RUBENS, Peter Paul

Palazzi di Genova is a 1622 book written and illustrated by Peter Paul Rubens, depicting and describing the palaces of Genoa, Italy in 72 plates. A second volume with 67 further plates was added the same year, and they are usually found (and reprinted) together. The illustrations of the second part are usually considered not to be by Rubens though. It is the only book Rubens published himself (he provided illustrations for a number of other books).

The first volume contained plans, fa�ades and additional views of 12 of the palaces of Genoa; the second book contained a further 19 palaces and 4 churches. Included are many of the Palazzi dei Rolli. They were seen by Rubens during his trips to Italy (probably late 1605 and early 1606).

Rubens was an admirer of the architecture of Italy, as evidenced in his own house, the Rubenshuis in Antwerp. The Genoese style, developed by architects like Galeazzo Alessi, became very popular, and their distribution in Northern Europe was at least partially due to the book by Rubens.

The picture shows plate 57 from the book.

Palazzi di Genova is a 1622 book written and illustrated by Peter Paul Rubens, depicting and describing the palaces of Genoa, Italy in 72 plates. A second volume with 67 further plates was added the same year, and they are usually found (and reprinted) together. The illustrations of the second part are usually considered not to be by Rubens though. It is the only book Rubens published himself (he provided illustrations for a number of other books).

The first volume contained plans, fa�ades and additional views of 12 of the palaces of Genoa; the second book contained a further 19 palaces and 4 churches. Included are many of the Palazzi dei Rolli. They were seen by Rubens during his trips to Italy (probably late 1605 and early 1606).

Rubens was an admirer of the architecture of Italy, as evidenced in his own house, the Rubenshuis in Antwerp. The Genoese style, developed by architects like Galeazzo Alessi, became very popular, and their distribution in Northern Europe was at least partially due to the book by Rubens.

The picture shows plate 30 from the book.

In this painting the artist portrayed his second wife, Helene Fourment nude but for a fur. This was certainly his favourite among the many paintings exhibiting her undeniable charms. At all events, he refused to part with Het Pelsken. In tones worthy of Titian, he painted Helene with curly hair, her nipples erect, her nudity barely concealed by a fur wrap better suited to her husband’s bulk than her own. Her expression is difficult to read: is her mutinous air intended as a provocation, or was she simply anxious to wrap herself up against the cold?

Nudity as an attribute of mythological beauty, which provided its “justification”, was by no means new, but for Rubens the unusual picture of the naked Helene is exclusively private in character. Helene is standing on a red cloth and is wrapping herself, apparently spontaneously with a white cloth and a fur cloak. She is holding both in such a way that each arm crosses in front of her body covering the pelvic region, but pushing her breasts up in the crook of her right arm. Here, together with the face, the intimate gaze of the painter is betrayed. The title Het Pelsken (“The Little Fur”) is due to Rubens himself, who described the painting thus in his will. He bequeathed it as a separate item to his wife and also stipulated expressly that it should not be offset against her official share of his estate. It was only after her death in 1658 that it passed into other hands.

On 12 November 1619 a contract was drawn up between Johannes del Rio, dean of the Onze-Lieve Vrouwekerk in Antwerp, and Peter Paul Rubens. The painter undertook to paint ‘a panel depicting the story of the Assumption of Our Lady’ for a fee of 1500 guilders. He received the first 1000 guilders in September 1626, and the remaining 500 guilders followed in March 1627.

The reason for the long delay between the conclusion of the contract and the execution of the commission was that the altar where the painting was to be placed was not completed until 1626. The dimensions involved were gigantic: the altar is 14 metres high and more than 7 metres wide.

Rubens’s altarpiece measures 4,9 by 3,25 metres. As a first step towards the making of this monumental composition, Rubens painted the ‘modello’ discussed here, which may be dated on stylistic grounds in the early 1620s. This preliminary study was intended to give the client an idea of what the composition would look like, so that he could comment on it at an early stage.

Preliminary studies of this kind by Rubens are best characterised as ideas expressed in paint. The rapid execution this implies is also clearly visible in the technique: the paint has been applied off the cuff in rapid movements of the brush. The upward movements give the image a highly dynamic quality. Although Rubens often enlisted assistants to help him with major commissions, it is clear from the high quality of this ‘modello’ and the altarpiece in the OnzeLieve-Vrouwekerk that he executed this important commission all by himself.

Rubens painted about three dozen landscapes during his busy career, mostly for his own pleasure. The late ones, like this superb example, transform earlier Flemish models through fresh studies of nature and colour and brushwork ultimately inspired by Titian.

The intensity and the red and yellow colours of the sunlight strongly suggest that the sun is setting; the deer, chased by a hunter and his hounds, are running for shelter in the deepening shadows of the forest. Rubens often suggested in his landscapes an encounter of elemental forces, such as light penetrating darkness, a struggle between life and death, or the cycle of growth and decay. Here the twisted forms of old trees contrast with the slender trunks of new ones and in their impetuous rhythms add to the sense of urgency and life surging throughout nature.

This very elegant painting hangs in the Church of St John in Mechelen. Apparently, Rubens considered it one of his best works,

This oil sketch served as the modello for the altarpiece of the Constantini Chapel in San Filippo Neri at Fermo (now Pinacoteca Comunale).

The portraits of Rubens’ children - of Clara Serena, Albert and Nicolaas - are entirely personal. In the full-length portrait of Albert and Nicolaas, Rubens’s two sons by his first marriage, the ,most prominent feature is the informal way in which the boys seem to pose, which also bears witness to the painter’s great empathy with the children’s nature: Nicolaas, the playful child,completely relaxed, and his serious elder brother Albert, a studious bookworm, posing rather self-consciously as a scholar.

This is a copy of a portrait painted in the winter of ¹⁵²⁴⁄₂₅ by Titian. The original is unfortunately lost but its appearance is recorded in a high-quality, full-size copy, probably by Rubens.

During his visit to London in 1629 Rubens was commissioned by King Charles I to decorate the great banqueting hall in his newly built Whitehall palace with a set of ceiling paintings. This set of paintings had to be conceived as an allegorical demonstration of homage to Charles’s father, James I, in which he would be glorified as the supreme authority, the supreme judge, defender of the faith, learning and art. In particular the prosperity and peace that England had enjoyed under James I had to be symbolized. Attention also had to be paid to the union between England and Scotland brought about by James I. This propagandist glorification of the divine right of kings had to be presented in a series of alternating oval and rectangular paintings contained in wide, ornamental gilded frames. Similar ceiling paintings by Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese in Venice were the immediate model.

Rubens was inspired by the illusionist art of Venetian ceiling painting to give a distinctly Italianate building by Inigo Jones the pictorial decoration that best suited its interior.

Rubens delivered the entire set in 1635.

During his visit to London in 1629 Rubens was commissioned by King Charles I to decorate the great banqueting hall in his newly built Whitehall palace with a set of ceiling paintings. This set of paintings had to be conceived as an allegorical demonstration of homage to Charles’s father, James I, in which he would be glorified as the supreme authority, the supreme judge, defender of the faith, learning and art. In particular the prosperity and peace that England had enjoyed under James I had to be symbolized. Attention also had to be paid to the union between England and Scotland brought about by James I. This propagandist glorification of the divine right of kings had to be presented in a series of alternating oval and rectangular paintings contained in wide, ornamental gilded frames. Similar ceiling paintings by Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese in Venice were the immediate model.

Rubens was inspired by the illusionist art of Venetian ceiling painting to give a distinctly Italianate building by Inigo Jones the pictorial decoration that best suited its interior.

Rubens delivered the entire set in 1635. The picture shows the central panel of the ceiling.

During his visit to London in 1629 Rubens was commissioned by King Charles I to decorate the great banqueting hall in his newly built Whitehall palace with a set of ceiling paintings. This set of paintings had to be conceived as an allegorical demonstration of homage to Charles’s father, James I, in which he would be glorified as the supreme authority, the supreme judge, defender of the faith, learning and art. In particular the prosperity and peace that England had enjoyed under James I had to be symbolized. Attention also had to be paid to the union between England and Scotland brought about by James I. This propagandist glorification of the divine right of kings had to be presented in a series of alternating oval and rectangular paintings contained in wide, ornamental gilded frames. Similar ceiling paintings by Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese in Venice were the immediate model.

Rubens was inspired by the illusionist art of Venetian ceiling painting to give a distinctly Italianate building by Inigo Jones the pictorial decoration that best suited its interior.

Rubens delivered the entire set in 1635.

During his visit to London in 1629 Rubens was commissioned by King Charles I to decorate the great banqueting hall in his newly built Whitehall palace with a set of ceiling paintings. This set of paintings had to be conceived as an allegorical demonstration of homage to Charles’s father, James I, in which he would be glorified as the supreme authority, the supreme judge, defender of the faith, learning and art. In particular the prosperity and peace that England had enjoyed under James I had to be symbolized. Attention also had to be paid to the union between England and Scotland brought about by James I. This propagandist glorification of the divine right of kings had to be presented in a series of alternating oval and rectangular paintings contained in wide, ornamental gilded frames. Similar ceiling paintings by Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese in Venice were the immediate model.

Rubens was inspired by the illusionist art of Venetian ceiling painting to give a distinctly Italianate building by Inigo Jones the pictorial decoration that best suited its interior.

Rubens delivered the entire set in 1635.

While Rubens was court painter to Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga, he was sent on a diplomatic mission to Spain in 1603-1604. Shortly after his return from Spain to Italy, he executed this portrait of the emperor, which he modelled on a painting by Parmigianino in the ducal collection.

At the demand of Charles I of England, who knighted him, he painted the Banqueting House ceiling with a sequence of compositions to the glory of James I. He also painted an Allegory of Peace for Charles. It was the pictorial equivalent of the letter he had sent to Peiresc: “I hope that his Holiness and the King of England, but above all the Good Lord Himself will intervene to smother the flames, which currently threaten to spread across and devastate the whole of Europe.”

The Altarpiece of St Ildefonso was commisioned in Brussels in 1639. The central panel shows the legend of St Ildefonso, while the side panels the donators and their patron saints.

At the end of his life, Rubens’s art tended to be meditative. His favourite dwelling-place was a country-house just outside Antwerp, from which his gaze could lose itself in the limitless calm of the Flemish plain.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 11 minutes):

Vivaldi: Concerto in F major RV 293 op. 8 No. 3 (Autumn)

As Mantuan court painter, young Rubens copied many Correggio paintings of mythological subjects whose tender eroticism lights up Rubens’s Andromeda. Although her glowingly full-bodied presence is in chains, she conveys a vibrant sense of potential motion.

At the age of twenty-eight Rubens’ works were accepted for the most historical locations, and have since entered the most prestigious collections. With paintings such as his Annunciation he was well on the way to fame.

This sketch was made as part of the projected decoration of the hunting pavilion Torre de la Parada of the Spanish king Philip IV near Madrid. For this project a number of painters from Rubens’s circle, among them Cornelis de Vos, Theodor van Thulden and Erasmus Quellinus II painted decorations after oil sketches by Rubens.

The present oil sketch was used by Cornelis de Vos. It displays Rubens’s skill at generating the same sensuality and poetic character in these small panels as in his large-format mythological works.

The Antwerp Cathedral was given a new marble high altar during the baroque refurbishment that reached a peak around the beginning of the 17th century. Rubens, by then the most famous artist of his day, was commissioned to paint an altarpiece.

The image of the Assumption of the Virgin does not derive from the Bible but from an ecclesiastical tradition that took shape in the Middle Ages. By the 16th century, it had become a popular theme. The depiction of the Virgin, with her fluttering robe and swirling head-dress, is graceful and lively. She is borne up to heaven in a cloud by playful putti. Two angels at the top left of the painting are about to crown her with a garland of roses. The twelve apostles stand around her sarcophagus at the bottom. The three women who, according to legend, laid out the Virgin’s body are also included. The attractive woman in the middle, wearing a red dress, is given greater prominence than the other bystanders. Her features are those of Rubens’ wife, Isabella Brant, who died in June 1626, while the artist was working on this painting.

This huge painting was commissioned for the high altar of the Carthusian church in Brussels. Rubens addressed the subject of the Assumption several times before, the painting in the Liechtenstein Museum is the last version from the painter’s late period.

Differing from the earlier versions, here the Virgin is kneeling. The palms of her hands are turned upwards, which could be interpreted as a sign of supernatural transformation. Rubens repeats the Virgin’s gesture in the figures of Sts Peter and John.

Rubens repeats the Virgin’s gesture in the figures of Sts Peter and John.

In painting and sculpture, Bacchus is traditionally represented as a slim youth with a handsome face. Rubens’s painting does not follow the tradition, Bacchus is depicted as a corpulent, flaccid reveller, seating on a wine barrel.

Rubens depicts Bathsheba at her toilet, sitting at a fountain. A messenger is shown arriving with a letter sent by King David who is barely visible at the upper left corner of the painting.

The Battle for the Flag is a study after Leonardo da Vinci’s Battle of Anghiari, the mural which was never realised in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.

Painted by Rubens when he was still young, the painting shows to the full the impetuosity of his talent. The whirlwind composition is typically Baroque, while the horse charging headlong into the fight was an image perfectly suited to this artist’s passionate temperament.

Rubens took the subject of The Battle of the Amazons from Classical Antiquity; it represents the battle between Theseus’s Athenians and the women-warriors of Telestris. A battle of this kind is briefly mentioned by Herodotus (4.110). The surging movement throws the opposing forces together; men, women and horses charge into combat, and the result is like an explosion within the picture space. The Amazons are hurled from their horses down into the river at the base of the picture, while Theseus’s horse rears up towards the upper frame, and the wounded go swirling into the background, drawn by the current of the River Thermodon. This is one of the most dazzling feats of Baroque painting.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 2 minutes):

Fran�ois Couperin: Pieces de clavicen: L’Amaz�ne

In seventeenth-century Flemish painting ‘dramatization’ of the animal theme found expression in the revival of hunting scenes. (This special sub-category of animal painting emerged in the fifteenth century as an expression of late-medieval aristocratic art.) Rubens devoted himself to this subject after about 1616, initially with the intention of appealing to his aristocratic clientele. Some of his early hunting scenes were deliberately located in an aristocratic setting.

Two phases can be distinguished in Rubens’s hunting pictures. The work of the first period, running up to about 1620, is marked by a centripetal and diagonal scheme of composition, in which the many movement are clearly directed towards the high point of the dramatic action in the centre and in the ‘depth’ of the painting. In this manner the viewer’s attention is drawn directly to the ultimate battle for life and death between man and beast. An example of these scenes is the Boar Hunt in Dresden.

The hunting scenes Rubens painted after 1620 are in sharp contrast to the earlier scenes with vehement representations of violence. These later versions are composed in a frieze-like manner. The action is shown horizontally and parallel to the picture surface. This emphasises the actual progress of the hunt rather than its climax, the life and death struggle between man and beast, ending in the slaughter of the beast. Wild animals are replaced by defenceless hunted deer, often in a mythological context such as in Diana Returning from Hunt.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 3 minutes):

Carl Maria von Weber: Der Freisch�tz, Act III: Jägerchor

This painting depicts an episode from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In Greek mythology Boreas is the ruler of the north wind. He is old and has flowing grey locks and wings. He loved Oreithyia, the daughter of a legendary king of Athens and, against her will, carried her off to be his bride (Met. 6:692-722). He is shown flying away with the naked girl clasped firmly in his hands. Putti are present playing with snowballs.

In Rubens’s representation, the bodies fill the picture from one side to the other leaving no space for a sense of motion and flying.

A child of about two is shown playing with a captive bird. On the original panel, which was smaller, only the child’s head was visible. Rubens made use of this study for an angel in the Madonna with a Floral Wreath in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Later the artist enlargened the picture on the left side, adding the hands with the bird.

Although formerly taken to be a girl, the child portrayed is in all probability Rubens’ first son Albert, who was born in 1614. The motif of the child playing with a bird goes back to antiquity. It also crops up frequently in Christian art. The bird symbolizes the soul or life, which passes all too quickly. In many pictures of the Virgin and Child, Jesus is portrayed holding a bird in his hand as an allusion to his death and resurrection. Whether Rubens had a similar allegory in mind when he introduced the bird into his child-portrait, or whether some particular incident in his own life motivated him, is not known.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 5 minutes):

Cl�ment Jannequin: The Birds (Le chant des oiseaux)

Rubens was deeply engaged with classical antiquity and the Italian Renaissance - subjects with which he acquired close familiarity during a stay in Italy from 1600 to 1608. The Flemish master produced numerous drawn copies after Renaissance and antique works. He also amassed an important collection of antique portrait busts. Among these is a celebrated Roman portrait then believed to represent the Stoic philosopher Seneca, which appears in a number of his paintings, prints, and drawings. This sheet, drawn after the Seneca bust, was preparatory for a series of engravings depicting portraits of twelve famous ancient Greeks and Romans, completed in 1638. It has been suggested that the black sketch is by Rubens’s hand, while the pen drawing was subsequently added by an assistant.

This is a copy of a lost painting by Titian. The double portrait was painted by Titian in Augsburg in 1548. The Empress’s portrait is posthumous, it is presumably based on a Netherlandish original. It is uncharacteristically lifeless in the treatment of the head and costume. However, the painting includes an evocative view of a mountainous landscape through the window on the right.

This is Rubens’s copy of Titian’s first portrait of the emperor, probably painted in Bologna early in 1530, in the weeks surrounding his coronation. This work has not survived, but its appearance is recorded in the apparently faithful copy.

Christ looks a bit like Rubens, representing the artist’s desire to resemble his saviour.

This composition shows the resurrected Christ triumphant over death and sin. The skeleton and the snake at his feet stand for death and sin. The figure of Christ is taken from Rubens’s Last Judgment in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.

According to the Bible (Luke 7:40-50) Simon the Pharisee invited Jesus to share a meal. He received Jesus in his home. While they were at table, a sinner, occasionally taken wrongly to be Mary Magdalene, came and poured ointment over Jesus’ feet.

This painting came from the high altar of the Capuchin church of Antwerp. It was transferred to the City of Toulouse in 2004.

The Christ on the Cross is a typical example of an oil sketch made to serve as a design for a larger work, in this case an altarpiece for St. Michael’s Church in Ghent, commissioned in 1627. However, because of the demands made on his time by his diplomatic missions, Rubens was unable to make the painting and the work was entrusted to Van Dyck, who prepared a new oil sketch based on Rubens’ original design.

The painting is also called as Pierced with a Lance.

Rubens’ close involvement with the resurgence of Catholicism and the struggle for power led to the production a numerous large altarpieces. His stirring baroque ideas come to the fore in The Lance, with its emotionally charged, highly plastic figures.

Christoffel (Christophe) Plantin (1520-1589), French printer, founder of an important printing house and publisher of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible.

Plantin learned bookbinding and bookselling at Caen, Normandy, and settled in 1549 as a bookbinder in Antwerp. A bad arm wound seems to have led him (about 1555) to turn to typography. His many publications were distinguished by their excellent typography, and he was original in using copper, instead of wood, engravings for book illustrations. His greatest venture, the Biblia regia, which would fix the original text of Old and New Testaments, was supported by Philip II of Spain in spite of clerical opposition and appeared in eight volumes during 1569-72.

When Antwerp was plundered by the Spaniards in 1576 and Plantin had to pay a ransom, he established a branch office in Paris and then, in 1583, settled in Leiden as the typographer of the new university of the states of Holland, leaving his much-reduced business in Antwerp in the hands of his sons-in-law, John Moerentorf (Moretus) and Francis van Ravelinghen (Raphelengius). But in 1585 Plantin returned to Antwerp and Raphelengius took over the business in Leiden. After Plantin’s death, the Antwerp business was carried on by Moretus, but it declined during the second half of the 17th century. All was religiously preserved, however, and in 1876 the city of Antwerp acquired the buildings and their contents and created the Plantin-Moretus Museum.

Of the examples of ‘filial piety’ in the literature of antiquity, that of Cimon and Pero was one of the ones that appealed most to artists of the 16th to 18th centuries in Italy and the Netherlands. Valerius Maximus tells of a certain Cimon, an aged man, who was in prison awaiting execution and who was therefore given no food. The jailer allowed Cimon’s daughter Pero to visit him. She nourished him by giving him her breast. The scene is a prison cell; the white-haired prisoner, manacled, reclines in the lap of a young woman who is suckling him. A jailer peers through a barred window.

Rubens was very keen on classical antiquity and this sketch in the Brussels museum evokes this facet of his genius. In it Cupid is guiding by the bridle a dolphin that is slicing through the sea. In his right hand he carries a bow, on his back a quiver of arrows, illustrating a passage from the Latin poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses where the little god of love is preparing to unleash arrows in order to conquer hearts for Venus, and symbolising the impatience of love.

Rubens was fond of Ovid’s narratives, which he illustrated several times. Cupid Riding a Dolphin is part of a series of sketches that Rubens made for the decoration of the Torre de la Parada, the Spanish kings’ hunting lodge close to Madrid. In 1636, Philip IV commissioned for this residence a series of paintings to be completed in just under a year. Almost half of these works were paintings of animals, along with hunting scenes and pictures of the king. The monarch turned to Rubens for the paintings of subjects taken from the verses of the Latin poet. The animals and the hunting scenes are a direct reference to the destination of the building, whilst Ovid’s mythological poems create the atmosphere of bucolic entertainment which is appropriate for such a country dwelling. This is the last, and largest, commission that Rubens received, consisting of around a hundred works. The artist did the sketches himself but painted only a few pictures, entrusting the execution of most of the canvases to his close collaborators Cornelis de Vos, Theodoor van Thulden, Erasmus Quellinus the Younger, Jan Eyck and Jacob Jordaens. Some forty of the paintings are conserved at the Prado in Madrid. The Brussels museum owns twelve of the fifty or so sketches that are still extant.

Cupid Riding a Dolphin is exemplary of the spontaneity and energy which show through in all of the master’s sketches. Thicker touches on top of the fine ground layer highlight the dolphin’s impetuous movement, whilst isolated touches of colour indicate the colour scheme of the composition. The final painting was produced by Erasmus Quellinus the Younger (Madrid, Prado).

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 4 minutes):

Francesco Gasparini: The Meddlesome Cupid, aria

This scene is set, like the Flemish Kermis, against a timeless natural background. In this painting Rubens transposes the bucolic spirit of contemporary mythological compositions into the ambiance of popular genre subject matter. Several of the figures are dressed “all’ antica” and Bacchus himself is dancing in a landscape which with its Italianate architectural elements creates a distinctly Arcadian impression.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 4 minutes):

Gioacchino Rossini: La Danza

This tapestry belongs to the series “History of Constantine the Great”. It was made in the workshop of Filippe Maëcht and Hans Taye (Comans-La Planche tapestry factory, France). The figural composition is after Peter Paul Rubens.

The Decius Mus cycle of paintings, consisting eight pictures, cover all aspects of the victory and death of the Roman consul. It is the earliest of Rubens’s cycles, and it was created as cartoons for tapestries. From this cycle several series of tapestries were woven in Jan Raes’s Brussels manufactory during the seventeenth century.

The picture shows one of the eight paintings of the cycle.

The subject of the painting is the Greek philosopher Democritus expressing his amusement at the world, which he holds in the shape of a globe. Democritus, who lived around 470-360 BC, taught that cheerful and moderate contentment was the way to happiness. European painting of the Renaissance and Baroque periods repeatedly portrayed him as the “laughing philosopher”, contrasting him with other intellectual types such as the pessimist, the stoic and the cynic.

Rubens painted Democritus for the Duke of Lerma, to accompany a Mourning Heraclitus. From 1638 these two pictures were in the Torre de la Parada, the king of Spain’s hunting lodge in the Pardo mountains near Madrid, for which Rubens and his pupils had painted mythological and hunting scenes ten years earlier.

After the termination of the Calvinist regime in Antwerp in 1585, the city’s churches were gradually decorated once again with works of art. The process continued and intensified in the early part of the 17th century, when the Southern Netherlands enjoyed a period of stability and prosperity thanks to the peace policies pursued by the Archdukes Albert and Isabella. Art and artists were major beneficiaries. Antwerp was a wealthy city, whose churches were decorated with unusual splendour: Catholic worship had to be especially glorious in this place where the Protestants head recently held sway.

In 1611, the Arquebusiers - Antwerp’s civic guard - commissioned a Descent from the Cross by their illustrious townsman Rubens for their altar in the cathedral. The dean of the guild at that time was Burgomaster Nicolaas Rockox, who appear in the painting. The Descent from the Cross is the second of Rubens’s great altarpieces for the Antwerp Cathedral. It shows the Visitation, and the Presentation of the Temple on either side of the Descent from the Cross. (The first triptych of the Raising of the Cross was executed in 1611-12.) His rich painterly Baroque technique incorporated both elements of Venetian design and also the composition and lighting of the Roman period of Caravaggio. But the result is purely Flemish.

Although at first sight the themes presented in the triptych seem extremely wide-ranging, they are actually linked, for St Christopher was the Arquebusiers’ patron saint. When the triptych was closed, all that worshippers could see was this scene from the legend of St Christopher, whose Greek name ‘Christophorus’ means ‘Christ-bearer’. This fact forms the key to the entire painting, in which the friends and holy women in the centre panel, and Mary and Simeon in the wings are also ‘Christ-bearers’.

This is a detail of the central panel of the triptych of the Descent from the Cross.

After the success of the altar triptych Descent from the Cross that Rubens painted for the Antwerp Cathedral in 1612, he produced several variants with his pupils, for different churches. In the present one, which adorned the Capuchin church in Lierre, the composition has undergone significant changes. The artist reduced the number of figures and increased the scale of Christ, focusing all the attention on his body and the kinsfolk and disciples, who do not so much support him as simply touch his body.

The centre panel of the great triptych shows the Descent from the Cross against a dark sky. Several men - Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, St John and two servants - carefully lower the body of Christ in a brilliant white shroud. They are assisted by several women, including Jesus’ mother. Christ’s foot rests on the shoulder of Mary Magdalene, who dried his feet with her hair.

The left wing of the great triptych of the Descent from the Cross shows the Virgin Mary, pregnant with Jesus, visiting her cousin Elizabeth, who will shortly give birth to John the Baptist. The women, accompanied by their respective husbands Joseph and Zacharias, greet one another in an imposing porch. A servant carries a basket containing travel items.

The outsides of the wings are devoted to St Christopher. According to his medieval legend, the huge St Christopher carried the Christ Child across a river on his shoulders. A hermit on the right lights his way with a lantern.

The outsides of the wings are devoted to St Christopher. According to his medieval legend, the huge St Christopher carried the Christ Child across a river on his shoulders. A hermit on the right lights his way with a lantern.

The right wing of the great triptych of the Descent from the Cross is devoted to the presentation of the Infant Christ in the Temple at Jerusalem. The elderly Simeon holds the Child in his arms while the prophetess Anna, located in the shadows between Simeon and Mary, looks on joyfully. Joseph, who has brought two sacrificial doves with him, kneels down respectfully. The onlooker on the left edge of this splendid temple interior is Nicolaas Rockox, a friend of Rubens and a prominent figure in Antwerp.

Rubens returned to Antwerp in 1608 from Italy, and he brought with him an interest in the heritage of Antique art and literature that developed into a cornerstone of his thinking and artistic production. After setting up home in Antwerp, he devoted himself with unfailing interest to Greek and Roman mythology, which he used for the subject of many works, mostly as private commissions.

The goddess of Diana was evidently of great importance to Rubens in around 1615, for she could be combined with another subject that interested him: the hunt. Moreover, this subject was well received by his royal and aristocratic patrons: game hunting was the exclusive preserve of the ruling class. Rubens produced a number of large format hunting scenes in 1614-15, many with mythological backdrop.

Rather than emphasizing extremes of movement, as is typical of many of Rubens’s hunting pictures, the Diana Returning from Hunt focuses instead on characterizing the powerful, beautiful and pensive huntress. Diana, simultaneously the goddess of chastity, stands with her companions before a group of satyrs, who belong to a quite different branch of Rubens’s work: Bacchanalia. Diana’s hunting spear divides the different worlds of the two groups And no less different than their appearance and natures are the spoils held by the satyrs on the one side, and Diana and her companions on the other. The fruit presented in richly laden baskets and the intoxicating wine, combined with the lecherous gazes of these half-naked figures, must be seen as an unambiguous sexual overture. Diana, guardian of female chastity, resists. The birds and the dead hare that she and her nymphs have bagged during the hunt reveal them as the conquerors of the pleasurable indulgence embodied by the friends of Bacchus.

The animals and the fruits were painted by Frans Snyders.

There is painting in Gemäldegalerie in Dresden almost identical to the one treasured in Belgrade. Among the differences is the size - the one in Belgrade is larger, and the slight difference in composition - on the Belgrade painting “the frame” is moved a bit to the right revealing the complete catch of the Diana companion.

Rubens returned to Antwerp in 1608 from Italy, and he brought with him an interest in the heritage of Antique art and literature that developed into a cornerstone of his thinking and artistic production. After setting up home in Antwerp, he devoted himself with unfailing interest to Greek and Roman mythology, which he used for the subject of many works, mostly as private commissions.

The goddess of Diana was evidently of great importance to Rubens in around 1615, for she could be combined with another subject that interested him: the hunt. Moreover, this subject was well received by his royal and aristocratic patrons: game hunting was the exclusive preserve of the ruling class. Rubens produced a number of large format hunting scenes in 1614-15, many with mythological backdrop.

Rather than emphasizing extremes of movement, as is typical of many of Rubens’s hunting pictures, the Diana Returning from Hunt focuses instead on characterizing the powerful, beautiful and pensive huntress. Diana, simultaneously the goddess of chastity, stands with her companions before a group of satyrs, who belong to a quite different branch of Rubens’s work: Bacchanalia. Diana’s hunting spear divides the different worlds of the two groups And no less different than their appearance and natures are the spoils held by the satyrs on the one side, and Diana and her companions on the other. The fruit presented in richly laden baskets and the intoxicating wine, combined with the lecherous gazes of these half-naked figures, must be seen as an unambiguous sexual overture. Diana, guardian of female chastity, resists. The birds and the dead hare that she and her nymphs have bagged during the hunt reveal them as the conquerors of the pleasurable indulgence embodied by the friends of Bacchus.

The animals and the fruits were painted by Frans Snyders.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 9 minutes):

Antonio Vivaldi: Concerto in B flat major RV 362 op. 8 No. 10 (Hunt)

Titian’s career as a court painter-at-large provided a model for that of Rubens, who likewise travelled exceptionally widely in the service of an international cast of rulers. During his travels, Rubens not only studied but also made numerous copies of the Titians in the princely collections of Mantua, Madrid and London. Rubens turned to his predecessor for guidance when composing every kind of subject, while at the same time introducing variations on his compositional models. His own version of the Diana and Callisto story of c. 1639, for example, clearly draws directly on his close study of Titian’s Diana pictures when he visited the court of Madrid in 1628-29.

The landscape and the animals were painted by Jan Wildens.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 11 minutes):

Claude Debussy: Pr�lude à l’apr�s-midi d’un faune

When he visited the Spanish Court for the first time, Rubens used this picture to display his talents and to make his mark. It has already many elements of his mature Baroque style, which would have been novel and striking to his viewers. The way in which the horse seems to surge forward towards the spectator - an effect engineered by the low viewpoint and lack of balancing elements in the foreground, and recalling the techniques of Caravaggio - was spectacular, and broke with the traditional profile of equestrian portraits. Other devices used to enhance the spectacle were the eccentric colouring, the tempestuous lighting, and the rather disquieting energy of the horse’s hair and the trees’ foliage.

Explicitly Venetian are the two large equestrian portraits Rubens made in his Italian period. The Mannerist emotiveness of the Duke of Lerma and of Giancarlo Doria with their typical foreshortenings and flickering light, is unthinkable without Tintoretto, from whom the composition is also derived. Yet unlike him, Rubens gives a strong impression physical presence and vitality to his aristocratic sitters.

This sketch was one of the first in a series of thirty-nine preparatory studies for the ceiling paintings in the Jesuit church St Charles Borromeo in Antwerp. In the scene Esther before Ahasuerus, Rubens copied Veronese’s ceiling painting in San Sebastiano, Venice.

This landscape display a realistic vision. Rubens not only painted the milkmaids and the cattle from preliminary drawings made from life. This piece of Brabant countryside is seen from a low viewpoint. It is noticeable that the peasant girls are painted larger than was usual for such additional figures in Flemish landscape painting. Depicted in the same sculptural style as the figures in contemporary history paintings, they are placed emphatically in the foreground. Moreover, they are approached sympathetically. The woman standing, carrying a basket on her head, is even painted in a very dignified pose, obviously based on the classical contrapposto. This explicitly positive approach to simple countryfolk is the more striking when it is remembered that in the genre painting the image of the peasant would continue to bear a pejorative accent until almost the middle of the seventeenth century.

This attractive oil sketch of a man’s head in four different poses is undoubtedly one of the most popular Rubens works in the Brussels museum, if not of Rubens’ entire oeuvre. For a long time experts were divided on whether to ascribe it to Rubens or to Van Dyck. The latest investigations into the paint layering appear to support the museum, which has always considered Rubens as the author.

It is easy to understand the popularity of this work. The masterly painting technique - free, virtuoso and rhythmic - is easy to read. The human subject matter, without any barrier of complicated mythology or religious themes, speaks to us directly. The whiff of exoticism in the living representation of a man from a distant country tempts some, the dignified treatment of a member of a frequently discriminated racial group wins over others, and a third group of viewers rejoices at this picture of a human being full of apparently uncomplicated joie de vivre. Rubens would perhaps be surprised at the special predilection for this work of his. It is certain that he also gave this sketch the full force of his artistic ability. Added to this he took the technique of the oil paint sketch, developed earlier in Italy, to unknown artistic heights, as in the unique series of designs for the Torre de la Parada which are found in the Brussels museum collection. Rubens made sure that his sons would have such studies should they themselves want to become painters.

But ultimately this type of facial study was intended for inclusion in much more ambitious compositions. Such telling observations from various angles were particularly suited to multiple, and hence highly economic, use in a very wide variety of paintings. The same head reappears for example in the Adoration of the Magi, also conserved in the museum, but then as the head of a turbaned wise man in the middle ground: here he is organically included in a detailed and monumental altarpiece, which today elicits much less enthusiasm and attention.

The splendid vision of sensual dalliance once hung in Philip IV’s bedchamber. The subject is a traditional medieval one, in which lovers were shown conventionally in a garden, sometimes with moral messages or symbols accompanying them. In the Italian Renaissance the theme had been represented in ‘fête champêtres’ such as the one attributed to Giorgione or Titian in the Louvre. This picture by Rubens is an important link in the tradition running from those works to the scenes of Watteau and Pater in the eigtheenth century.

In the Garden of Love Rubens celebrated his marriage to Helena Fourment, his second wife. Helena, the woman deemed “the most beautiful in Antwerp’, is seen in the painting.

In the Garden of Love Rubens celebrated his marriage to Helena Fourment, his second wife. Helena, the woman deemed “the most beautiful in Antwerp’, is seen in the painting.

In 1630 Rubens returned to Antwerp from his diplomatic mission in England. His two sons were now twelve and sixteen, and he himself was over fifty. Yet the young woman he was now to marry, Helene Fourment, was no older than his elder son. She was, in the words of the Cardinal-Infante Fernando, “the most beautiful woman in Antwerp”. She was the younger daughter of the silk and tapestry-merchant, Daniel Fourment, and sister to the Suzanne Fourment whose delightful portrait Rubens had painted some years before. Rubens explained himself to Peiresc: “I decided to remarry, for I have never been attracted to the abstinent life of the celibate, and I told myself that, though we should award the crown to continence, we may nevertheless enjoy legitimate pleasures and give thanks for them. I have chosen a young woman of good but bourgeois family, though everyone sought to convince me to make a court marriage. But I was fearful of a vice inbred in the nobility, and especially prevalent among noble women: vanity. So I chose someone who would never have to blush at finding me brush in hand. And the truth is, I am too fond of my freedom to exchange it for the embraces of an old woman.” Far from blushing, Helene was to inspire some of the most personal and moving of all Rubens’ portraits.

In this panel the contribution of Rubens’s workshop is assumed.

This formal portrait is probably the last known portrait of his wife by Rubens. On the steps of their opulent house in Antwerp, wearing a gorgeous black dress in Spanish fashion, she is with Frans about to step into a carriage drawn by two horses, a symbol of matrimonial harmony.

While commercial production continued apace in Rubens’ studio, he reserved his strength for the intimate works that lay closest to his heart, and in particular to those that his young wife continuously inspired. Here his painting becomes deeply moving. There are no greater works in his catalogue than the portrait Helene Fourment with her Children, in which she is seen rosy-complexioned beneath a wide-brimmed feather hat that sets off her round cheeks.

This intensely personal work reveals to us the true Rubens, whose mastery of stroke and palette can convey the sweetness and freshness of youth with incomparable mastery. These brushstrokes, so tenderly applied, reflect an obsession with the beauty of his “Helen”.

The subject of the painting is a legend according to which Leander, a youth of Abydos, a town on the Asian shore of the Hellespont, used to swim across the waters at night to Sestos on the opposite side to meet his lover Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite. She would guide him by holding up a lighted torch. One stormy night Leander was drowned. Hero in despair threw herself into the sea. The story is related in this form by the Greek poet Musaeus (4th-5th century A.D.). Ovid (Heroides, 18, 19) tells of the lovers, omitting their death. The theme is found in Italian and Netherlandish painting, especially of the 17th century which depicts Leander swimming the Hellespont towards a distant tower lighted by Hero; or the drowned Leander is borne away by Nereids as Hero plunges to her death into the sea.

Rubens gives additional intensity to the story by combining consecutive events to produce one highly dramatic scene: the death of Leander, the way his pale, lifeless body is accompanied by thirteen nereids through the churning waves, and finally Hero’s plunge into the depth. The subject of Rubens’s composition is, in fact, the human body in extremes of movements.

The Hero and Leander was painted during Rubens’s second stay at the court of Mantua, where he worked from the middle of 1604 until the end of 1605 for Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga. It belongs to a group of at least five paintings that were evidently painted at this time for the free market, without any definite client. The common feature of these works lies in their portrayal of historical scenes with large number of figures, which allowed Rubens to depict powerfully moving bodies in extreme perspectives. The works show the influence on the young Rubens of Michelangelo and Caravaggio, and also in the particular case of Hero and Leander of Leonardo and Tintoretto.

There is a smaller version of this painting in the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.

The subject of the painting is a legend according to which Leander, a youth of Abydos, a town on the Asian shore of the Hellespont, used to swim across the waters at night to Sestos on the opposite side to meet his lover Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite. She would guide him by holding up a lighted torch. One stormy night Leander was drowned. Hero in despair threw herself into the sea. The story is related in this form by the Greek poet Musaeus (4th-5th century A.D.). Ovid (Heroides, 18, 19) tells of the lovers, omitting their death. The theme is found in Italian and Netherlandish painting, especially of the 17th century which depicts Leander swimming the Hellespont towards a distant tower lighted by Hero; or the drowned Leander is borne away by Nereids as Hero plunges to her death into the sea.

Rubens produced a number of large format hunting scenes in 1614-15, many with mythological backdrop.

King Philip IV’s affection for pictures was emulated by his courtiers who amassed large collections and helped to turn Madrid into one of the most active picture market in Europe. Diego Mess�a, the marquis of Legan�s’s beginnings as a collector was modest enough; in 1630, his inventory lists a mere eighteen works, eleven of which were ascribed to Titian. Twelve years later, the total increased to well over 1.100 pictures, among them masterpieces by Rubens and van Dyck, as well as a generous share by lesser Flemish masters. Leganes also collected the Flemish primitives. His Italian paintings included attributions to Titian, Raphael, Veronese and the Bassanos.

This Immaculate Conception by Rubens was also part of Legan�s’s collection.

Isabella, the first wife of Rubens, died in 1626. This portrait, full of warm and constructive colour, was posthumously done about 1626 after a chalk drawing of the master of c. 1623-25 (British Museum, London).

The artist’s first wife, Isabella Brant, may be the subject of this portrait of about 1626, the year of her early death. Its bold red background typifies Rubens’s self-imposed pictorial challenges, trusting that his elegiac, posthumous image, with its massively enlarged eyes and strong yet graceful hands, could and would win over the regally demanding, flaming colour.

From 1616 onwards Rubens was able to illustrate dramatic scenes with a reliance on Caravaggios’s sharp contrasts of light. This painting represents this aspect of Rubens’s work well.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 17 minutes):

Alessandro Scarlatti: La Giuditta, oratorio, Part I (excerpts)

Rubens’s study of the antique and of the new sciences manifests itself in this huge celebratory work which uses the story of Jupiter’s love for Io and the jealousy of his wife Juno as an allegory of the cosmos and demonstrates his colour theory.

Rubens’s painting represents the concluding scene from the story of Io. The giant Argus of the hundred eyes, whom Juno set to watch over Io, was murdered by Mercury. In memory of Argus Juno took his eyes and set them in the tail of her peacock.

The heroic classicist style in the 1610s Which Rubens developed in his religious works was even more apposite in scenes derived from classical themes. Rubens painted many such subjects shortly after 1612. The action in them was carried out by a limited number of figures placed in the foreground and clearly highlighted, giving these paintings an almost relief-like appearance; it may well have been his intention to suggest a comparison with antique relief sculpture.

The Jupiter and Callisto is one of the many secular subjects Rubens painted in this relief style. The subject of the painting is taken from Ovid. Diana’s nymphs were expected to be as chaste as the goddess herself. One of them, Callisto, was seduced by Jupiter who first disguised himself as Diana in order to gain the nymphs presence. Her pregnancy was eventually noticed by Diana who punished Callisto by changing her into a a bear and setting the dogs on her. But Jupiter snatched her up to heaven just in time.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 38 minutes):

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Symphony in C Major (Jupiter-Symphony) K 551

By the early 1620s Rubens had perfected the art of giving an evocative depiction of the most static as well as the most complicated and dramatically charged subjects from religious and secular literature. It is therefore no coincidence that around this time and in the years following he designed the cycles, that form perhaps the creative culmination of his whole career. In these new tasks - and partly because of their unprecedented scale - his style showed innovations first evident in the great series he was commissioned to product in 1620 for the ceiling of the Jesuit church in Antwerp. This building was decorated from Rubens’s designs with some forty large ceiling paintings with scenes from the Old and New Testaments, as well as some representing scenes from the lives of saints. The paintings, largely executed by Van Dyck after Rubens’s design, were in 1718 destroyed in a fire. The quality of the painting can be judged from several drawn and engraved copies, and especially from the survival of numerous oil sketches, such as King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.

This typical sketch shows that in every respect his style is dependent on that of the famous Venetian ‘soffitti’, the painted ceilings by Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese, which express the same liveliness and sense of illusion.

Rubens’s modelli for the lost ceiling paintings show clearly how much the dazzling, nervous style of his work varies from the more controlled classicism of his earlier years.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 3 minutes):

George Frideric Handel: Solomon - The arrival of the Queen of Sheba