Flemish and Dutch Masters: Rubens and Rembrandt
The Flemish School: Rubens
Peter Paul Rubens was much more than a painter of athletic, masculine types and generous, pink, and sensual women. Nature endowed him with a prodigious mind to unravel the compositional problems of a painting, and he was a magician of color. Considered the most learned artist of his time, he spoke and wrote six modern languages besides Latin and was regarded as a shrewd diplomat in the service of Spain’s foreign policy. His skill in state affairs led him to traverse European foreign ministries to negotiate peace treaties. The success of this mission resulted in his being knighted by both Philip IV of Spain and Charles I of England.
Orphaned at only one year old, his family later obtained forgiveness, allowing them to leave exile and return with his mother to Antwerp. He pursued humanistic studies, served as a page at the Countess of Lalang’s court, and studied art. By 1598, he was already an independent painter. He completed his training in Italy.
He crossed the Alps to settle in the court of the Duke of Mantua. He made a stop in Rome, where he admired the works of Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and the Carracci.
In 1609, he was appointed court painter to the Archduke, married Isabella Brant, and began efforts to build the most emblematic estate, home, and workshop of the European Baroque. He had over a hundred apprentices at his service, as evidenced in a letter, some as brilliant as Jacob Jordaens and Anthony van Dyck.
Rubens mastered every painting technique, from oil paintings to fresco murals, tapestry cartoons, the design of triumphal arches to honor royal receptions, and book and missal illustrations. He delved into religious, historical, and mythological subjects, cultivated landscapes and still lifes, and was a superb portraitist. Painting held no secrets from him.
His career as a religious painter began with the triptych of the Raising of the Cross and the Descent from the Cross in the cathedral of Antwerp. The Archdukes wanted to erase the memory of the Calvinist iconoclasts’ vandalism, which had filled the interiors of churches and chapels with shadows. They aimed for altars with pictorial works that proclaimed the orthodoxy of Rome. Rubens represented Gospel mysteries and miracles of modern saints.
When he returned to Spain in 1628, he met Velázquez and copied Titian’s works for Philip IV. He then exclaimed: “I want Titian as a bridegroom to his beloved.”
Dutch School: Rembrandt
The painter, engraver, and artist Rembrandt is the great interpreter of bourgeois society in the Netherlands and the first artist whose livelihood no longer depended on the court or aristocracy, but rather on selling his products in the market.
His origins were modest. He pursued his education as a painter with Pieter Lastman, who had just returned from Rome and taught him the secrets of Caravaggio’s tenebrism. With these ingredients, Rembrandt coined a unique style in which the contrasts of light and shadow were never sharp, as the Italians were doing, but instead surrounded his figures in a dark, mysterious, golden-brown atmosphere. In 1624, he opened a workshop in Leiden, began painting biblical subjects, and developed the technique of etching.
By 1632, he was already established in Amsterdam, the most prosperous city in the Netherlands.