Rubens and the Eloquence of Drawing

Catherine H. Lusheck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351770880
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Monographs

Rubens and the Eloquence of Drawing re-examines the early graphic practice of the preeminent northern Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577–1640) in light of early modern traditions of eloquence, particularly as promoted in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Flemish, Neostoic circles of philologist, Justus Lipsius (1547–1606). Focusing on the roles that rhetorical and pedagogical considerations played in the artist's approach to disegno during and following his formative Roman period (1600–08), this volume highlights Rubens's high ambitions for the intimate medium of drawing as a primary site for generating meaningful and original ideas for his larger artistic enterprise. As in the Lipsian realm of writing personal letters – the humanist activity then described as a cognate activity to the practice of drawing – a Senecan approach to eclecticism, a commitment to emulation, and an Aristotelian concern for joining form to content all played important roles.

Two chapter-long studies of individual drawings serve to demonstrate the relevance of these interdisciplinary rhetorical concerns to Rubens's early practice of drawing. Focusing on Rubens's Medea Fleeing with Her Dead Children (Los Angeles, Getty Museum), and Kneeling Man (Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen), these close-looking case studies demonstrate Rubens's commitments to creating new models of eloquent drawing and to highlighting his own status as an inimitable maker. Demonstrating the force and quality of Rubens's intellect in the medium then most associated with the closest ideas of the artist, such designs were arguably created as more robust pedagogical and preparatory models that could help strengthen art itself for a new and often troubled age.

Part I
Drawing in Context

1
Setting the Stage

Privileging Eloquent Disegno in Rubens’s Early Drawings

Taking Rubens’s Drawings Seriously

In the late allegorical painting critiquing the deleterious effects of the Thirty Years War (1618–48), the so-called Horrors of War, c. 1638 (London, National Gallery; Plate 5), Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens curiously elected to insert a painted drawing – not a painting, nor a tapestry, nor a print – directly under Mars’s destructive feet. Set firmly alongside other contemporary markers of humanist knowledge, including a book and a lute, and situated precisely at the bottom center of the painting, this rendering of a drawing of The Three Graces stands as a rhetorical demonstration (dimostrazione) of how seriously Rubens took drawing and the practice of drawing in his larger artistic enterprise. As a key marker of the liberal arts in the painting, the drawing almost certainly embodied for Rubens the intellectual and cultural superiority – and indeed, the perceived grace (grazia) – of his humanist milieu. Through a striking moment of rhetorical antithesis, it represented the very real threat to peace and cultura exemplified in his allegory featuring Mars’s and Alecto’s furious rampage, poor Europa’s grief, and the wide open door of Janus’s temple.¹ For Rubens, the destructive trampling (desecration?) of what may look to modern eyes like the image of a relatively insignificant work on paper clearly held the rhetorical potential to express – front and center, at the heart of painting – the artistic and social indignities and degradation suffered in war-torn Europa, including Flanders which suffered great losses to population and prosperity as a result of the Dutch Revolt.² As a sign of the persistence and grace of humanist culture in spite of incredible devastation, the proud drawing – and by extension, the conceptual basis of painting for which it synecdochally stands – signaled the crucial role that a substantive, conceptually bound humanist art might play in helping to renew Europe’s strength and prosperity. As Philipp Fehl observed, “It takes Minerva, the armed goddess of statecraft,” – and not incidentally, Wisdom too – “to ward off Mars so that the arts may flourish in a climate of peace and plenty.”³ For drawing and painting, along with art, diplomacy, philosophy, and politics, were all arguably inextricably linked in Rubens’s mind, with his ambitions for one inflecting his ambitions for the others. In a similar vein, Rubens’s earlier Minerva Protecting Pax from Mars (Peace and War), 1629–30 (London, National Gallery; Figure 1.1), also painted during the long European conflict, allegorically encapsulates the rich, cornucopian benefits to Flanders and Europa that Rubens believed accompanied a peaceful and well-governed Europe.

Good reasons abound to take Rubens’s artistic and even social ambitions for drawing in this context seriously, not least of which is a truly vast body of scholarship highlighting Rubens’s training and self-fashioning as a prodigious and erudite humanist artist. Rubens was arguably the quintessential northern humanist artist of his age, and drawing had formed the basis of a humanist artist’s training since the early Renaissance in Italy.⁴ A wide range of scholars, including Justus Müller Hofstede, Wolfgang Stechow, Michael Jaffé, Elizabeth McGrath, Jeffrey Muller, Marjon van der Meulen, Ulrich Heinen, and many others, have explored the breadth and depth of Rubens’s humanist training and his classical rhetorical commitments.⁵ This includes his embrace of the Horatian ideal of ut pictura poesis, or painting as a poetic, liberal art across his artistic enterprise.⁶ Trained in the northern intellectual tradition of Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) and the Louvain philologist Justus Lipsius, and onetime pupil of Lipsius’s learned friend, the pictor doctus Otto van Veen (Flemish, 1556–1629), Rubens remained a committed humanist artist throughout his career. As a painter and diplomat to some of the most important European courts of his age, including the Spanish governors of the Netherlands, Albert and Isabella,⁷ he enjoyed an international reach in the highest court and papal circles, and was introduced to some of the period’s greatest humanist thinkers through personal connections and letters, including Lipsius, J.J. Scaliger (1540–1609), Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637), Balthasar I Moretus (1574–1641), Gaspar Scioppius (1576–1649), and Franciscus Junius (1591–1677).

Figure 1.1 Peter Paul Rubens, Minerva Protecting Pax from Mars (Peace and War), 1629–30, oil on canvas, 203.5 × 298 cm. Presented by the Duke of Sutherland, 1828. London, National Gallery (inv. NG46). © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.

Testifying to his lifelong humanist commitments, contemporaries praised Rubens as much for his superior erudition and judicious choices as for his skill in painting. Fellow humanist and philologist Gaspar Scoppius wrote of Rubens as early as 1609, “I do not know what to praise most in my friend Rubens: his mastery of painting … or his knowledge of all aspects of belles lettres, or finally, that fine judgment which inevitably attends such fascinating conversation.”⁸ Philippe Chifflet, chaplain to the Infanta Isabella and a humanist correspondent of Rubens and his friend Balthasar Moretus, eulogized Rubens as “the most learned painter in the world.”⁹ This may not have been an exaggeration. According to seventeenth-century French theoretician and biographer Roger de Piles (1635–1709), the painter knew at least six, and likely seven, languages, including Latin, Greek, Italian, French, Spanish, Flemish, and probably English.¹⁰ In both his art and personal letters, Rubens liberally alluded to noble, classical themes and borrowed from an unusually wide range of luminaries’ works from the classical (especially Roman) world, including seminal writings by Aristotle, Quintilian, Pliny, Virgil, Ovid, Livy, Seneca the Younger, and Tacitus among many others. In one letter to his Flemish colleague Franciscus Junius, he claimed to “adore [the] very footprints of classical painters such as Apelles and Timanthes.”¹¹ He collected and documented a wide range of antiquarian coins, sculpture, and texts and used countless works of classical and classically inspired art, often known through sculptures, engravings, and paintings he saw on his travels or collected in his studio, as emulative models for his own practice. As the proud owner of one of Flanders’ largest and most impressive private humanist libraries, he collected and voraciously read an extensive range of antiquarian and Renaissance texts both in Italy and after his return to Antwerp, with many of these ideas making their way into his art.¹² Suggesting the breadth of his classical knowledge, many of the classical texts that Rubens alluded to in his art do not seem to have been represented in his library nor in his correspondence.¹³ Contemporaries also noted his uncanny ability to multitask by painting, listening, and speaking all at once. In one well-known account, Rubens had someone read classical texts while he painted and dictated a letter in his workshop as a means of displaying his intellectual prowess. According to Otto Sperling who visited Rubens’s studio in 1621:

While still painting, he was having Tacitus read aloud to him, and was dictating a letter. When we kept silence so as not to disturb him with our talk, he himself began to talk to us, while still continuing to work, to listen to the reading and to dictate his letter, answering our questions and thus displaying his astonishing powers. After that he told off one of his servants to show us over every part of his splendid house, in which we were shown the Greek and Roman antiquities, which he possessed in great quantity.¹⁴

Much of the considerable scholarship on Rubens’s humanist approach to drawing has focused on his knowledge and emulation of classical models, including ancient and classically inspired texts, gems, sculptures, paintings, and engravings, many dating back to his formative artistic period in Italy (1600–08).¹⁵ Dominated by often recondite classically inspired and biblical istoria (history painting), archaeologically minded emulations after antique statuary, coins, and gems, works after esteemed masters, and especially the human figure – the primary concern of humanist artists since antiquity – Rubens’s early drawings collectively betray the intellectual depth of his artistic leanings, expressed quite literally from the moments when his pen or chalk first hit paper. Renaissance approaches to imitation and emulation guided his practice.

At times, he quoted directly from Renaissance draftsmen as well as the sculptural forms of antiquity in the same spirit that contemporary humanist authors quoted Latin authors. In his Baptism of Christ, c. 1604 (Paris, Louvre),¹⁶ for example, he quoted one motif (the male figure bending over) almost directly from Raphael. At other times, as in his drawing after the so-called Paduan lion (Plate 6), grounded in classical sculpture, he cleverly disguised his visual allusions, allowing for a partially recognizable relationship between image and model. This imitative approach aligned with the long-established practice of early modern humanist writers and artists dating back to Petrarch, Leon Battista Alberti, and Lorenzo Ghiberti, who also often inserted both well- and lesser-known classical allusions into their texts, personal letters, and compositions to highlight their own erudition, often for the further delectation of fellow humanist friends and scholars. In Renaissance humanist workshops, drawing and imitation of excellent models were central to both artistic training and later, to a master painter’s demonstration of artistic originality and invention.¹⁷

Figure 1.2 Peter Paul Rubens, Milkmaids with Cattle in a Landscape (The Farm at Laken), c. 1617–18, oil on panel, 85.9 × 127.9 cm (RCIN 405333). Picture Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London. Credit: Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2016.

Like the classical Roman artists he often emulated as a master draftsman and painter, Rubens often exploited the power of visual rhetoric to persuade viewers not only of fundamental ideas and values, but also, by extension, his own humanist, artistic superiority and exceptional erudition. As painted compositions throughout his career as diverse as the Horrors of War (Plate 5), The Decius Mus Cycle, the Marie de’ Medici cycle (Paris, Louvre), and Milkmaids with Cattle in a Landscape (The Farm at Laken), c. 1617–18 (London, Buckingham Palace, Royal Collection Trust; Figure 1.2) suggest, some of the funda...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: Rubens’s Early Drawings and the Problem of Eclecticism
• PART I Drawing in Context
• PART II Case Studies in Graphic Eloquence
• Bibliography
• Index of Works
• Index