Sutton : Introduction to Rubens

Rubens , Het Pelsken,  1636-38

This is one of my favorites.

In his middle age, 

Rubens loved his fleshy young wife

wrapped up in fur.

Quite delectable,

and the forerunner of 

so many pinup girls.

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Rubens, Adam and Eve, 1598-1600

But our text is chronological.

Beginning with the early works of Rubens,

this was based on the print shown below:

Marcantonio  Raimondi, after Raphael, 1512-14

Rubens certainly improved upon it - big time.

And he hadn’t even been to Italy yet

where he would spend the next eight years. 

Rubens, Fall of Man , 1628-9

Here’s a later version,

based on Titian’s piece below:

Titian (1488-1576), Fall of Man, 1550

Rubens left the woman alone

but transformed the man - 

from a gardener

into a baker.

Rubens made about 30 copies of Titian paintings -

we’ll talk about them more later.

Rubens, Self Portrait wit Friends,  c. 1602

Here is Rubens inviting us to join the courtly circle into which he was invited by his older brother standing behind him.  The man at the far left may be the excellent portrait painter, Frans Pourbus. The man on the far right is the distinguished humanist and Catholic scholar,  Justus Lipsius (1547-1606).  

One might note that the more solitary Rembrandt only painted himself alone.

(A greater need for "self-realization" as Sutton puts it)

One might also note that in 1602 Caravaggio was in Rome at the height of his career -

but he may as well been living on a different planet.

(Rubens would copy him later)

Titian, Charles V at the Battle if Muhlberg, 1548

Rubens, Equestrian portrait of the Duke of Lerma, 1603

El Greco , St. Martin, 1597-99

Sutton tells that:

The portrait acknowledges Rubens’ admiration for Titian‘s Charles the fifth on horseback which he would have known from the Spanish royal collection while achieving a greater immediacy and vitality through more foreshortening and dazzling lighting effects.

I’m not saying that Rubens ever saw the above El Greco - but I’m feeling more of him than Titian here. The somber majesty of the bellicose monarch has been replaced with a comic book hero.   One might well guess that the Duke of Lerma was a courtier rather than soldier.

When Rubens returned to Mantua via Venice, the Duke commissioned  this series for a Jesuit church. Sutton sees the influence of Veronese - while l’m seeing a lot more of a visionary like Tintoretto.

Roman, Lo Spinario, 1st C. AD

Rubens, 1601-2

Rubens, Head of Hercules, 1601-8

Farnese Hercules    

Rubens wrote a pamphlet about the practice of drawing from ancient sculpture - now regretfully lost.

For him, an ancient piece was apparently a starting point rather than a mimetic goal.

According to Rubens, for some artists the practice of copying antique sculptures was beneficial, while for others it was "pernicious, even to the ruin of their art. I conclude that in order to attain the highest perfection in painting, it is necessary to understand the antique, may, to be so thoroughly possessed of this knowledge, that it may diffuse itself everywhere. Yet it must be judiciously applied, and so that it may not in the least smell of the stone.

Rubens, Madonna della  Vallicella, 1608

In painstaking fashion, he worked out this important public commission in a series of preparatory drawings and oils, freely adapting compositional and figural elements from his studies of the Italian masters, notably Titian, Raphael, and Correggio. 

It does not appear that Reuben’s has taken anything of value from those three masters.

Rubens, Marchesa Brigida Spinoza Doria, 1606

Belongs on the set of a horror movie - not in an art museum 

Rubens, self portrait with Isabella Brant, 1609-10

 

There is an endearing, modest sensuality about this young couple that is so delightful, though as a painting, it's rather staid.

Despite the couple's elegant finery, the marriage portrait that Rubens painted conveys an informality and mutual affection that was unprecedented in the pictorial conventions of marriage portraiture. Though buttressed by symbolism and tradition (the honeysuckle bower is the residual memory of medieval love gardens and the clasped hands are the emblem of marital fidelity) and speaking clearly enough of social position, the image attests to a new middle-class concept of marital love and an unpretentious view of private life - social ideals that were just beginning to replace old aristocratic notions of marriage as primarily a pact of economic and social convenience and utility.

Rubens, Adoration of the Magi, 1609 and 28-29

Rubens, Raising of the  Cross, 1610

Though adopting a traditional medieval triptych format that had never gone entirely out of fashion in Antwerp, the painting's central subject is rare in northern art (though treated by Hans Baldung Grien in a woodcut), drawing heavily on Italian inspiration (specifically Tintoretto, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio). However Rubens has recast his sources with a bold new vitality and authority. Muscular figures strain to raise aloft the powerful and tortured body of Christ - the spiritual athlete, whose suffering is vivid but emotionally controlled as he looks heavenward toward the figure of God the Father who formerly appeared above on the (now lost) altar pediment. Originally installed at the top of a flight of sixteen steps, this vast triptych seemed the fulfillment of the ideals of Charles Borromeo (Instructiones fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae [Antwerp, 1572]) and other spiritual leaders of the Counter Reformation, such as Gilio de Fabriano, Johannes van der Meulen (Molanus), Andrea Possevino, and Raffaello Borghini. It was imperative that the high altar should be monumental, prominent, and legible; it should feature the Christ figure or another New Testament subject (according to the prescription of the Third Diocese Synod of the bishopric of Antwerp in May 1610); and, perhaps most important of all, it should prompt a spiritual meditation on the life of Christ and the Passion that is so intensely felt as to appear (in Ignatius of Loyola's terms) as if it were happening before one's very eyes. Rubens's painting successfully achieved the clarity, naturalism, and emotional impact necessary to stimulate the devotion and piety that were the ideals of the Counter Reformation. Moreover, its dignified and controlled Christ (so different, for example, from the Middle Ages' pathetic Man of Sorrows) seemed to embody the synthesis of stoicism and Christianity that were Lipsius's ideal. 

The brawny dudes are triumphantly raising a flag - not torturing and killing a man.  Only the dismayed faces of the women on the left indicate otherwise.

Like Rembrandt and the Medievals - I’m not so much into triumphalism — preferring Christ as The  Man of Sorrows.

 

Christianity is losing its visual expression

Rubens, Descent from the Cross, 1611-14

. Also a huge winged altarpiece, The Descent from the Cross painted in 1611-1614 (fig. 18) is as calm and elegiac as the Raising of the Cross is passionate. That work, however, was not destined for a high altar but for the altar of a municipal shooting club in a chapel of the Cathedral (Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk). It too achieves a monumental clarity and naturalism, while conveying through the mourners' coordinated effort to lower the body of Christ a model of spiritual solidarity and team work befiting its patrons' organizational ideals. The second decade of the century was Rubens's most classical period, when his figures were characterized by a noble simplicity, dramatic rhetorical gestures, firm modeling, clear local colors, and a pearly translucence in flesh tones. By comparison, van Veen's classicism is alternately leaden or limp, and even Janssens's seems oddly vulcanized. We appreciate this style's calmer application in paintings like the Descent - the so-called Rockox Triptych of 1613-1615 and the Tribute Money. while the style could also be applied more vigorously to vast images of choreographed commotion like the great Last Judgment. Painted in 1615 for the Jesuit Church of Duke Wolfgang-Wilhelm at Neuburg on the

Danube, this painting is now preserved in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. What at first appears

to be a Gordian knot of bodies readily untangles itself to reveal a carefully structured design that

acknowledges Tintoretto and, of course, Michelangelo, but again subsumes its sources. Rubens

places the emphasis not on harsh judgment and the damned, who descend to their torment rela-

tively inconspicuously on the right, but on the saved, who appear as beautiful, sensuous nudes

floating heavenward on the left. The optimistic message is one of Jesuit positivism and the

promise of readily attainable salvation.

Rubens’ figures - as powerfully energized as they are - do so at the expense of graphic tension and dramatic space.

That may be appropriate for "Jesuit positivism" - but it makes me cringe.

Mention is made of the “splendid" Sampson and Delilah now in the National Gallery, London. Above, I’ve compared it with the preparatory sketch in Cincinnati ( the one that I’m familiar with )

I would agree with those (including A.I.) who attribute the London painting to an assistant.  The details seem painted without a feeling for the whole.

But I’ve never been all that thrilled by the sketch, either.  It’s wonderful as a cartoon, but only in the manner of a great painting.

Caravaggio, Deposition, 1603-4

In these same years he made "creative" copies not only of Caravaggio's famous Deposition, no doubt seeking to understand better the master's naturalism, but also Parmigianino's highly mannered Cupid Shaping his Bow. 

So much shock, awe, and ooomph has been lost in Rubens' copy - but it does feel more tender

Parmigianino, Cupid Shaping his Bow, 1533- 1535

 

 

 

 

 

Rubens, Copy of Parmigianino, 1614

  Rubens modified the body of Parmigianino's Cupid in significant and perhaps critical ways. In the original the figure twists round to look straight into the eyes of the spectator, perhaps his next victim, but Rubens made him less confrontational and less malicious. He also gave the god a more tense and muscular body, looser ringlets that are not pulled back under a womanly band, and he made the arch of the god's back less provocative. It is an open question whether Rubens was attracted or repelled by the feminized body of Parmigianino's Cupid, and the way that he is shown not only as duplicitous and 

provocative but as merciless to his victims  (Jeremy Wood)

 All of the changes made by Rubens appear to be for the worse.

All sense of  mischief and fun has been lost.

Who knows what Rubens had in mind. - one might think this would have been a perfect subject for a sensualist.

Rubens, Sine Cerero er baccho Frigat Venus, 1614

Rubens, Miracles  of St. Ignatius , 1617-8

 

 

 

 

Rubens, Massacre of Innocents, 1611

Rubens, Rape of the Daughters of Leuccipus, 1618

Above are some paintings from the first decade after Rubens returned to Antwerp.

Mostly, I feel the elements of great painting - but not great painting itself.

The above piece  being an exception.

It is so sculptural, goofy, and politically incorrect (by 21st C. standards)

Rubens’ typical collapsing of space seems appropriate for this lusty subject matter - the first time it was ever depicted.

Apotheosis of King James I, Whitehall ceiling

The day after the Jesuit Church was consecrated, the indefatigable Rubens was already writing to the English King James I's agent about the possibility of decorating the newly rebuilt Banqueting House in Whitehall. In making his sales pitch he remarked, "regarding the hall in the New Palace, I confess that I am, by natural instinct, 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."

Rubens certainly decorated the vast ceiling - but that’s about all he achieved

Rubens, Head of Cyrus brought to Queen Tomiris, 1622

What a strange subject  matter - 

but apparently suitable for the Infanta of Spain during an era of war and rebellion.

Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder, 1616

Rubens and Osias Beert,  Pausias and Glaucera, 1612-15

Another revealing case of collaboration between a Rubensian figure painter and a still-life artist, formerly believed to be Jan Brueghel the Elder but probably Osias Beert, is offered by a painting in Sarasota.  Although the design was once again conceived by Rubens, the somewhat awkward figures were probably for the most part executed by his studio. The subject of the work, long mistakenly thought to be a self-portrait of Rubens and Isabella Brant (no doubt because of the resemblance of the figures seated poses to the famous double portrait in Munich, is more likely to be the theme of Pausias and Glycera. Pliny (Naturalis Historia, xxxv, chapter 11, 123-127) relates that Pausias, a famous Greek artist, fell in love with Glycera, the inventor of flower wreaths, and painted a highly prized painting of her plaiting her flowers, known in the ancient world as the stephanoplocus. Though a rare subject in art, it surely was not too obscure for Rubens, who after all had been the first artist ever to represent such subjects as the Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus.  Moreover the subject of Pausias and Glycera was well known from the art theoretical literature of the day. Karel van Mander recounted the story in his "Den Grondt der edel vry schilder-const" (Foundations of the Noble Free Art of Painting) of 1604, in a chapter "On the Distribution and Interaction of Col-ors," which begins with a defense of the art of flower painting. Van Mander explains that the colors distributed by nature in fields of flowers are skillfully gathered and ordered by Glycera in her wreaths, but by painting her, Pausias attained the higher artifice of "naturalistic painting" (naturlijk malen; chap. 11, stanza 4, line 2).104 The story thus not only illustrates the time-honored philosophical discussion of the competition between nature and art (and here van Mander clearly implies that the latter is the winner because art employs nature's methods as its guide and can also depict the creative process itself), but also served in the defense of the lowly genres that were the specialties of collaborators. In addressing the subject, Rubens and his followers not only emulated antiquity in executing a modern (i.e., seventeenth-century) stephanoplocus, but also affirmed the higher value of art's goal of naturalism. Thus Pausias and Glycera was an appropriate theme for a collaborative effort between baroque artists, who through their various specialties competed as they strove toward the shared goal of naturalistic painting

This collaborative piece has all the drama of three potted plants.  It seems as lost as the two figures within it.

(

Rubens, Disembarkation of Marie D’Medici, 1622-25

A two-tiered creation:

political propaganda above,

hedonistic paganism below.

One of the few pieces I remember from visiting the Louvre fifty years ago.

Way, way over the top - and making me recall a Maxwell Anderson play about another Catholic Queen:

"John Knox.   :  Aye, dicing, gaming, cards, drinking, dancing, whoring, and all the papistical uses of the flesh -they run before her like a foul air"

(I shared the stage with him asThird Guard in a high school production )

Victory of Truth Over Heresy

Did Europe really need a monument to religious intolerance?

It's shameful.

 

Following Archduke Albert's death in 1621, Rubens greatly increased his diplomatic activi-ties, initially serving as a secret agent and later as a diplomatic representative of the Infanta Isabella. His artistic profession naturally provided a passe-partout to all the courts of Europe. However in the midst of his increasingly restless activities as a diplomat he also received his most important commission from the Infanta, namely the Triumph of the Eucharist tapestry series for the Convento de la Carmelitas Descalzas Reales in Madrid .Rubens prepared this series with an unprecedented thoroughness, working out the modelli with an exceptionally high degree of resolution and contriving an especially rich, symbolic program at once internally consistent and evocative of larger spiritual issues. The thought and effort expended suggest a deeply personal spiritual devotion, and indeed, few artistic projects produced during the Counter Reformation offer a more forceful illustration of the triumph of the Church and the vivid consumation ifbits dogma. In May of 1628, Rubens wrote with the fervor of belief  "religion exerts a stronger influence upon the human mind than anything other motive."

Judging from the above images, it’s hard to say whether the painted modellos or the woven tapestries have suffered most from aging.   It’s even harder to imagine how they once appeared.

Apotheosis of the Duke of Buckingham, 1627

Rubens, Virgin and Child enthroned with saints, 1628 562cm x 402cm

 

In this exhibit, the given title refers primarily to the Virgin and Child.  Elsewhere the title references the mystical  marriage of Saint Catherine. But isn't the nearly nude figure of Saint Sebastian given the most light and the largest dimension in this image?  

 Is it just my 21st Century self that sees Sebastian's  relationship with George as romantic ? Saint George is so masculine, heroic, and active.  Saint Sebastian is so soft, feminine, and passive.  The one has pierced the fierce dragon with his lance ( as shown at his feet) -- the other has been pierced by the many arrows of executioners.

This would appear to present homoerotic love as a path to the divine - a tradition going back to Plato - and wasn't neo-Platonism still as fashionable among the learned elite of that day as deconstruction is today ?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bronzino, portrait of young man as St. Sebastian, 1533

Here's an example from an earlier century.

Rubens himself appears to have been enthusiastically heterosexual, but those who commissioned this work probably felt otherwise.

Even before Rubens departed for Spain, he had shown a rekindled interest in the art of Titian. His large altarpiece of the Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints  for the Church of the Augustinian Fathers in Antwerp not only adopts a more painterly and colorful Venetian style than comparable subjects from the previous decade, but also paraphrases aspects of the design of Titian's Madonna of the Pesaro Family.

 

 

Titian, Pesaro Madonna, 1518

 

 

Not much in common with the Rubens pieced discussed above.

 

 

. Rubens found little intellectual stimulation at the Spanish court (later writing to Peiresc, he observed "here is no lack of learned men there, but mostly of a severe doctrine, and very supercilious in the manner of theologians" but clearly appreciated the attentions of the rather malleable and hedonistic Philip IV. Rubens claimed that the king visited his studio daily and in characteristically generous fashion assessed him as "a prince endowed with excellent qualities," chief among them, of course, his love of art.Is Philip IV owned more than 1,000 paintings, including scores of works by Titian, mostly gathered by his predecessors Charles V and Philip II. These Rubens studiously copied during his protracted stay in Madrid; no fewer than thirty-two copies after Titian remained in the artist's estate at his death. Some of the finest of his copies are subtly creative reinterpretations of their sources, such as Worship of Venus and its pendant, Bacchanal with Andrians , both now in Stockholm

Details taken from the Bacchanals

by Titian and Rubens

Why was Rubens driven to copy Titian so many times?

He liked making money - and couldn't he have made more in his large commissions ?

Has anyone ever thought that his versions are not humbled by Titian's  originals ?

As in this case, where he enhances the fleshy volume of the figures

at the expense of visual power.

Was he too self obsessed to see that ?

Or was he doing it as a weird  kind of penance ?

Rubens, Landscape with Cart fording stream, 1615-24

Rubens, Forest at Dawn with Stag Hunt, 1633

scarcely three dozen painted landscapes exist from his entire carcer. However at the end of the decade and especially after returning to Antwerp and purchasing the castle Het Steen, Rubens renewed his interest in the art form. From about 1614 to 1620, he had painted imaginary landscapes of remarkable structural sophistication, culminating in works like the Landscape with Cart , which ultimately descends from designs used by Pieter Bruegel, Lucas van Valckenborch, and Hans Bol, but makes the scene at once more natural and universal by seeming to reconcile virtually all of the elemental oppositions of nature. When he took up landscape again in the 1630s it was with a more private, proto-romantic view of nature. Probably painted around 1635, A Forest at Dawn with a Deer Hunt  still employs compositional formulae popularized by late mannerist artists (such as Gillis van Coninxloo and Roe-lant Savery), but recasts these sources with an unprecedented painterly freedom. The rising sun that explodes upon the scene from behind the traditional repoussoir of a darkened tree stump not only shoots rays of shimmering light across the forest floor, but seems to drive the scampering prey as forcefully as the hunters and their dogs. The thick crepuscular atmosphere of the forest interior is shattered by this sudden burst, creating dramatic oppositions of darkness and light, day and night, but now nature's dichotomies are resolved with a more poetic, elegiac vision that again calls to mind the art of Titian. A more cultivated and serene view of nature is offered in the parklike setting of Rubens's eminently civilized Conversatie à la Mode . With this ravishing picture the artist not only envisioned an ideal of society, discourse, fashion, and deportment, but also of love and courtship. It is an enchanted world that Rubens conceives, far from the vulgarities of daily life, where the women are forever beautiful and the men ardent but gallant. The air is filled with playfully diverting putti, while the manicured grounds are richly appointed with noble architecture and statuary that seem almost to breathe. Especially in the background this painting is executed with some of the delicacy of touch characteristic of the artist's sylvan and pastoral late mythological subjects, but the colors are deep and sure, the brushwork, especially in the figures, caressing and descriptive. Socially as well as pictorially, this ideal of arcadian high life can be regarded as the high-life counterpart of Rubens's bumptious and elemental peasant kermesse from

Like a Sung Dynasty landscape, Rubens appears to be presenting the magnificence of creation - rather than the more personal response of how he feels being out in the fields and woods.  And so he is closer to the 17th C Dutch than the 19th C. French.

Rubens, Three Graces, 1630-35

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Looking  back over the artist's entire career,

it does appear that Rubens mostly worked to please others and thereby accumulate wealth and  prestige.

A true bourgeois.

The church/state leaders of the Spanish empire must have been convinced that 

presenting their world as glorious, sensual, and triumphant

would be a selling point in their competition with  Protestant heretics.

Rubens apparently felt that way about his own life -  so he was their perfect spokesman.

Regarding religion, Rubens once wrote that: 

"religion exerts a stronger influence upon the human mind than anything other motive."

.. but regarding clerics he wrote:

here is no lack of learned men there, but mostly of a severe doctrine, and very supercilious in the manner of theologians

His obsession with Titian suggests that he did love to look at good paintings - even if not especially devoted to producing them.

He is not as well represented in American art museums as Rembrandt, for example,  and I’ve never seen a painting attributed to him that I really liked.  The reproductions, however, suggest that his "Garden of Love" and portraits of himself and  family are really great pieces.