Peter Paul Rubens E-Book

Maria Varshavskaya

• Herausgeber: Parkstone International
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 146

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Universally celebrated for his rosy and concupiscent nudes, Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) was an artist whose first concern was sensuality in all its forms. This Baroque master devoted himself to a lifelong celebration of the joys and wonders of the physical realm. He felt that the human body was as lovely and natural as the many natural landscapes he painted as a young man. In a lushly illustrated text, María Varshavskaya and Xenia Yegorova explore the master at work, bringing a unique focus to Ruben’s life and work

Leseprobe

Authors:

Maria Varshavskaya and Xenia Yegorova

© 2023, Confidential Concepts, worldwide, USA

© 2023, Parkstone Press International, New York, USA

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Maria Varshavskaya and Xenia Yegorova

Content

The life and works of peter paul rubens

Saint George Battles the Dragon, c. 1607.

Oil on canvas, 309x257cm.

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

Leda and the Swan, c. 1598-1600.

Oil on panel, 122x182cm.

Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden,

Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden.

The name of the great 17th-century Flemish painter, Peter Paul Rubens is known throughout the world. The importance of his contribution to the development of European culture is generally recognised. The perception of life that he revealed in his pictures is so vivid, and fundamental human values are affirmed in them with such force, that we look upon Rubens’paintings as a living aesthetic reality of our own time as well.

The museums of Russia have a superb collection of the great Flemish painter’s works. These are concentrated, for the most part, in The State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, which possesses one of the finest Rubens’collections in the world. Three works, previously part of the Hermitage collection, now belong to The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. TheBacchanaliaandThe Apotheosis of the Infanta Isabellawere bought for the Hermitage in 1779 together with the Walpole Collection (from Houghton Hall in England);The Last Suppercame to the Hermitage in 1768 from the Cobenzl Collection (Brussels). These three paintings were then transferred to Moscow in 1924 and 1930.

One gains the impression that in the 17thcentury, Rubens did not attract as much attention as later. This may appear strange: indeed his contemporaries praised him as the“Apelles of our day”. However, in the immediate years after the artist’s death, in 1640, the reputation which he had gained throughout Europe was overshadowed. The reasons for this can be found in the changing historical situation in Europe during the second half of the 17thcentury.

In the first decades of that century nations and absolutist states were rapidly forming. Rubens’new approach to art could not fail to serve as a mirror for the most diverse social strata in many European countries who were keen to assert their national identity, and who had followed the same path of development.

This aim was inspired by Rubens’idea that the sensually perceived material world had value in itself; Rubens’lofty conception of man and his place in the Universe, and his emphasis on the sublime tension between man’s physical and imaginative powers (born in conditions of the most bitter social conflicts), became a kind of banner of this struggle, and provided an ideal worth fighting for.

In the second half of the 17thcentury, the political situation in Europe was different. In Germany after the end of the Thirty Years’War, in France following the Frondes, and in England as the result of the Restoration, the absolutist regime triumphed. There was an increasing disparity in society between conservative and progressive forces; and this led to a“reassessment of values”among the privileged, who were reactionary by inclination, and to the emergence of an ambiguous and contradictory attitude towards Rubens.

This attitude became as internationally prevalent as his high reputation during his lifetime, and this is why we lose track of many of the artist’s works in the second half of the 17thcentury after they left the hands of their original owners (and why there is only rare mention of his paintings in descriptions of the collections of this period). Only in the 18thcentury did Rubens’works again attract attention.

Rubens and Isabella Brant in the Honeysuckle Bower, c. 1609.

Oil on canvas, 178x136.5cm.

Alte Pinakothek,

Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich.

Samson and Delilah, c. 1609-1610.

Oil on panel, 185x205cm.

The National Gallery, London.

The Four Philosophers, 1611-1612.

Oil on canvas, 164x139cm.

Galleria Palatina e Appartamenti Reali

 (Palazzo Pitti), Polo Museale, Florence.

In the course of the three centuries which have elapsed since the death of Rubens, his artistic legacy, while not losing its immediate aesthetic value, has been variously interpreted. Prevailing aesthetic opinion has never been able to ignore his influence, but at each specific historical juncture it has sought to channel this influence in a particular direction. At times the perception and interpretation of the artist’s legacy has been determined by those features which people desired to see in his works, or those that they hesitated to find there. Rubens’creative activities were so closely interwoven with the world he lived in that the detachment necessary for an overall assessment of his role and importance was not possible to achieve during his lifetime.

His contemporaries did not furnish literature on his art. Only a few brief reviews or verses dedicated to his works by his contemporaries confirm his wide recognition. The opinion stated in a letter by Vincenzo Giustiniani, the well-known Italian maecena and patron of Caravaggio, may be considered one of the first attempts to define the nature of the artist’s work.

Writing during Rubens’lifetime, Giustiniani discussed the development of contemporary art: he considered it possible to place Caravaggio and Guido Reni in one group, with Rubens in another. He included Rubens, together with Ribera, Terbrugghen, and Honthorst, in the group of“naturalists”. Critical writings about Rubens began to appear when enthusiasm for him was moderated, and when the aesthetics of the“Grand Manner”began to take hold.

One of the chief proponents of this trend was Giovanni Pietro Bellori, the director of the Academy of St Luke in Rome. His classical theories had a decisive influence on the formation of artistic taste throughout Europe in the second half of the 18thcentury. According to his aesthetic principles, the main requirement of art was that it should embody“the ideal of beauty”; moreover, all that was individual, partial, accidental, or transitory had to be raised to the level of the universal, eternal, and immutable. Rubens, with his concrete observation of life and sensualistic approach, was seen as an underminer of such canons, and as an offender against social decorum.

At the end of the 17thcentury, however, Roger de Piles, a recognised art specialist and leader of the“Rubensistes”(a new tendency in French painting and the theory of art), praised Rubens as a brilliant master of colour. Like the adherents of the hedonist aesthetics in the 18thcentury, Roger de Piles considered colour as the“spirit of painting”and“the satisfaction of the eyes”as the basic purpose of art. With the approach of the French Revolution of 1789, however, new movements of artistic theories grew, and Neo-Classicism was being formed. Its theoretician, Johann-Joachim Winckelmann, promoted it to counteract the“defiled”culture of the aristocratic drawing room. The rationalist aesthetics of his ideal,“the noble simplicity and calm majesty of free Greece”, naturally rejected Rubens as he was then understood. It was to be expected, furthermore, that the artist’s supposed hedonism was quite unacceptable to the severe civic-mindedness of the revolutionary Jacobin Classicism of David.

Juno and Argus, c. 1610.

Oil on canvas, 249x296cm.

Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud,

Cologne.

In 18th-century Germany, the protagonists of the“Sturm und Drang”period had already advanced concepts directed against the ancien régime which were also contrary to Classicism. They had declared the free development of the personality to be the sole source of artistic creativity and had regarded Rubens with joy.

Goethe, to the end of his days, considered Rubens to possess great virtues. These ideas were opposed by the narrow nationalist tendency in German Romanticism. The latter regarded the spiritual world of the Middle Ages and the Gothic style as an expression of abstracted religious feeling, to be their ideal. For Friedrich Schlegel, Rubens was“an extremely misguided talent, and a false artistic innovator”. The French Romantics of the early 19thcentury took a characteristically different attitude towards Rubens. Delacroix produced a veritable apotheosis of Rubens in his Journal. The artist Eugène Fromentin who was a follower of Delacroix and passionate admirer of Flemish painting, compared Rubens’works to heroic poetry and wrote enthusiastically about the“radiant light of his ideas”.

In 19th-century Belgium, which had just won its independence, there was an ambiguous attitude towards Rubens. The progressive democratic movement bore his name on its banner. André van Hasselt, a poet and publicist, saw Rubens as the founder of the national school of painting; he revealed Rubens’importance in establishing a national self-awareness which had in turn shown the Flemish people the real possibility of their further advance.

The view of official circles, however, was expressed by Van den Branden, the keeper of the Antwerp city archives. He complained that the artist had“endowed his figures with a heroic mobility and liveliness that was unsuitable for their setting in the peaceful temples of God”. Van den Branden reproved Rubens with having betrayed the national character; for him, only the masters of the 15thcentury and Quentin Massys were the true exponents.

The artist’s Belgian biographer, Max Rooses, devoted his entire life to the collection of material relating to Rubens. He completed the major work of publishing Rubens’correspondence which he had begun with Charles Ruellens; it amounted to six volumes and included letters to and from Rubens and those which discussed about him.

To this day, the publication has remained unique in its kind; only a very few letters by Rubens have been discovered since Rooses completed his work. The only exhaustive publication of Rubens’works is still the fundamental catalogue compiled by Rooses, which includes all the then-known paintings and drawings of the master. In gathering together Rubens’legacy, Rooses was continuing the work begun in 1830 by the English antiquarian, John Smith, who had produced a multi-volume catalogue devoted to the best known Dutch, Flemish, and French artists. The second volume of Smith’s catalogue deals with Rubens and notes everything that the author saw or heard concerning Rubens throughout his lifetime. Another book published in 1873, which is, with Smith’s catalogue, the earliest record of its kind, is C. G. Voorhelm-Schneevoogt’s list of the engravings made after Rubens’paintings.

The Drunken Hercules, c. 1615-1616.

Oil on canvas, 204x225cm.

Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden,

Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden.

The Coronation of the Virgin (detail), 1609-1611.

Oil on canvas, 106x78cm.

The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.

Risen Christ, c. 1616.

Oil on canvas, 183x155cm.

Galleria Palatina e Appartamenti Reali

(Palazzo Pitti), Polo Museale, Florence.

By the end of the 19thcentury, art history as an independent field of research had begun to stand distinct from the broader study of culture as a whole. It was the publication in 1898 of Jakob Burckhardt’s book“Recollection of Rubens”that initiated the historico-cultural approach to the study of art. In his book, the German scholar (who had worked in Switzerland) recognised and defined Rubens’aspiration towards the“extolling of man in all his capabilities and aspirations”. Burckhardt insisted that, in contrast to the theatricality and rhetoric of the Italians, Rubens’figures were true to life, and he laid emphasis not only on their formal qualities (of colour and chiaroscuro) but also on the importance of their moral and spiritual values. Burckhardt presented extremely significant evidence of the close ties between Rubens and his native Antwerp, and showed that the substance of his portrayals had much in common with the outlook of those who were his most important and frequent patrons — the influential city guilds and ecclesiastical fraternities. The scholar noted, with some pleasure, that“there was no royal throne in Rubens’immediate vicinity”and that“Antwerp was not a papal residence”. For Burckhardt, Rubens was the standard-bearer of the new universal flourishing of art, which was born in the Low Countries, the“Italy of the North”, and continued the work begun during the Renaissance.

At the turn of the century, there developed a more biased opinion that Rubens was a prophet of passive sensuality and nothing more. However, both“art for art’s sake”aesthetics and formal art criticism again acknowledged Rubens since they saw in his art a degree of the primacy of form which they had proclaimed. In this respect, the interpretation of Rubens’artistic approach by the German scholar Rudolf Oldenbourg was typical. Although the formalist school was incapable of understanding the complex variety of artistic phenomena, it nevertheless played a great role in the history of art criticism.

The actual study of Rubens’works, and of their specific“forms of expression”, laid the foundations for contemporary Rubens studies. By singling out the distinctive features of Rubens’artistic style, it became possible to distinguish the master’s own works from the enormous number of those produced under his direction; to establish who had influenced him; and to define the stages through which he had evolved. In short, it was possible to clarify the features of Rubens’individual creativity.

In the years between the two World Wars, the work of Rubens was increasingly regarded as a direct expression of the anti-materialist and anti-realist trends that were identified with the feudal and absolutist Counter-Reformation in 17th-century Europe.

After the Second World War, there was a notable return to an appreciation of the primary materials and actual circumstances of Rubens’art. Much has been achieved in this direction. First and foremost, the number of works known to be genuine Rubens grew due to the inclusion of those that had been attributed to other painters or to none, quite unknown compositions, variants of already familiar pictures and preparatory works, drawings, and sketches.

This has involved a re-examination of some previous conceptions of Rubens’development as an artist and adjustments to the datings. Entire periods and aspects of his artistic activities are now seen in a new light, and the gaps in the history of his artistic career are constantly decreasing.

Jupiter and Callisto, 1613.

Oil on wood, 126.5x187cm.

Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister,

Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, Kassel.

To give some examples: we have a quite different impression of Rubens as a draughtsman; his early pre-Italian works are more precisely placed; we have a better understanding of his relations with his predecessors and successors, and how his workshop was organised; and light has been shed on many iconographic problems, on the actual way in which he worked, and on the process whereby his conceptions were brought to life.

While Rubens inherited the realist Flemish traditions of the art of Van Eyck and Brueghel, he was, at the same time, a loyal student of the Romanist master painters – the Antwerp Italianisers who had taken the achievements of the Italian Renaissance as their ideal.

Following the example of his teachers, he travelled to Italy in 1600 when he was a young man of twenty-three to be in direct communion with the treasures of ancient and Italian cultures. However, he approached what he had seen in Italy with a critical eye, and we may judge his true aspirations from what actually attracted him there.

It was not so much as a model of a formally strict and ideal beauty that Antiquity inspired Rubens: he preferred the relics of the late classical period and the sculpture of Hellenistic Rome, where“noble simplicity and calm majesty”were softened by the evocation of the living flesh – Praxiteles’Resting Satyr, theLaocoön,Heracles of Farnese, as well as small, decorative fountain works. Rubens would later return to the great art works and monuments he had seen in Italy more than once in his artistic career.

Among the Italian masters of the previous era he singled out the Venetians for their attachment to colour as the basic means of expression in painting, and Correggio with his sensuality and magical chiaroscuro. Rubens was enthralled by the dynamism of Leonardo da Vinci’sBattle near Anghiari,and the titanic power of Michelangelo’s heroes. Rubens also took an interest in the expressiveness of the images in the work of Pordenone, an original but in no sense“great”