RUBENS, PETER PAUL. - Painter b. at Siegen (Westphalia) on 28 June 1577, d. in Antwerp on 30 May 1640. Of a noble Antwerp family that had emigrated to Germany to escape the persecutions of the wars of religion and had returned to Antwerp in 1587, R. completed his artistic education there, first with Tobias Verhaecht, then with Adam van Noort and Otto van Veen, a Flemish Romanist.
Enrolled as a master in the Guild of St. Luke of Antwerp in 1598, two years later he began a long journey in Italy that was of decisive importance in shaping his manner: first in Venice, then in Mantua, then in Florence (1600) and in Rome (1602), again in Mantua, whence on the commission of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga he went to Spain (1603), to Rome (1605) and to Genoa (1607), and only in 1608 did he return to Antwerp. The study of the works of Caravaggio (his copy of the Vatican Entombment is preserved in the Liechtenstein collection in Vienna), of Barocci, of Tintoretto, of Veronese, of Michelangelo, of Correggio, of Raphael, of the antique (of which a singular testimony is the painting representing the Death of Seneca, of ca. 1606, in the Pinacoteca of Munich, which reproduces a famous Hellenistic sculpture, then in the Borghese collections and today in the Louvre), and, above all, of Titian, copied in great number with particular predilection, allowed R. a profound assimilation of the Italian classical-Renaissance culture and made him master of that rich, sure and articulated technique on which his production of painting, impressive in number and quality, is founded. Among the most significant works of the Italian period are to be remembered the three canvases with St. Helena, the Crucifixion and the Crowning with Thorns executed in 1602 for the church of S. Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome, whence they were removed in the 18th century (today they are preserved in the chapel of the Hospital of Grasse); the Triumph of Caesar of the National Gallery in London, 1602-1604, where borrowings from the Triumphs of Mantegna, formerly in the Ducal Palace of Mantua and today in Hampton
Court, appear evident; the Gonzaga Family Adoring the Trinity, executed in 1605 for the church of the Trinity in Mantua and today, mutilated, in the ducal palace; Romulus and Remus Suckled by the Wolf, 1606-1608, of the Capitoline Pinacoteca; the Adoration of the Shepherds, 1606-1608, in the church of St. Philip Neri in Fermo; the three canvases of the apse of S. Maria in Vallicella in Rome, of 1608, with the Madonna and Angels, Sts. Gregory, Maurus and Papian, and Sts. Domitilla, Nereus and Achilleus; the Circumcision, 1606 or 1607, in S. Ambrogio in Genoa (for which church he painted, some years later, in 1620, the Miracle of St. Ignatius), etc.
Settled in Antwerp from 1608 (in 1609 he married there Isabella Brandt, whom he portrayed in numerous canvases, as later Elena Fourment, married in second nuptials 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, on whose behalf he carried out brilliant missions at various courts of Europe, of writer (his letters are preserved in great number), which makes him one of the most versatile minds of the century. At the head of a most flourishing workshop, surrounded by pupils and collaborators among whom were J. Jordaens, F. Snyders and van Dyck, his production, varied in the highest degree and always bold and grandiose, went on progressively passing from an idealization and objectification of the image, nevertheless pervaded by exceptional vitality and agitated by a rhythm of movement and an inventive verve fully Baroque, toward a formal freedom and a fantastic excitement ever more accentuated that find their highest expression in the extreme opposites of the thundering great allegorical or religious compositions and of the lyrical representations of landscapes surprisingly anticipatory. Among the major undertakings of his maturity are to be remembered in particular the canvases of the cathedral of Antwerp with the Erection of the Cross (1610-11) and the Descent from the Cross (1611-14; later, 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 by Domenichino in Bologna and in Rome, and the Lance Thrust (1620), of the Museum of Antwerp; the decoration of the church of the Jesuits in Antwerp (1620-21), destroyed in the 18th century, except for the two altarpieces with the Miracles of St. Ignatius and the Miracles of St. Francis Xavier preserved in the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna; the great cycle of paintings celebrating Maria de' Medici executed in 1621-25 for the Luxembourg Gallery, today in the Louvre (of another cycle in honor of Henry IV, never completed, canvases remain in the Uffizi, in Munich, etc.); the decoration of the ceiling of the Banqueting Hall (1630-35) in Whitehall in London; the Triptych of St. Ildefonso, for the court church of Brussels (1630-32), today in the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna; the Crucifixion of St. Peter, 1635-40, in the church of St. Peter in Cologne, etc. A production for the most part of the highest artistic value, always of surprising facility and skill of pictorial execution, which places R., whose appreciation has long suffered because of classicist prejudices against the art of the Baroque period (he would be much exalted by his contemporaries, whose consent found an echo at the end of the 17th century in Roger de Piles in the famous Querelle des anciens et des modernes, opposing R. to Poussin, idol of the orthodox classicists) as the immediate antecedent of the most refined achievements of French painting of the 18th century as well as a most ingenious anticipation of the painting of the last century from Delacroix to the Impressionists. In parallel the Romantic writers, from Baudelaire to Fromentin, exalted his work, giving rise to the present high esteem of the painter. - See pl. LXXXVIII.
Bibliography4 works
Carla Guglielmi
