RUBENS, PETER PAUL

RUBENS, PETER PAUL. – Painter born in Siegen (Westphalia) on the 28th

(courtesy of Monsignor A. P. Frutaz)
RUBENS, PETER PAUL. — Detail of St. John the Baptist — Balduina (Padua), parish church.

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 returned to Antwerp in 1587, R. completed his artistic education there, first under Tobias Verhaecht and then under 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 embarked on a long journey through Italy that was decisive in the formation of his style: first to Venice, then to Mantua, followed by Florence (1600) and Rome (1602), and once again to Mantua, whence, commissioned by Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga, he travelled to Spain (1603), to Rome (1605), and to Genoa (1607); only in 1608 did he return to Antwerp. His study of the works of Caravaggio (his copy of the Vatican Deposition is preserved in the Liechtenstein Collection in Vienna), Barocci, Tintoretto, Veronese, Michelangelo, Correggio, Raphael, and antiquity (singular testimony to which is the painting depicting the Death of Seneca, c. 1606, in the Munich Pinakothek, which reproduces a celebrated Hellenistic sculpture, then in the Borghese collections and now in the Louvre), and, above all, of Titian, whose works he copied in large numbers with particular predilection, enabled R. to assimilate deeply the Italian classical-Renaissance culture and made him master of that rich, assured, and articulate technique on which his extraordinarily abundant and high-quality pictorial production rests. Among the most significant works of the Italian period, mention should be made of the three canvases depicting St. Helena, the Crucifixion, and the Crowning with Thorns, executed in 1602 for the church of S. Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome, from which they were removed in the 18th century (they are now preserved in the chapel of the Hospital of Grasse); the Triumph of Caesar in the National Gallery in London, 1602–1604, in which evident borrowings from Mantegna’s Triumphs, formerly in the Ducal Palace of Mantua and now in Hampton

Court; 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 Nursed by the She-Wolf, 1606–1608, in the Capitoline Gallery; The Adoration of the Shepherds, 1606–1608, in the church of S. Filippo Neri at Fermo; the three canvases of the apse of S. Maria in Vallicella in Rome, from 1608, with the Madonna and Angels, SS. Gregorio Mauro and Papiano, and SS. Domitilla, Nereo and Achilleo; The Circumcision, 1606 or 1607, in S. Ambrogio at Genoa (for which church he painted, some years later, in 1620, The Miracle of S. Ignatius), etc.

Having settled in Antwerp in 1608 (in 1609 he married Isabella Brandt there, whom he portrayed in numerous canvases, as he later did Elena Fourment, whom he married in 1630 as his second wife), he was appointed painter to the archdukes Alberto and Isabella, embarking upon that prodigious activity—not only as a painter, but also as a collector and diplomat in the service of the Infanta Isabella, on whose behalf he carried out brilliant missions to various courts of Europe, and as a writer (a great number of his letters have been preserved)—which makes him one of the most versatile intellects of the century. At the head of a flourishing workshop, surrounded by pupils and collaborators including J. Jordaens, F. Snyders and van Dyck, his production, extraordinarily varied and always bold and grandiose, progressively moved from an idealization and objectification of the image, nevertheless pervaded by exceptional vitality and stirred by a rhythm of movement and an inventive fervour that were fully Baroque, toward an increasingly pronounced formal freedom and fantastic excitation, finding its highest expression at the two extremes of thunderous large allegorical or religious compositions and lyrical representations of landscapes that were astonishingly anticipatory. Among the major undertakings of his maturity, particular mention should be made of the canvases in Antwerp Cathedral, The Elevation of the Cross (1610–11) and The Descent from the Cross (1611–14; later, in 1626, is The Assumption of Mary in the same church); The Communion of S. Francis, 1619, still under the influence of the analogous compositions of The Communion of S. Jerome by Agostino Carracci and Domenichino in Bologna and Rome, and The Lance Wound (1620), in the Antwerp Museum; the decoration of the Jesuit church in Antwerp (1620–21), destroyed in the 18th century except for the two altarpieces with The Miracles of S. Ignatius and The Miracles of S. Francis Xavier, preserved in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; the great cycle of celebratory paintings of Maria de' Medici executed in 1621–25 for the Luxembourg Gallery, now in the Louvre (from another cycle in honour of Henry IV, never completed, canvases remain in the Uffizi, Munich, etc.); the decoration of the ceiling of the Banqueting Hall (1630–35) at Whitehall in London; the Triptych of S. Ildefonso, for the court church of Brussels (1630–32), now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; The Crucifixion of S. Peter, 1635–40, in the church of S. Peter at Cologne, etc. A production for the most part of the highest artistic value, always displaying astonishing ease and skill in pictorial execution, placing R.—whose appreciation long suffered on account of classicist prejudices against the art of the Baroque period (his contemporaries would have greatly extolled him, and their approval found an echo at the end of the 17th century in Roger de Piles, in the well-known Querelle des anciens et des modernes, which opposed R. to Poussin, the idol of orthodox classicists)—as the immediate precursor of the most refined achievements of 18th-century French painting, as well as a highly inspired anticipation of the painting of the last century, from Delacroix to the Impressionists. In parallel, Romantic writers, from Baudelaire to Fromentin, extolled his work, initiating the high esteem in which the painter is held today. – Vedi tav. LXXXVIII.

(courtesy of Mons. A. P. Frutas)
RUBENS, PETER PAUL — The Miracle of St. Ignatius — Genoa, church of St. Ambrose.

On the doctrine that the Fathers of the Society of Jesus teach to Neophytes in the missions of China.

With a reply to the objections of certain Moderns who oppose II.
A work by Father Antonio Rubino of the Society of Jesus, Visitor of the Province of Japan and China.

Translated from Portuguese into Italian by Father Gio. Filippo de Marini, of the same Society.

To which is appended at the end a brief treatise on the form of Baptism pronounced in the Tumbonfice language, concerning the cases of Marriage that have occurred.

IN LYONS,
Appello HORATIO BOISSAT, AND CRORGIO REMEVE.

M. DC. LXV.
With Approval and Permission.

(photo Enc. Catt.)
RUBINO, ANTONIO – Title page of the Metodo, Lyon 1665 – Rome, copy in the National Library.

More recent works: J. Burckhardt, Die Landschaften von P. P. R., Vienna 1940; L. van Puyvelde, Les esquisses de Rubens, Basel 1940; J. Burckardt, R., Berlin 1942. Carla Guglielmi