The Joyous Genius of Peter Paul Rubens

As gifted in the arts of living as in the skills of painting, this great Flemish artist has enriched the world with his flamboyant pictures.

three pretty girls were sitting by a ground-floor window spinning when a tall, red-headed, good-looking fellow in a plumed hat stopped and stared in. His gaze was cool and deliberate; he might have been examining butterflies. Walking into the house without a knock, he said matter-of-factly, "Take off your clothes, please."

One of the girls shrieked, but her older companion allayed her fears. "The gentleman doesn't seem like that kind of man."

"Nor am I," he agreed. "I am an artist. If your bodies are what I think they are, you will make much more money sitting as my models than you earn with your spindles." The year was 1622. The place was Paris. The man was Peter Paul Rubens, master painter of the Flem­ish School and one of the world's greatest artists. He had just been commissioned by France's queen mother, Marie de Medicis, to do 21 large murals for the Luxembourg Palace. No one painted the female form more often than Rubens, and no one, except possibly Titian and Renoir, brought it so beautifully to life. Rubens' nudes—reclining on the grass, rollicking in the woods, coming out of the bath—hang in museums throughout the world. The figures, broad-hipped, substan­tial women for the most part, are symbols of abundance and fruitfulness, no more sexy than the fruits and vegetables one sees tumbling out of a cornucopia. Whatever their posture, they wear an air of inno­cence.

Nudes, however, are only a part of Rubens' incredibly large produc­tion. He painted hundreds of por­traits, landscapes, hunting scenes, quiet interiors. Greatest of all are his religious paintings. Few artists have portrayed Christ more ten­derly: Christ on the Cross, Christ descending, Christ pierced by the Roman lance. We feel the suffering in the texture of the flesh, in the eyes and lips, the posture of the head, the collapse of the body. But the secret of the emotion he arouses is in the movement, the rhythm of mass and colour—a rhythm of religious fervour.

No man worked harder at his craft. Though the Antwerp guild of painters had officially recognized him as "Master" when he was only 21, he kept on studying and learning to the end of his life. At 50, he was still making copies of Titian and others to improve his technique. A true genius, he painted always at terrific speed, never hesitating, never correcting. One of his largest and most beloved creations, ''The Adoration of the Magi," was allegedly completed in six days.

In addition to being a prodigy at the easel, Rubens was master of a greater art: the art of living. He was supremely happy in marriage, strictly faithful to his wife in an age of widespread dissipation. His children respected and adored him. When he died at 62, all the notables of Antwerp attended his magnificent funeral. Rubens had none of the wayward­ness that often goes with great talent. Never spoilt by success, he was as orderly in his habits as a filing clerk. A man of enormous vitality, he would get up at four each morning, attend early mass, then begin work. As he painted, he listened to a boy whose job it was to read to him from Tacitus or Plutarch. At noon he paused for a snack—mostly vegetables, for he believed that meat was bad for a creative artist. At five he finished work. Then he would saddle a horse and ride in the outskirts of Antwerp. In the evening friends and family would gather round his hospitable table for food and conversation.

Peter Paul Rubens was born in 1577 in Siegen, Germany, where his father, a native of Antwerp, then part of the Netherlands, was living in exile. It wasnot a happy house­hold. The elder Rubens had been found guilty of adultery and con­demned to death. Only the efforts of his wife saved him and at last won his release from prison. It may well be that the bitter experience of his father gave Rubens his aversion to frivolity.

At the elder Rubens' death, the family moved back to Antwerp where Peter Paul became a page in a noble family. There he learned the social graces and impeccable man­ners that were to distinguish him all his life. Painting, however, was his passion, and he became an appren­tice to minor painters, rapidly win­ning a reputation of his own. When he was 23 his mother gathered to­gether the money to buy him a horse, and Rubens set out for Italy. In Venice, a few months later, he was sitting in the courtyard of an inn, copying a famous painting from memory, when a stranger be­hind him exclaimed, "Marvellous— it's better than the original! I'll take you to my friend Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua, and your for­tune will be made." In Mantua, Rubens became official painter to the court, making copies of great paintings and doing portraits of the ducal family.

Rubens had been eight years in Italy when he received word that his mother was gravely ill. He re­turned at once to Antwerp, too late to see her. But the Archduke Al-brecht and the Infanta Isabella, rulers of the Netherlands (then under Spanish influence), were en­chanted with him personally, and named him court painter. For the city's Town Hall he did his impos­ing "Adoration of the Magi" with 28 life-size figures. Shortly after­wards, for Antwerp Cathedral he painted the "Descent From the Cross," generally considered his masterpiece.

At 32, he married Isabella Brant, daughter of a town dignitary, 14 years his junior. They had three children. After 17 years of serenely happy married life, his wife died suddenly. A heartbroken Rubens, seeking escape from his grief, took a job which few painters could have done well—that of ambassador. Highly polished, cultivated and per­suasive, Rubens was to become one of the ablest diplomats of his day, competing with even that wiliest of statesmen, Cardinal Richelieu of France.

During his many tours of duty, Rubens did not cease to paint. The intimacy of a studio even helped his work as ambassador; posing is tedious and encourages confidences. Painting the Duke of Buckingham one day, Rubens was given to understand that England would not be averse to making peace with Spain. Taking the hint, Rubens moved between the courts of Philip IV of Spain and Charles I of England and after many months of effort won their signatures to a treaty ending hostilities between the two countries. Both nations honoured him.

Rubens had led a widower's life for four years when he fell deeply in love with a 16-year-old girl, Helena Fourment, and married her. He never tired of painting his young wife, doing more than 15 portraits. In addition, she posed for his innumerable religious and mythological pictures.

In time it became a physical im­possibility to execute alone all the commissions that came his way. He established an "assembly-line" of art for some of his paintings. He would make the outline of a picture and indicate the colours needed. He or a pupil would block in the paint­ing; then one assistant would add landscapes, another horses, a third wild animals, a fourth figures, a fifth the still-life portions. Rubens' own final touches would stamp the picture with his personality. His assistants were gifted artists, among them Anthony van Dyck, Jan Breughel and Frans Snyders. They were delighted to work for him, for Rubens paid them well.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-16