cette Satiresse & celle de ses enfants paroissent si veritables, qu’on s’imagine facilement que si l’on y portoit la main on sentiroit la chaleur du sang). De Piles, Conversations, p. 146. 33 Sanderson, Graphice, pp. 33–4. I have silently corrected the syntax. 34 Franciscus Junius, The Painting of the Ancients (London, 1638), pp. 17–18. The original is Franciscus Junius, De pictura veterum (Amsterdam, 1637), pp. 8–9. The English translation, published shortly after the Latin version that Rubens read, is Junius’s own. Junius and Rubens both use the Latin vestigia for ‘footsteps’. 35 Peter Paul Rubens to Franciscus Junius, Antwerp, 1 August 1637. lppr, p. 407; cdr, vol. vi, pp. 179–80. Magurn translates the phrase ‘magnis illis manibus’ as ‘those great spirits’. I have translated ‘genio’ as ‘inclination’ rather than her ‘talent’.

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36 Samuel van Hoogstraten, Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst [1678], quoted in Jeffrey M. Muller, ‘Rubens’s Theory and Practice of the Imitation of Art’, Art Bulletin, lxiv/2 (1982), p. 245. 37 See for example Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, i.3,1: ‘Ingenii signum in parvis praecipuum memoria est’ (In children, the principal sign of talent is memory). 38 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, x.2. 39 ‘L’Antique est un remede contre le mauvais Goust à la verité; mais s’il est pris tant crû, & sans qu’il soit assaisonné des beautez vivantes de la Nature, l’usage en sera dangereux.’ De Piles, Conversations, p. 42. 40 ‘l’esprit est le genie du peintre. Il paroit dans ses inventions, & dans l’air particulier qu’il donne aux figures, & aux autres objets qu’il represente, & selon que ce genie est bon, ou mauvais dans les peintres, nous disons que leurs ouvrages sont d’un bon ou d’un mauvais goust’ (wit is the genius of a painter. It is revealed in his inventions and in the particular air that he gives to his figures, and to other things that he represents, and depending on whether this genius is good or bad in painters, we say that their works are in good or bad taste). Ibid., p. 11. See also above, p. 107.

4 Genial Painting 1 Translation and original (Peiresc’s undated autograph copy, in French) in Marjon van der Muelen, Copies after the Antique, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, part xxiii(1), 3 vols (London, 1994), vol. i, p. 155. 2 ‘ut filiorum suorum postremum spiritum ore excipere liceret’ (that they should be allowed to catch on their lips the final breath of their sons). Cicero, Verrine Orations, v.45. 3 Bion, Epitaphium Adonidis, 14. ‘Spiritus ille tui dulcissimus influit oris, / Ipsa ego dulce tuo mulgebo ex corpore philtrum, / E totoque bibam mansurum pectore amorem’ (That sweetest breath of your mouth flows [into mine], / I shall milk the sweet philtre from your body, / and drink everlasting love from the whole of your breast); ‘In meumque e basiantis ore spiritus fluat. / Ebibemus, extrahemus quidquid in te amoris est’ (May the breath flow from the mouth

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of him who kisses me into mine. / Let me drink it down, and draw out whatever of love is in you). In Lodewijk Caspar Valckenaer, ed., Theocriti, Bionis et Mosschi Carmina Bucolica (Leiden, 1810), pp. 525 and 551. I am grateful to John de Boulton-Holland for his assistance with this translation. The ‘piercing’ topos extends even beyond Adonis’ death. Another painting by Rubens (Armand Hammer Collection, University of Southern California, Los Angeles) depicts the moment when Venus, running wildly through the woods, treads on and is wounded by a thorn. The drops of her blood turned a white rose red, while Adonis’ spilled blood gave rise to the anemone. ‘Een Spreeck-woordt isser, om nu voort te menen, / Als, waer handt waer seer, waer liefde waer ooghe.’ Karel van Mander, Schilderboek (Haarlem, 1604), fol. 24r. Original and translation in Walter S. Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander’s Schilder-Boeck (Chicago, il, and London, 1991), pp. 67 and 247. For Angelica and the Hermit, see Nils Büttner, Allegories and Subjects from Literature, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, part xii (London, 2018), no. 60. The section ‘De natura visus’ of Book 1 of Aguilon’s Opticorum libri sex includes discussion of intromission, species and spiritus. For Rubens’s copy, see De Bibliotheek van Pieter Pauwel Rubens: een reconstructie, compiled by Prosper Arents (Antwerp, 2001), d4. All subsequent citations of this text will be indicated by the abbreviation bppr. bppr, n8. Otto van Veen, Amorum emblemata (Antwerp, 1608), p. 150. Van Veen produced the Amorum emblemata (the engravings for which were cut by Cornelis Boel) in different, multilingual editions, with text in Latin, French, Dutch, Italian and English. ‘Ille decus rerum, cedit cui tota vetustas, / Et pariter Coae Parrhasiaeque manus, / Ausus inaccessos heroum ducere vultus, / Sacraque divina principis ora manu, / Cesserat ignoto (quis enim non cedit?) amori, / Et tenerae lusus virginitatis erat.’ Daniel Heinsius, In Pauli Rubenii praestantissimi pictoris, et Isabellae Brantiae, nuptias [3 October 1609], quoted in Max Rooses and Charles Ruelens, eds and trans., Codex diplomaticus Rubenianus,

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6 vols (Antwerp, 1887–1909), vol. ii, p. 12. All subsequent citations of this series will be indicated by the abbreviation cdr. Translation in Lisa Rosenthal, Gender, Politics, and Allegory in the Art of Rubens (Cambridge, 2005), p. 124. ‘Et vis ingenii mirabilis et Polygnoti / Sive et Apelleae manus aemula decantetur. / Jamque facem Deus, euge, facem lucere jugalem, / Ac laris interiora citato irrumpere gressu / Gestit, et apparet genialis lectus, arena Cypridis, innocuo jamjam devota cruori.’ Philip Rubens, Petro Paullo Rubenio fratri suo et Isabella Brantiae nuptiale foedus (5 November 1609). cdr, vol. ii, p. 22. The term ‘Cypris’ refers to Venus’ origins on the shores of Cyprus. The supposedly ‘harmless’ bloodshed (‘innocuo . . . cruori’) refers, in a singularly tasteless joke, to the evidence of female virginity ended upon the consummation of marriage. ‘In Sampsonem a femina superatem. Qui genus humanum superavit robore Sampson, / Femineis tandem vincitur insidiis. Sic a feminea vis Herculis arte doloque Occidit. o magnis sexus inique viris!’ In St Asterius / Philip Rubens, Homiliae Graece et Latine nunc primum editae Philippo Rubenio interprete. Eiusdem Rubeni Carmina, orationes, et epistolae selectiores: itemque Amicorum in vita functum Pietas (Antwerp, 1615), p. 128. Original and translation in Hans Jakob Meier, ‘Peter Paul Rubens and his Brother Philip’s Poems on Samson and Judith’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, lxxvii (2014), p. 241. Plato, Phaedrus, 246a–b. Peter Paul Rubens to Johann Faber, Antwerp, 10 April 1609, in The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens, ed. and trans. Ruth S. Magurn (Evanston, il, 1991), p. 52. All subsequent citations of this text will be indicated by the abbreviation lppr. cdr, vol. vi, p. 323. Juvenal’s Sixth Satire was a well-known invective against women. John Florio, A Worlde of Wordes; or, Most copious, and exact dictionarie in Italian and English (London, 1598), p. 146; Thomas Blount, Glossographia; or, A dictionary, interpreting all such hard words, whether Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Teutonick, Belgick, British or Saxon, as are now used in our refined English tongue (London, 1656), n.p. Peter Paul Rubens to Lucas Faydherbe, Antwerp, 9 May 1640. lppr, p. 415; cdr, vol. vi, p. 281. Faydherbe entered Rubens’s

RUBENS’S spirit

17 18

19

20

21

22

23 24 25

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studio aged nineteen but left (in order to marry) a few years later, settling in Mechelen. Sold Sotheby’s, New York, 29 January 2009, lot 43. Rubens owned at least two paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, listed in the ‘Specification’ of the sale of his collection in 1640. In one of his study drawings for the work (British Museum, London, inv. 1885,0509.50), Rubens drew a young woman with loosened hair (sometimes a bridal attribute) taking the hand of a dancing partner, although she is missing from the painting. ‘Lo spirito è quella vivezza, e fierezza di moto che deve havere la figura nello sguardo, e gesti per far beni l’officio suo secondo i soggetti.’ Federico Zuccaro, L’idea de pittori, scultori ed architettori, 2 vols (Turin, 1607), vol. ii, p. 14. ‘Imperoche la maggior gratia, & leggiadria che possa havere una figura è che mostri di moversi, il che chiamano i pittori furia de la figura. E per rappresentare questo moto non vi è forma più accommodata, che quella de la fiamma del foco’ (For the greatest grace and ease that a figure may have is that shown in its self-motion, which is called by painters the fury of the figure. And to represent this motion there is no better figure than the flame of fire). Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Trattato dell’arte de la pittura (Milan, 1584), book i, p. 23. ‘Verbum hercle hoc verum erit “sine Cerere et Libero friget Venus”’ (The proverb turns out to be true: ‘Without food and wine love is cold’). Terence, Eunuchus, 732. This motto is also alluded to in The Cabinet of Cornelis van der Geest (illus. 27), in which we see statues of Ceres and Bacchus, the latter looking directly at the wings of Ingenium above the entrance portal – surely a nod to the related adage ‘Vinum acuit ingenium’. Philostratus, Imagines, i.6, 6. This is a pentimento to the composition, which originally featured a different crown or a nimbus. Rubens discussed and illustrated this ‘Delphic’ tripod in a letter to Peiresc, who wrote a dissertation on it. See Peter Paul Rubens to Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Antwerp, 10 August 1630. cdr, vol. v, pp. 309–12.

References

26 bppr, no. e31. 27 ‘Rite deam colitis, Latiae matresque nurusque / et vos, quis vittae longaque vestis abest. / aurea marmoreo redimicula demite collo, / demite divitias: tota lavanda dea est. / aurea siccato redimicula reddite collo: / nunc alii flores, nunc nova danda rosa est. / vos quoque sub viridi myrto iubet ipsa lavari: / causaque, cur iubeat (discite!), certa subest. / litore siccabat rorantes nuda capillos: / viderunt satyri, turba proterva, deam. / sensit et opposita texit sua corpora myrto: / tuta fuit facto vosque referre iubet. / discite nunc, quare Fortunae tura Virili / detis eo, calida qui locus umet aqua. / accipit ille locus posito velamine cunctas / et vitium nudi corporis omne videt; / ut tegat hoc celetque viros, Fortuna Virilis / praestat et hoc parvo ture rogata facit. / nec pigeat tritum niveo cum lacte papaver / sumere et expressis mella liquata favis; / cum primum cupido Venus est deducta marito, / hoc bibit: ex illo tempore nupta fuit.’ Ovid, Fasti, iv, 133–54. 28 Peter Paul Rubens to Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Antwerp, 18 December 1634. lppr, p. 393; cdr, vol. vi, p. 82. 29 ‘Rubens l’a execute avec promptitude, avec science, & avec liberté comme le maistre et le souverain de son art. Son genie mesme, tout élevé qu’il est, luy a permis de descendre souvent jusques aux minuties qui rendent de prés l’imitation plus parfaite . . . parfaitement donner à ses couleurs leurs véritable place, il les employoit avec plus de promptitude & de liberté, & leurs laissoit par ce moyen tout l’éclat don’t ells ont besoin pour imiter parfaitement les beautez vivantes de la nature.’ Roger de Piles, Dissertation sur les ouvrages des plus fameux peintres (Paris, 1681), pp. 37–8.

Conclusion: Genius Loci 1 Peter Paul Rubens to Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Steen, 4 September 1636, in The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens, ed. and trans. Ruth S. Magurn (Evanston, il, 1991), p. 404. All subsequent citations of this volume will be indicated by the abbreviation lppr. Original in Max Rooses and Charles Ruelens, eds and trans., Codex diplomaticus Rubenianus, 6 vols (Antwerp, 1887–1909), vol. vi, p. 164.

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2 3 4

5 6

7

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All subsequent citations of this series will be indicated by the abbreviation cdr. Elisha Coles, An English Dictionary (London, 1676), n.p. ‘Nunc locus arvorum ingeniis, quae robora cuique, / quis color et quae sit rebus natura ferendis’. Virgil, Georgics, ii, 177–8. ‘Sic deinde effatus frondenti tempora ramo / implicat et geniumque loci primamque deorum / Tellurem Nymphasque et adhuc ignota precatur / flumina, tum Noctem Noctisque orientia signa / Idaeumque Iovem Phrygiamque ex ordine matrem / invocat, et duplicis caeloque Ereboque parentis.’ Virgil, Aeneid, vii, 135–40. De Bibliotheek van Pieter Pauwel Rubens: een reconstructie, compiled by Prosper Arents (Antwerp, 2001), e45. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Johann Peter Eckermann, 18 April 1827, in Goethe on Art, ed. and trans. John Gage (London, 1980), p. 205. Peter Paul Rubens to William Trumbull, Antwerp, 13 September 1621, lppr, p. 77; cdr, vol. ii, pp. 286–7.

further reading

Introduction Burckhardt, Jacob, Recollections of Rubens, ed. Horst Gerson, trans. Mary Hottinger (London, 1950) Büttner, Nils, Pietro Pauolo Rubens: Eine Biografie (Regensburg, 2015) Jaffé, David, and Elizabeth McGrath, Rubens: A Master in the Making (London, 2005) Marr, Alexander, Raphaële Garrod, José Ramón Marcaida and Richard J. Oosterhoff, Logodaedalus: Word Histories of Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe (Pittsburgh, pa, 2019) Müller Hofstede, Justus, ‘Rubens und das Constantia-Ideal: Das Selbstbildnis von 1623’, in Der Künstler über sich in seinem Werk, ed. Matthias Winner (Rome, 1989), pp. 365–405 Warnke, Martin, Kommentare zu Rubens (Berlin, 1965)

1 Holy Spirit Esposito, Teresa, ‘Ignis artificiosus: Images of God and the Universe in Rubens’s Depiction of Antique Shields’, Early Modern Low Countries, ii/2 (2018), pp. 244–77 Göttler, Christine, ‘Actio in Peter Paul Rubens’ Hochaltarbildern für die Jesuitenkirche in Antwerpen’, in Barocke Inszenierung: Der Moment in dauerhafter Erscheinung, ed. Josef Imorde, Klaus Krüger and Tristan Weddigen (Emsdetten and Zurich, 1999), pp. 24–45 McGrath, Elizabeth, ‘Rubens, the Gonzaga, and the “Adoration of the Trinity”’, in Splendours of the Gonzaga, ed. David Chambers and John Martineau (London, 1981), pp. 214–21

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Sauerländer, Willibald, The Catholic Rubens: Saints and Martyrs, trans. David Dollenmayer (Los Angeles, ca, 2014) Zur Mühlen, Ilse von, Bild und Vision: Peter Paul Rubens under der ‘Pinsel Gottes’ (Frankfurt, 1998)

2 Vive l’Esprit Balis, Arnout, ‘Rubens and His Studio: Defining the Problem’, in Rubens, a Genius at Work: The Works of Peter Paul Rubens in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium Reconsidered, ed. Arnout Balis et al. (Brussels, 2007), pp. 30–51 Belkin, Kristin Lohse, and Fiona Healy, A House of Art: Rubens as Collector (Schoten, 2004) Filipczak, Zirka Zaremba, Picturing Art in Antwerp, 1550–1700 (Princeton, nj, 1987) Marr, Alexander, ‘Ingenuity and Discernment in The Cabinet of Cornelis van der Geest (1628)’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, lxix (2019), pp. 106–45 Woollett, Anne T., and Ariane van Suchtelen, eds, Rubens and Brueghel: A Working Friendship (Los Angeles, ca, 2006)

3 Vital Spirits Büttner, Nils, ‘Peter Paul Rubens und Franciscus Junius: Aemulatio in Praxis und Theorie’, in Aemulatio: Kulturen des Wettstreits in Text und Bild (1450–1620), ed. Jan-Dirk Müller et al. (Berlin, 2011), pp. 319–67 Davis, Lucy Jane, ‘A Gift from Nature: Rubens’ Bacchus and Artistic Creativity’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, lv (2004), pp. 226–43 Gruber, Gerlinde, Sabine Haag, Stefan Eppelmann and Jochen Sander, eds, Rubens: The Power of Transformation (Munich, 2017) Lusheck, Catherine H., Rubens and the Eloquence of Drawing (London, 2017) Van Wyhe, Cordula, ed., Rubens and the Human Body (Turnhout, 2018)

4 Genial Painting Alpers, Svetlana, The Making of Rubens (New Haven, ct, and London, 1995)

243

Further Reading

Chapman, H. Perry, ‘Rubens, Rembrandt, and the Spousal Model/ Muse’, in Ut pictura amor: The Reflexive Imagery of Love in Artistic Theory and Practice, 1500–1700, ed. Walter S. Melion, Michael Zell and Joanna Woodall (Leiden, 2007), pp. 439–82 Heinen, Ulrich, ‘“Con ogni fervore”: Love and Lust in Rubens’s Library, Life and Work’, in Munuscula Amicorum: Contributions on Rubens and His Colleagues in Honour of Hans Vlieghe, ed. Katlijne van der Stighelen (Turnhout, 2006), pp. 79–101 McGrath, Elizabeth, ‘Rubens and Ovid’, in The Afterlife of Ovid, ed. Peter Mack and John North (London, 2015), pp. 159–79 Weststeijn, Thijs, ‘“Painting’s Enchanting Posion”: Artistic Efficacy and the Transfer of Spirits’, in Spirits Unseen: The Representation of Subtle Bodies in Early Modern European Culture, ed. Christine Göttler and Wolfgang Neuber (Leiden, 2008), pp. 141–78

Conclusion: Genius Loci Brown, Christopher, Rubens’s Landscapes (London, 1996) Marr, Alexander, ‘Locus genii: Placing Genius in Roger de Piles’s Criticism’, in The Places of Early Modern Criticism, ed. Gavin Alexander, Emma Gilby and Alexander Marr (Oxford, 2021) Vergara, Lisa, Rubens and the Poetics of Landscape (New Haven, ct, and London, 1982)

acknowledgements

In researching and writing this book I have incurred many debts, which I am pleased to acknowledge here. I received support and bonne chère (Rubens would not have approved) from my colleagues on the ercfunded project Genius before Romanticism: Ingenuity in Early Modern Art and Science, hosted by crassh: Marta Cacho Casal, Tim Chesters, Tom Colville, Irene Galandra Cooper, Raphaële Garrod, José Ramón Marcaida, Richard Oosterhoff, Andrés Vélez Posada and Lorraine de la Verpillière. The staff of Cambridge’s Faculty of Architecture and History of Art Library – Sophie Fletcher, Laura Moss and Tanya Zhimbiev – generously indulged my requests to borrow extensively and for far too long. In 2018 I saw the superb exhibitions Rubens: The Power of Transformation (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; Städel Museum, Frankfurt) and Rubens: Painter of Sketches (Museo del Prado, Madrid; Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam), both of which shaped my thinking about Rubens. I thank the curators Jochen Sander, Gerlinde Gruber and Stefan Weppelman (Vienna and Frankfurt), Friso Lammertje and Alejandro Vergara (Madrid and Rotterdam), for their labours. I am grateful to John de Boulton-Holland, Nils Büttner, Raphaële Garrod, Fiona Healy, Koenraad Jonckheere, Eric Jorink, Tine Meganck, Richard Oosterhoff, Bart Ramakers, Paul Taylor, Joanna Woodall and Carrie Vout, all of whom answered questions or shared research material. Anneke de Bont assisted me at a critical moment during editing, for which I am very thankful. My editors at Reaktion Books, François Quiviger and Michael Leaman, gave helpful feedback on a draft manuscript, as did Paul Binski, Tim Chesters, Henning Reelsbo and José Ramón Marcaida. Christine Göttler, Julian Luxford and Elizabeth

245

Acknowledgements

McGrath kindly read the entire book assiduously, offering invaluable advice and saving me from numerous errors. In different ways, their exemplary work on Rubens has decisively informed my own. Needless to say, any errors that remain are my own. I am grateful to Alexandru Ciobanu, Amy Salter and their colleagues at Reaktion Books for all their help in producing the book. Christine Slottved Kimbriel, Elizabeth Marr and Poppy Marr have patiently listened to me talk about Rubens when they had better things to do. As ever, I could not have written this book without their love and encouragement. The research leading to these findings has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (fp7/2007-2013)/erc grant agreement no. 617391.

photo acknowledgements

The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the below sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it. Some locations of artworks are also given below, in the interest of brevity: Photo © Alinari Archives/Corbis via Getty Images: 54; Alte Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich: 37 (photo akg-images), 44, 51, 53, 72; The British Museum, London: 29, 56; Chiesa del Gesù e dei Santi Ambrogio e Andrea, Genova/photo Realy Easy Star/Toni Spagone via Alamy Stock Photo: 25; Cleveland Museum of Art, oh: 13; from Jan David, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp, 1601), photos courtesy Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles: 18, 19; photo De Agostini/G. Dagli Orti via Getty Images: 46; from Salomon de Caus, Les Raisons des forces mouvantes avec diverses machines tant utiles que plaisantes (Frankfurt, 1615), photo courtesy Smithsonian Libraries, Washington, dc: 87; Detroit Institute of Arts, mi: 42; The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge: 40, 55; Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence: 8, 86; Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden: 59, 60; Gemäldegalerie der Staatliche Museen zu Berlin: 80; from Willem Hesius, Emblemata sacra de fide, spe, charitate (Antwerp, 1636), photo courtesy Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles: 20; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem: 65; Koninklijke Bibliotheek van België (kbr), Brussels: 21; Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België, Brussels: 43; Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten (kmska), Antwerp: 23, 77; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna: 11, 16, 34, 35, 62, 64, 68, 78, 79; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: 2; Musée du Louvre, Paris: 38, 45, 70, 71, 73, 80; Musei di Strada Nuova, Genova: 61; Museo del Prado, Madrid: 6, 9, 67, 74; The National Gallery, London:

247

Photo Acknowledgements

30, 31, 82, 83; National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc: 63; Onze-LieveVrouwekathedraal, Antwerp: 17; Palazzo Ducale, Mantua: 12; Philadelphia Museum of Art, pa: 39; from Roger de Piles, Cours de peinture par principes (Paris, 1708), photo courtesy Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles: 4; private collection: 32, 85; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam: 5, 14, 58, 75, 76, 81; Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth ii 2021: 7, 36, 52; Rubenshuis, Antwerp: 3, 27, 28, 33; The Samuel Courtauld Trust/ Bridgeman Images: 57; Santa Maria in Vallicella, Rome: 15; from Floris van Schoonhoven, Emblemata, Partim Moralia partim etiam Civilia (Gouda, 1618), photo courtesy Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles: 49; Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich: 50; Staatsgalerie Neuburg, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Neuburg an der Donau: 26; The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg: 47, 48, 66, 84; from Otto van Veen, Amorum Emblemata (Antwerp, 1608), photo courtesy Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles: 69; from Otto van Veen, Physicae et theologicae conclusiones (Orsellis, 1621), photo courtesy Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel: 22; Victoria and Albert Museum, London: 41; Ville de Grenoble/Musée de Grenoble – J. L. Lacroix: 1, 10; Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne: 24.

index

Illustration numbers are indicated by italics. Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, Paris 21 Accademia dei Lincei, Rome 75 Adonis 161–7, 63, 65–6 d’Aguilon, François (Aguilonius) 166 Albert vii, Archduke of Austria 11, 12, 35, 84, 91, 96, 101, 102, 177, 27, 34 Alciati, Andrea 136 Alessandri, Alessandro 191 amor (love) 36, 92, 164–7, 170–82, 187–98 see also creative gifts and influences Antwerp Guild of St Luke 10 Twelve Years Truce 90–91, 93, 95, 96 Ariosto, Ludovico 167 Aristotle 54, 68, 146 Bacchus 32, 129, 131, 137, 149, 150, 159–60, 185–89, 48, 61 Baronio, Cesare 58 Baudius, Dominicus 81–2, 110

Bellori, Giovanni Pietro 20–21, 119, 122, 147, 199 Beyerlinck, Laurent 108–10 Bion 164 Bloemaert, Abraham, Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus 187, 188, 76 Blount, Thomas 179 Borromeo, Cardinal Federico 108 Brant, Isabella 11, 13, 29, 33, 91–2, 173, 177–9, 72 Brant, Jan 11, 92, 177–8 Bruegel the Elder, Pieter 37, 182, 203 Brueghel the Elder, Jan 101, 108; The Sense of Sight (Rubens and Brueghel the Elder) 166–7, 168–9, 67; Virgin and Child in a Garland of Flowers (Rubens and Brueghel the Elder) 108–10, 38 Brueghel the Younger, Pieter, St George’s Kermis 182 Burckhardt, Jacob 7 Centaur Tamed by Cupid (Anon) 126, 128, 46

249

Cardano, Girolamo 145 Carleton, Dudley 110, 116 Carracci, Annibale, Venus and a Satyr 167 Carracci, Agostino, Venus and a Satyr (after Annibale Carracci) 167 Charles i, king of England 12, 28, 134 Chieppio, Annibale 46–7, 55–6 Cicero 142, 163 Coles, Elisha 202 collaborative work 11, 34–5, 52, 89–90, 107–8, 115–16; Abundance (Three Nymphs with a Cornucopia) (Rubens, Snyders and de Vos) 97–8; Achilles Discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes (Rubens, begun by ?Van Dyck) 145; Homage to Ceres (Rubens and Snyders) 186–8; Prometheus Bound (Rubens and Snyders) 110–11, 112, 39; Pythagoras Advocating Vegetarianism (Rubens and Snyders) 133; The Sense of Sight (Rubens and Brueghel the Elder) 166–7, 168–9, 67; Virgin and Child in a Garland of Flowers (Rubens and Brueghel the Elder) 108–10, 38 Cordier, Balthasar 68 Council of Trent 45, 50 Counter-Reformation religion 11, 33, 43, 45, 56, 62, 85

Index

creative gifts and influences see fire, creative; esprit; force of movement; fury; genius; humours; imagination; imitation; ingenuity; love (amor); spirito, spirits; spiritus; temperaments David, Jan 64–5, 66, 18–19 De Bie, Jacob 92 De Caus, Salomon 205–6, 207, 97 De Passe the Elder, Crispijn, Genius 185–6, 75 De Piles, Roger 23, 31, 37, 183, 198, 208; Conversations 21–3, 30–31, 43, 62, 92, 98, 106–7, 112, 119, 132–3, 157; Cours de peinture par principes 23, 24, 4; Dissertation sur les ouvrages des plus fameux peintres 131, 139, 151, 198, 199 De Vos, Paul, Abundance (Three Nymphs with a Cornucopia) (Rubens, Snyders and de Vos) 97–8 Del Monte, Deodaat 46 design versus colour debate 21–2 Drebbel, Cornelis, perpetual motion machine 101–5 drinking/drunkenness 30, 32, 131–2, 137–9, 182–3 see also Rubens, works: Bacchus on a Barrel; Drunken Hercules; Drunken Silenus; Mars, Venus and Bacchus Dupuy, Pierre 29

Rubens’s spirit

Elsheimer, Adam 134–7; The Artist in Despair 135–6, 50; The Mocking of Ceres 88–9; Rest on the Flight into Egypt 134 esprit 18, 22, 23, 84, 90, 101, 131, 133, 157 see also ingenuity Faber, Johann 75, 90–91, 134–5, 177 fantasy see imagination Faydherbe, Lucas, 182 femininity, attitude to 33, 62, 132, 141–5, 159–60, 174, 176 ‘Rubenesque’ terminology 39 see also masculinity and virility Fernel, Jean 145–6 Ficino, Marsilio 81 fire, creative 76–81, 111–12 see also creative gifts and influences Florio, John 179 force of movement 119–25 see also creative gifts and influences; fury Fourment, Helena 13, 39, 158, 159, 179–82, 195–7, 199, 201, 62, 79–80 Francken the Younger, Frans, A Banquet at Burgomaster Rockox’s House 106, 107, 37 fury (furia, furor) 27–8, 81–2, 119–25, 132, 183–5 see also creative gifts and influences

250

geest see ingenuity gender roles see femininity; masculinity génie 18, 22, 106, 131, 157 see also genius genius 17–23, 27–33, 47, 93–4, 131–2, 188, 198–9 and marriage 179 and Rubens’s name, meaning of 146–7 and taste 106–7, 157 see also creative gifts and influences; heat and human robustness; ingenuity genius loci (spirit of the place) 203–8 Gevaerts, Jan Gaspar 13 Giordano, Luca, Rubens Painting ‘The Allegory of Peace’ 27–8, 6 Giorgione, 63 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 7, 18, 39, 207–8 Gonzaga, Vincenzo, Duke of Mantua 10, 46–7, 50, 52, 82, 12 heat and human robustness 145–8, 157, 177 see also genius; ingenuity; spiritus Heinsius, Daniel 173 Henry iv, king of France 171–2, 70 Hercules 140–2, 148–50, 174–6, 179, 57, 60, 71 Herri met de Bles 203; An Extensive Rocky Landscape . . . 205, 206, 85

251

Hesius, Willem 66, 67, 20 Het Steen 13, 200, 201–3, 82 Holbein, Hans the Younger, The Dance of Death (copied by Rubens) 9 Huarte de San Juan, Juan 42, 58, 59, 80, 133, 147–8 humours 35, 133, 146 see also temperaments imagination 59, 115, 147–8, 152–9, 183 see also creative gifts and influences imitation 35, 114–15, 125, 130, 152, 152–9, 198, 199 De imitatione statuarum 32, 36, 127–8, 137, 157 ingegno see ingenuity ingenium see ingenuity ingenuity 16, 17–18, 23–7, 34–8, 54, 84–90, 119–25, 136, 184–5, 198 and artistic freedom 21, 28, 37, 199, 202 in De imitatione statuarum 32 and force of movement 119–25 and genius loci (spirit of the place) 203–8 and imagination 155–9 and marriage 173–4 perpetual motion machine (Drebbel) 101–5 Rubenized (retouched) artworks 112–15, 40–42 and social freedom 202–3

Index

and tranquillity 97–8 see also creative gifts and influences; esprit; genius; heat and human robustness; spiritus Isabella, Infanta of Spain 11, 12, 35, 91, 96, 101, 102, 103, 177, 35 Jesuits 43–5, 47, 52, 54, 65–6, 68, 72–3, 77, 166 Junius, Franciscus 13, 18, 116–17, 153–5 landscape painting 37–8, 200–208 Leonardo da Vinci, The Battle of Anghiari 119–22, 123 light, in Catholic theology 60–62 Lipsius, Justus 29, 75–7, 146, 8, 24 Lomazzo, Gian Paolo 123–4, 152, 183–4 London, Whitehall Banqueting Hall ceiling 12, 134 love (amor) 36, 92, 164–7, 170–82, 187–98 see also creative gifts and influences masculinity and virility 32, 35, 132, 139–42, 145–50 see also femininity, attitude to Matsys, Quinten 88, 119; The Madonna of the Cherries 101; Paracelsus 117; Portrait of a Scholar 117 de’ Medici, Marie 11, 12, 21, 96, 171–3, 70

Rubens’s spirit

Mellan, Claude, Allegory of the Human Soul (after Vouet) 23 Mercuriale, Girolamo 139 Michelangelo 10, 21, 131 Moretus, Balthasar 23–5 Neostoicism 28–9, 75–6, 132–3 Nero 98–9, 124, 27, 32 Nicholas of Cusa 58–9 Ovid 163, 164–5, 191–4 Patinir, Joachim 203 Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de 12, 16–17, 28, 31–2, 98, 104–5, 195–6, 198–9, 201 Philostratus the Elder 190 Pietrasanta, Silvestro da 23, 25, 105, 5 Plato 81–2, 137, 176 Poussin, Nicolas 21 preparatory studies 21, 142, 56 puer mingens 159, 62 Quintilian 141, 156–7 Raimondi, Marcantonio, A Bacchanal 197, 198, 81 Raphael 10, 21, 46, 89, 131 Reynolds, Joshua 18, 19–20 Rockox, Nicolaas 92, 93 A Banquet at Burgomaster Rockox’s House (Francken) 106, 107, 37 Röver, Valerius 112 ‘Rubenesque’ terminology 39 Rubenized (retouched) artworks 112–15, 40–42

252

Rubens, Jan 8–9, 33 Rubens, Maria (née Pijpelinckx) 8–9, 11, 18, 33, 90 Rubens, Peter Paul collaborative work see collaborative work diplomatic career 7, 12, 25–6, 90, 96 early life 8–10 health 13, 132–4, 202 homes 11, 13, 92, 93, 200, 201–3, 29, 82 knighthood 12, 98 Palazzi di Genova (book) 46 religious faith 33–4, 43–5 Theoretical Notebook 31, 68, 117, 123, 132, 140, 197 De imitatione statuarum 32, 36, 127–8, 137, 157 works: Abundance (Three Nymphs with a Cornucopia) (Rubens, Snyders and de Vos) 97–8; Achilles Discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes (Rubens, begun by ?Van Dyck) 145; Adonis Departing from Venus 165, 167, 66; Adoration of the Magi 93, 106; Albert vii, Archduke of Austria 101, 102, 34; Album amicorum entry (Van Valckenisse) 68, 69, 21; Angelica and the Hermit 167–70, 68; The Annunciation 34, 60–62, 16; Bacchanal 165; Bacchus on a Barrel 129–32, 159–60, 186, 48; The Baptism

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Index

of Christ 47, 77; The Battle of the Amazons 35, 119–23, 124, 44; The Battle of Anghiari (after Leonardo) 119–22, 123, 45; The Birth of Venus 106; Christ on the Cross 73, 74, 23; Christ in the House of Simon the Pharisee 62–3; The Circumcision 77, 78, 82, 25; The Coronation of a Hero 32–3, 148–9, 59; The Dance of Death (after Holbein) 9; The Dance of the Villagers 183–5, 74; The Death of Adonis 163, 166, 65; The Descent from the Cross 163; The Descent of the Holy Spirit 77–80, 26; Drunken Hercules 149–50, 60; Drunken Silenus 136, 137, 151– 2, 186, 51; Ecce Homo 128, 47; The Fall of the Damned 138, 139, 53; Farnese Hercules (study) 140–41, 143, 57; The Feast of Venus 13, 36, 189–98, 78–9; Figure of a Nude Man Lying on the Ground (Anon, retouched by Rubens) 112, 113, 40; The Four Philosophers 29, 31, 98, 8; God the Father (Anon, retouched by Rubens) 112, 114, 41; Judith Beheading Holofernes (The Great Judith) 142–5, 58; Helena Fourment in a Fur (Het Pelsken) 158, 159, 62; Hercules and Omphale 174–7, 179, 71; The Holy Trinity Adored by the

Duke of Mantua and His Family (Gonzaga Adoration) 34, 47– 50, 52, 60, 66–8, 82, 12; Homage to Ceres (Rubens and Snyders) 186–8; The Incredulity of St Thomas with Donors (Rockox Triptych) 106; Isabella, Infanta of Spain 101, 103, 35; The Judgement of Paris 195; Kermis 36–7, 180–81, 182–3, 186, 191, 73; A Knight Accompanied by Two Pages 113– 15, 42; The Labours of Hercules 140, 142, 56; The Lamentation 163, 165, 64; Landscape with a Cart Crossing a Ford (La Charrette Embourbée) 204–5, 206, 84; A Landscape with a Shepherd and His Flock 200, 83; The Last Judgement 116; Lion Hunt 28; Lot and His Daughters 167; The Madonna della Vallicella Adored by Angels 56, 57, 60, 15; Marie de’ Medici cycle 11, 12, 21, 96, 171–3, 70; Minerva Protects Pax from Mars (Peace and War) 11, 96–7, 152, 31 (see also Giordano, Luca); The Miracles of Francis Xavier 45; The Miracles of St Ignatius of Loyola 44, 45, 52–4, 73, 11; Paracelsus (after Matsys) 117–19, 43; Portrait of a Man, Possibly a Watchmaker 14, 15–16, 2; Prometheus Bound (Rubens and Snyders)

Rubens’s spirit

110–11, 112, 39; Pythagoras Advocating Vegetarianism (Rubens and Snyders) 133; The Raising of the Cross 11, 62, 63, 93–5, 119, 17; The Return of the Farm Workers from the Fields 205, 206–8, 86; St Cecilia Playing the Virginals 195, 197, 80; St Gregory the Great Surrounded by Other Saints 6, 34, 40–43, 45, 50, 54–60, 61–2, 82, 85, 94, 1, 10; Samson and Delilah 106, 107, 174, 37; Self-portrait (1622–4) 28–9, 147, 7; Self-portrait (1630) 17, 19, 3; Self-portrait with Friends (The Mantuan Friendship Portrait) 75–6, 24; Self-portrait with Isabella Brant (The Honeysuckle Bower) 92, 178–9, 72; Seneca and Nero 98–9, 32; The Sense of Sight (Rubens and Brueghel the Elder) 166–7, 168–9, 67; Shivering Venus 188–9, 77; Silenus and Aegle 137–9, 149, 52; Susanna and the Elders 167; The Three Graces 13, 39, 40, 9; Title page to De symbolis heroicis, 23, 5; The Transfiguration 47; Triumph of the Eucharist tapestry series 133; Two Men Wrestling 139, 141, 55; Venus Lamenting Adonis 174; Venus Mourning Adonis 161–5, 63; Virgin and Child in a Garland of Flowers (Rubens

254

and Brueghel the Elder) 108–10, 38; Virgin and Child with Saints 13; Whitehall Banqueting Hall ceiling 12, 134 wives see Brant, Isabella; Fourment, Helena Rubens, Philip (brother of R.) 17, 23–5, 29, 75–6, 173–4, 177, 196, 8, 24 Rubens, Philip (nephew of R.) 18, 30, 43, 130 sacred geometry 68–73 Saenredam, Jan, Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus (after Bloemaert) 187, 188, 76 Sanderson, William 26–7, 28, 137, 152–3 Seneca 29, 76, 98–9, 124, 149, 156, 8, 27, 32 Sigismund of Poland, Prince Władysław 100–101, 27 Silenus 32, 137–9, 149, 151, 186, 51, 52 Snyders, Frans 88, 107; Abundance (Three Nymphs with a Cornucopia) (Rubens, Snyders and de Vos) 97–8; Homage to Ceres (Rubens and Snyders) 186–8; Monkeys Gorging on Fruit 106; Prometheus Bound (Rubens and Snyders) 110–11, 112, 39; Pythagoras Advocating Vegetarianism (Rubens and Snyders) 133 species 71, 170–71

255

Sperling, Otto 26, 27, 28 Spinola, Ambrogio 99, 106, 27 spirito 18, 21, 183 spiritus 18, 34, 42–3, 45, 52, 58, 60–62, 73, 76, 80–83, 105, 145, 159, 164–5, 171, 179, 183, 199 spiritus mundi 76 spirits (animal, natural, vital) see spiritus Strabo 154, 155 taste, and genius 106–7, 157 temperaments 28, 34, 132–4, 157 Terence 187 Tintoretto 10, 46 Titian 10, 12, 21, 46, 63, 131, 198; La Gloria 47; Francesco Maria i della Rovere 113–14; Vendramin Family Adoring the Cross 47; The Worship of Venus 190, 191 Trumbull, William 134 Turin Shroud 50–52 Van Balen, Hendrik 107; Fruit Harvest 119; The Holy Trinity 51, 52, 107, 13 Van der Geest, Cornelis 94, 95, 119, 27, 30 Van Dyck, Anthony 11, 99, 101, 27; Achilles Discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes (Rubens, begun by ?Van Dyck) 116; Portrait of Cornelis van der Geest 94, 95, 30 portrayed by Rubens 104, 36

Index

Van Haecht the Younger, Willem, The Cabinet of Cornelis van der Geest 34, 85–9, 95– 108, 113, 117–19, 124, 136, 27–8, 33 Van Hoogstraten, Samuel 156 Van Mander, Karel 18, 152, 165 Van Montfort, Jan 101, 105, 27 Van Noort, Adam 9, 18; Christ in the House of Mary and Martha 85 Van Valckenisse, Filips 68, 69, 21 Van Veen, Otto 9–10; Amorum emblemata 170–71, 69; Conclusiones 70–73, 75, 22; Venus at the Forge of Vulcan 119 Vasari, Giorgio 18, 81 Veil of Veronica 52 Venus 161–6, 170, 174, 177, 187–90, 191, 194–5, 63, 65–67, 69, 76–9 Verdonck, Rombout 9, 75 Verhaecht, Tobias 9, 84 Veronese 10, 46, 131 vice 99, 137, 139, 142, 148, 149, 160 virtue 35, 99, 132, 140, 142, 148, 149, 150, 160, 194 Virgil 137, 203 Von Sandrart, Joachim 25, 73 Vouet, Simon, Allegory of the Human Soul 23 Wierix, Hieronymus, Ignatius Loyola Having a Vision of the Holy Trinity 52–4, 14 Wildens, Jan 88, 107, 27

Rubens’s spirit

wit see ingenuity Woverius, Johannes 29, 8 Wrestlers (Anon) 139, 140, 54 Ximenez, Emanuel 106 Zuccaro, Federico 183–4 Zuccaro, Taddeo 112

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