Authors: Mark Lamster
Through all of his travels, Rubens remained a devoted servant of his beloved Antwerp. When the beleaguered city needed him most, at the close of 1634, he was ready and willing to lend it his aid. The occasion was the ceremonial entry into the city of Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand, the strong-willed younger brother of Philip IV. Rubens had painted Ferdinand on his most recent trip to Madrid, a half-length portrait in his clerical habit. The prince had been made a cardinal as a matter of political expedience, but he was by nature
a man of action disinclined to the ascetic life of a church elder. “Rid me of these cardinal’s robes, that I may be able to go to the war,” he demanded. He got his chance. It had long been planned that he should succeed his aunt Isabella as governor of the Spanish Netherlands. When he received the sad news of her passing, in 1633, he was brushing up his administrative and martial abilities in Milan. From there, he marched north with an army, taking a detour along the way to rout the Protestant forces of Sweden at the Battle of Nördlingen, in Germany. By November 1634 he was ensconced in Brussels, having relieved d’Aytona of command.
The arrival of a new prince was traditionally grounds for a civic celebration of welcome. Antwerp, its economy weak and its citizens still doleful about their prospects, chose to roll out the red carpet for the cardinal-infante, and to do so in the grandest style. All of the struggling city’s financial and intellectual muscle would be leveraged in the rather desperate hope that Ferdinand would be moved to come to its rescue. Who better to oversee this grand project than the city’s favorite son, Peter Paul Rubens? There was no one, anywhere, more skilled at orchestrating a massive decorative program designed to impress a royal patron.
Rubens dutifully accepted the commission, and set to work planning a reception that might embarrass a Roman emperor. In December 1634, he presented his ideas to the city magistrates. Three triumphal arches would be thrown up on the route Ferdinand would follow through the city. A series of stages, each with an allegorical scenic program, would be constructed at key civic sites. An elaborate portico, more than two hundred feet long, would be built along the Meir. There would be flags and bunting and statues and three hundred lampposts capped with tar-barrel torches to keep the city ablaze at night, when a spectacular pyrotechnics show would enliven the sky above.
It was an extraordinary vision, and the initial schedule required it to be ready in a single month—and during winter no less, when construction would be most difficult. The Rubens workshop, accustomed to large projects and tight deadlines, now became the headquarters for an operation of unprecedented scale. Architects, artists, craftsmen, suppliers, and bureaucrats came in and out in waves, all hoping for a moment with the master, who sat in the center of it all, making sketches, interviewing subordinates, delegating jobs, and granting approvals. The press of work challenged even his famed ability to manage a great many tasks at once. “I am so overwhelmed with work,” he wrote in the midst of the preparations, “that I have not time to write, or even to live.” (Being Rubens, he found the time.) All of Antwerp’s resources were marshaled and placed at his disposal. The cost was enormous. The city raided its meager treasury and even then had to impose a special tax on beer to pay for it all—no small sacrifice for the average
sinjoor
, who drank three pints per day and considered it his birthright.
When the day of reckoning arrived, the city ramparts were packed with spectators, and trumpeters played from its ceremonial gate, which had been gilded for the occasion. At four o’clock, Ferdinand marched down from Alva’s old citadel, a troop of his best horsemen before him, to be greeted by the burgomeester and a salvo from the civic guard. A young girl draped with flowers presented him with a laurel crown and a golden salver. So equipped, Ferdinand began his procession through the city toward the first of Rubens’s stages, where a large painting depicted a maiden of Flanders kneeling before the new prince. If there was any question as to its meaning, a Latin inscription, written by Gevaerts, made it clear: “To thee we look for our salvation; the days which the plagues of war have made evil will through thee become better days; the road lies open before thee, and Victory flies on snowy wing to greet
thee.” For the rest of the afternoon and into the evening, Ferdinand was guided along Rubens’s scripted path, the message of civic desperation drummed home with an insistent determination. On Nieuwstraat, Ferdinand saw his victory at Nördlingen, and with it a request that he return peace to the troubled land of Flanders. At the Stage of Mercury, on the plaza before the Church of St. John, there was a prayer for the reopening of the Scheldt. Above it, Rubens illustrated the city’s plight with a personification of the river collapsed over a barren urn. Abandoned ships, a destitute sailor, and a starving child were added for emphasis.
Rubens was not there to greet Ferdinand at the city gate, nor did he accompany the cardinal-infante on his procession through the many installations he had designed and seen to completion. The superhuman effort required to produce the great spectacle precipitated an acute case of gout that left Rubens bedridden in his Antwerp home. Ferdinand, who stayed eight days in the city, made a special point to call on the recuperating painter to express his compliments and gratitude. When Rubens recovered, he painted a new portrait of the infante, with his cardinal’s robes exchanged for a shining suit of armor and the red sash of a military commander. Ferdinand, in turn, granted Rubens the sinecure of court painter, as Albert and Isabella had done before him.
The armor suited Ferdinand, who soon found himself embroiled in a two-front war with France and Holland that left him in no position to offer financial assistance to Rubens’s beloved city. Spain’s two enemies had agreed on a pact of mutual aggression, their aim being to squeeze Flanders from above and below and then to divide it between them, with the Dutch-speaking north handed over to Holland and the Francophone south delivered to France. (Back in Madrid, Olivares may well have cursed himself for not taking Rubens’s prescient advice, given just a few years earlier,
to remove Richelieu from power at any cost.) Ferdinand, however, proved an able defender of his adopted homeland. In 1635, he made forays deep into enemy territory, to both the north and the south. His most impressive performance came in defense of Antwerp, in June 1638, when he routed a Dutch offensive at Kallo, just a few miles from the city walls. He captured more than twenty-five hundred prisoners and eighty river transports in what he claimed to be the greatest victory in the long history of the conflict with the Dutch. The Franco-Dutch alliance was left to flounder.
The good
sinjoren
were grateful for the rescue, and demonstrated that sentiment at their annual fair. A decorated chariot in the shape of a boat, designed by Rubens and drawn by a pair of white horses, carried an enormous trophy in honor of the warrior hero. Ferdinand appreciated the gesture, if not the ardor, of the local celebrants. “The great festival they call the
kermis
took place here yesterday,” he wrote. “It is a long procession with many triumphal carts … and after it has all passed by, they will eat and drink and get thoroughly drunk, because without that it’s not a festival in this country. There’s no question that they live like beasts here.”
Rubens was familiar with the boisterous, coarser aspects of the Flemish character, but he looked upon them with a native’s sympathy that Ferdinand, a foreigner of noble blood, could never quite understand. In his later years, the
kermis
was a subject Rubens would happily take up, just as Pieter Brueghel had before him. Rubens’s paintings, classically inspired compositions in bucolic settings bathed in warm light, suggest a certain romanticized pride in Flemish custom, notwithstanding its occasional boorishness and vulgarity.
As Rubens grew older, he gave in more and more to his pastoral impulse, both on canvas and in his daily life. In May 1635, he traded in his modest country house in nearby Ekeren for a massive
estate outside of Mechlin. The Castle Steen was built of stone and enclosed by a moat. Orchards and rolling meadows stretched as far as the eye could see, and one could see a good long ways from the crenellated guard tower adjacent to the big manor house. Rubens paid nearly 100,000 florins for it, and the right to call himself the Lord of Steen.
On his peaceful new estate, Rubens took up landscape painting in earnest for the first time in his career. Freed from diplomatic service, he also celebrated the pleasures of family, love, and society in pictures of extraordinary grace and beauty, images that often depicted his beautiful wife, Helena Fourment. She was there in
The Feast of Venus
, a Roman debauch in which he placed her in the arms of a muscled Satyr, and she was there, in several guises, in
The Garden of Love
, a more respectable outdoor fete. If her face was not immediately recognizable, she was at least spiritually present in a series of love-themed mythological paintings—
The Three Graces, The Judgment of Paris, Venus and Adonis, Diana and Callisto
—that remain, to this day, among his most beloved pictures.
Those canvases were balanced by a series of less sanguine meditations on the costs of war, raw acknowledgments that, for all of his own good fortune and the ostentatious luxury enjoyed by his royal clients, the world was still a cruel place, and that man was often responsible for his own tribulations. Rubens, raised by a single mother who kept her family together through war and the degeneracy of her husband, persistently depicted the female figure as a paragon of virtue and peace felled by male bloodlust. In a sketch made in chalks and gouache some time after his return from London, he drew Mars, dagger in hand, dragging a woman off by the hair as Minerva and Hercules look on helplessly. In a monumental
Massacre of the Innocents
, a gruesome slaughter painted in 1636,
children are speared and trampled by Roman soldiers. A swooning mother in the foreground wears a contemporary dress, a striking suggestion of the relevance of the mythological scene.
Rubens deplored violence in practice, but no painter, before or since, depicted it with such relish or sheer beauty. Whether it was a lion hunt, a crucifixion, or a battle scene, his expressive brushstrokes and dynamic compositional structures suited themselves to an aesthetic celebration of mortal brutality. Rubens’s violence could be gratuitous—skewered children and severed heads on pikes—but for the most part it was not of an easy, pandering variety. Rubens had spent a lifetime working to establish peace in Europe, and his paintings of war were meditations on its awful costs, rather than bellicose arguments for aggression. Even his warrior heroes were tragic figures. A cycle of paintings, made during the truce years, related the story of the valiant Roman consul Decius Mus, who sacrificed himself to save his own army.
Rubens’s great masterpiece on the theme of violence was his
Horrors of War
, painted in the winter of 1638 as a commission for the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The composition, for which he was paid 142 florins, was derived from the earlier sketch of Mars dragging off a female figure, but with significant alterations. At the center of the large canvas, Rubens painted the war god rushing forward with a bloody sword as a nude Venus, one of his most beautiful, drapes herself across his body in an effort to restrain him. An architect, protractor in hand, is thrown on the ground, symbolizing the urban destruction that is war’s inevitable consequence. Mars treads on a book and paper—the sad fate of the arts and sciences. Cowering at the side is a woman with a child in her arms. As Rubens wrote in an explanatory note about the painting, that maternal figure “indicates that fertility, procreation, and parental love are disrupted by war, which ruins and destroys everything.”
Opposite her is another disconsolate female figure, reeling in terror. “That grieving woman,” the artist wrote, “clad in black with a torn veil, robbed of all her jewels and ornaments, is the unfortunate Europe, which has endured plunder, humiliation, and misery for so many years now, so deeply felt by everyone, that I need say no more on the subject.”
In fact, he had a bit more to say on the subject. It was in that same year, 1638, that his old friend Balthasar Moretus commissioned from him a title-page design for yet another edition of Frederik de Marselaer’s primer on diplomatic conduct. Rubens responded with a typically sophisticated composition: Minerva (representing wisdom) and Mercury (patron of ambassadors) reach out to each other below a bust of Politica, an allegorical personification of good government, itself crowned by the towers of a vigorous city. Angels fill the sky above. Dancing children appear in relief below. In a letter, Rubens described the design in some detail, explaining the significance of its many elements in a monologue that shifted from the exploits of the Athenian politician Themistocles to his own philosophy on the conduct of foreign affairs. “The advice gleaned from Minerva’s wisdom must be put into action through eloquence, through the words best suited to the issue, so that the ambassador fulfills his duty with composure,” he wrote. “Through the accomplishments of ambassadors (indicated by the olive branch which they bear), who judiciously conduct public affairs, the citizens are preserved.”
Two years after he wrote those words, Rubens succumbed to the gout that had plagued him for so much of his adult life. His final decline was rapid. By the spring of 1640, the artist’s dexterous hands were crippled to the extent that he could no longer hold a pen. A series of doctors treated him in his last days; Ferdinand even dispatched his personal medical team from Brussels, but to no
avail. All the bloodlettings and false cures may well have done more harm than good, a possibility of which Rubens was acutely aware—he had always been suspicious of such treatments. Diet may also have contributed to his problems. Herring, a staple of the Flemish table, contains a hormone that exacerbates the effects of gout.
Rubens died on May 30, 1640, at the elegant home he designed for himself in Antwerp, with his wife by his side. Three days later he was buried at the Church of St. James. In the years following, an altar was raised in his honor, with paired columns, a statue of the Madonna by one of his prized students, and an epitaph in Latin composed by his old friend Gevaerts. Indeed, no Flemish writer of merit failed to pen an encomium to the great painter-diplomat, but few achieved the majesty that was Rubens’s signature. Antwerp’s Alexander van Fornenbergh may have come closest. “The rhyming geniuses who have celebrated Rubens in bold verses and composed learned poems in his honor all imagine they have carried off the palm, but they have taken charcoal to paint the sun,” he wrote. Only Rubens could have gotten away with that.