**RUBEN** — Firstborn son of Jacob and Leah, his first wife (Gen. 29:32). At his birth, his mother exclaimed, “God saw my affliction,” and the name R. is connected with the assonance of *rà‘àh bè’oujì r’ saw affliction,” but properly means: “Behold a son.”
Of R. in his youth, the episode of the mandrakes is recalled, which heightened the jealousy between Leah and Rachel (Gen. 30:14 ff.). For having violated his father’s bed, he was deprived of all rights of the firstborn. Jacob’s words are significant in this regard: “Reuben, you are my firstborn, my strength and the firstfruits of my vigor (not sorrow, as the Vulgate reads), preeminent in rank and preeminent in passion: fiery as water, you shall not excel...” (Gen. 49:3–4).
Though, like his other brothers, he was envious of Joseph, he resolutely opposed his murder and suggested casting him into a dry cistern, intending thus to save him and restore him to his father. He took no part in the sale his brothers made of Joseph; and when he did not find the boy, he tore his garments in grief (Gen. 37:21–30). For this act, Joseph later did not hold Reuben as a hostage but Simeon, the eldest after him (Gen. 42:24), and assigned Reuben the place of honor among his brothers (Gen. 43:33). He went down to Egypt with the entire family of Jacob (Gen. 46:9), and there he died (cf. 1 Chron. 2:1 and 5:1, 3–10).
The tribe of Reuben received from Moses, even before the occupation of the land of Canaan, the lower Transjordan, sharing with the tribe of Gad the territory seized from the Amorite king Sihon (Num. 21:21–35; 32:1–38). Its boundaries were from Arnon in the south to the Wadi Hesban (Heshbon) in the north, and from the Dead Sea to the desert of Moab (Josh. 13:15–23; cf. Num. 32:34–38). It was always among the less numerous tribes (cf. Deut. 33:6; Judg. 5:16), chiefly devoted to pastoralism, and never played an important part in the history of Israel, being also situated on the margins of the nation’s life. Proximity and contact with the Moabites were a continual threat to it, and Moabite infiltration was so deep that in Isa. 15–16 the entire land of Reuben is practically depicted as Moabite; in the inscription of King Mesha (q.v.), names of Reubenite cities conquered by Moab recur (q.v.).
Of this tribe were Dathan and Abiram, who in the desert, together with the Levite Korah, incited the people against Moses and were punished by God (Num. 16). In the age of the Judges, the tribe mostly remained idle in its pastures while the others were engaged against the oppressor, so as to merit ironic reproach in the Song of Deborah (Judg. 5:15–16). In the time of King Saul, the Reubenites had to defend themselves against raids by the Hagrites (1 Chron. 5:10, 19–22). A closer bond with the Cisjordanian tribes developed under David, to whom Reuben and the other two Transjordanian tribes (Gad and half of Manasseh) supplied 120,000 warriors (1 Chron. 13:3, 7); among David’s heroes is also Adina, chief of the Reubenites (1 Chron. 11:42). The tribe of Reuben also participated in the schism of the northern tribes; yet it seems that for some time, at least under King Jotham (q.v.), together with the two Transjordanian tribes, it obeyed the king of Judah (cf. 1 Chron. 5:17). Finally, at the time of the Assyrian deportation (q.V. THEGLATHPHALASAR III), Reuben shared the fate of the northern tribes (1 Chron. 5:6–26) and left no trace of itself.
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**RUBENS, PETER PAUL** — Detail of *St. John the Baptist* — Balduina (Padua), parish church.
(Courtesy of Mons. D. P. Frutaz)
Enrolled as a master in the Guild of St. Luke in Antwerp in 1598, two years later he began a long journey to Italy that was decisive in shaping his style: first to Venice, then to Mantua, then to Florence (1600) and Rome (1602), back to Mantua, where at the behest of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga he went to Spain (1603), to Rome (1605) and to Genoa (1607), only returning to Antwerp in 1608. His study of the works of Caravaggio (his copy of the Vatican *Deposition* is preserved in the Liechtenstein collection in Vienna), of Barocci, Tintoretto, Veronese, Michelangelo, Correggio, Raphael, and antiquity (of which a singular testimony is the painting *The Death of Seneca*, dated 1606, in the Pinacoteca of Munich, reproducing a famous Hellenistic sculpture then in the Borghese collection and now in the Louvre), and above all of Titian—copied in great numbers with particular predilection—enabled Rubens to deeply assimilate Italian classical-Renaissance culture and made him master of that rich, sure, and articulate technique on which his impressive output, remarkable for both quantity and quality, was founded. Among the most significant works from his Italian period are the three canvases with *St. Helena*, the *Crucifixion*, and the *Crowning with Thorns*, executed in 1602 for the church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome, from which they were removed in the 18th century (now preserved in the chapel of the Hospital of Grasse); the *Triumph of Caesar* in the National Gallery, London, 1602–1604, where clear borrowings from Mantegna’s *Triumphs* in the Ducal Palace of Mantua (now in Hampton Court) are evident; the *Elevation of the Cross* (1610–11) in the church of St. Walburga in Antwerp; the triptych of the *Descent from the Cross* (1611–14) in the cathedral of Antwerp; the *Assumption of the Virgin* (1625–26) in the cathedral of Antwerp; the altarpiece of the *Miraculous Draught of Fishes* (1618–19) for the Jesuit church in Antwerp (1620–21), destroyed in the 18th century except for the two panels with the *Miracles of St. Ignatius* and the *Miracles of St. Francis Xavier* preserved in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; the great cycle of paintings celebrating Marie de’ Medici executed in 1621–25 for the Galerie du Luxembourg, now in the Louvre (of another cycle in honor of Henry IV, never completed, some canvases remain in the Uffizi, in Munich, etc.); the decoration of the ceiling of the Banqueting House (1630–35) in Whitehall, London; the *Triptych of St. Ildefonso*, for the court church of Brussels (1630–32), now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; the *Crucifixion of St. Peter*, 1635–40, in the church of St. Peter in Cologne, etc. His output, for the most part of the highest artistic value, always marked by astonishing facility and skill in painting, places Rubens—whose appreciation long suffered due to classical prejudices against Baroque art (he would be greatly exalted by his contemporaries, whose consensus found echo at the end of the 17th century in Roger de Piles in the noted *Querelle des anciens et des modernes*, opposing Rubens to Poussin, the idol of orthodox classicists)—as an immediate precursor of the most refined achievements of 18th-century French painting as well as a most ingenious forerunner of 19th-century painting from Delacroix to the Impressionists. In parallel, Romantic writers, from Baudelaire to Fromentin, exalted his work, initiating the high regard in which the painter is held today. — See pl. LXXXVIII.
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Court; The Gonzaga Family in Adoration of the Trinity, executed in 1605 for the church of the Trinity in Mantua and now, damaged, in the ducal palace; Romulus and Remus at the Teats of the She-Wolf, 1606–1608, from the Capitoline Picture Gallery; the Adoration of the Shepherds, 1606–1608, in the church of S. Filippo Neri at Fermo; the three canvases in the apse of S. Maria in Vallicella in Rome, from 1608, with the Madonna and angels, SS. Gregory, Mauro and Papianus, and SS. Domitilla, Nereus and Achilleus; the Circumcision, 1606 or 1607, in S. Ambrogio at Genoa (for which church he later painted, some years afterward, in 1620, the Miracle of St Ignatius), etc.
Having settled in Antwerp from 1608 (in 1609 he married Isabella Brandt, whom he portrayed in numerous canvases, as later he did Elena Fourment, whom he married in second wedlock in 1630), he was appointed painter to the Archdukes Albert and Isabella, beginning that prodigious activity, besides that of painter, of collector, of diplomat in the service of the Infanta Isabella, for whom he carried out brilliant missions at various European courts, and of writer (a great number of his letters are preserved), which makes him one of the most versatile minds of the century. At the head of a very flourishing studio, surrounded by pupils and collaborators among whom were J. Jordaens, F. Snyders and van Dyck, his output, extremely varied and always bold and grandiose, gradually passed from an idealization and objectification of the image, yet traversed by exceptional vitality and stirred by a rhythm of movement and an inventive impetus fully Baroque, toward an ever more pronounced formal freedom and fantastic excitement that find their highest expression in the extreme opposites of the thunderous large allegorical or religious compositions and the lyrical representations of landscapes surprisingly anticipatory. Among the major enterprises of his maturity are to be recalled in particular the canvases in Antwerp Cathedral with the Erection of the Cross (1610–11) and the Deposition (1611–14); later, in 1626, is the Assumption of Mary in the same church; the Communion of St Francis, 1619, still under the influence of the analogous compositions of the Communion of St Jerome by Agostino Carracci and of Domenichino in Bologna and Rome, and the Lance Stroke (1620), in the Museum of Antwerp; the decoration of the church
