Rubens’ ‘Consequences of War’

In 1592, Peter Paul (hereafter Rubens) began an apprenticeship with Tobias Verhaecht, a landscape artist. He soon left that position to work with Adam van Noort, whose work focused more on grand historical scenes. Van Noort had studied in Rome and was familiar with the work of the great Renaissance artists.

But it was with his third, and very sophisticated, teacher, Otto van Veen – another “Romanist” painter – that Rubens began to get more advanced artistic training and a taste for diplomacy; at first likely as a means of approaching the wealthy and powerful from whom he might receive commissions for portraiture.

By 1598, Rubens was able to enter the painters’ Guild of St. Luke, signifying him as a “master.” In 1600, at age 23, he made his first trip to Italy, and, likely with van Veen’s recommendation, found a patron in Vincenzo I Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, whose portrait Rubens painted.

Rubens was remarkably versatile: a painter, of course (and among the greatest), but also a Catholic humanist and scholar, a linguist, a diplomat, and a loving husband and father. Although a friend of kings and queens, he was also at home among the “common” people. It’s almost as though Rudyard Kipling had Rubens in mind in his 1910 poem “If—”:

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch . . .

(Kipling had in mind the stoicism of men at war, but the poem would likely have appealed to Rubens.)

Rubens was fluent in Flemish/Dutch, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, and English. Being a polyglot meant he could move easily through many countries, and his learning made him a perfect go-between for sovereigns seeking peace. He helped encourage amicable, if uneasy, relations among the courts of Spain and England and the Catholic Spanish Netherlands and the Protestant Dutch Republic.

This suggests an interesting historical reality. In the 17^th century, a painter could be influential in world affairs in a way no 21^st-century artist could ever hope to be. I think of Igor Babailov, the contemporary Russian-American painter who has done portraits of popes, presidents, and other distinguished persons of many nationalities, but who, for all his friendship with these people, likely has not had anyone’s ear on foreign policy.

But art loomed larger in earlier centuries. The design of cathedrals, for instance, their vivid exteriors and lavish interior decorations, were artistic catechisms for populations in which there was little literacy. When Rubens did portraits of powerful people or of mythological, allegorical, or historical scenes, the works had the same effect, although his canvases were not as visible to the same number of people as were those medieval cathedrals. But Rubens’ paintings had an enormous impact on those sovereigns.

Consider his Consequences of War, a large painting that was, in effect, a broadside against Europe’s Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). On the painting’s left side, “Europe” despairs over the people (and the arts) crushed in the conflict. Venus, portrayed in classic, full-figured Rubenesque style, tries futilely to stay the strong arm of Mars.

Perhaps Mr. Babailov should do an allegorical painting of the Israel-Hamas conflict or Russia’s war in Ukraine.