In 1621, the Danish royal physician Otto Sperling visited an artist’s studio in Antwerp, in what is now Belgium. The great painter he encountered there, he wrote, was not only working while someone read the Roman historian Tacitus to him, but he also dictated a letter and answered his visitors’ questions all at the same time, before sending them off on a tour of his antiquities with his servants. This somewhat over-the-top account gives us an idea of the powerful impression the artist in question, Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), and his erudition made on his contemporaries.
Over the course of his illustrious career, Rubens produced altarpieces for the cathedral in Antwerp, rich, mythological scenes for the likes of Philip IV of Spain, and portraits of various dignitaries. He also contributed images for a number of publications on ancient coins, customs, and clothing. Many artists since the Renaissance were trained through the study of ancient sculptures and were familiar with myths, but for Rubens it was an all-encompassing interest. He was actively involved in scholarly discussions with antiquarians of the day and, in his letters, used quotations from a range of ancient Latin, and also Greek, literature – poetry, philosophy, histories – to express himself.
The ways in which the Baroque artist lived with the distant past, envisioned it, and recreated it in chalk and in paint are explored in a new exhibition opening at the Getty Villa in November. In Rubens’s mind, however, the ancient world was not such a remote concept, as Anne Woollett, one of the exhibition’s three curators, explains. ‘I always think that Rubens was building throughout his life a very rich tapestry of his own classical past. He had a kind of alternative universe that transmits his knowledge of sources, both written and formal. It’s like an alternative history. The past isn’t a stale, distant thing, it is a thing that could be lived in his psyche in a way. It becomes part of his art.’
Secret Tunnels