Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [38]
As the art historian Sir Kenneth Clark wrote in The Nude, skin represents the most difficult problem for a painter. Rubens’s mastery was such, he promised patrons “many beautiful nudes” as a selling point. Whatever the subject, his compositions were always based on massive, rounded human figures, usually in motion. While most painters, because they revered the Classical style, worked from plaster casts or antique sculptures, Rubens preferred to sketch from living models.
HUNTING PICTURES. One characteristic Rubens shared with Hals and Velázquez was that his method of applying paint was in itself expressive. Rubens’s surging brushstrokes made his vibrant colors come alive. Nowhere was this more evident than in his hunting pictures, a genre he invented.
MARIE DE’MEDICI SERIES
Rubens’s mast ambitious project was a sequence of paintings celebrating the life of the queen of France, Marie de’Medici, a silly, willful monarch chiefly remembered for squandering huge sums of money and quarreling incessantly with her spouse (she ruled temporarily after he was assassinated), and for commissioning Rubens to decorate two galleries with pictures immortalizing her “heroic” exploits.
“My talent is such,” Rubens wrote, “that no undertaking, however vast in size ... has ever surpassed my courage.” True to his boast, he finished Marie’s twenty-one large-scale oils in just three years, virtually without assistance. Even more difficult, however, must have been creating glorious epics out of such inglorious raw material. Here, too, the tactful Rubens was up to the task. He portrayed Marie giving birth to her son (the royal heir before she had him banished) as a solemn nativity scene. His panel on Marie’s education featured divinities like Minerva and Apollo tutoring her in music and eloquence.
In “Marie Arrives at Marseilles,” the goddess of Fame heralds the queen’s landing in France with golden trumpets. Rubens diplomatically omitted Marie’s double chin (though in later scenes he did portray her queen-size corpulence) and concentrated instead on three voluptuous assistants to Neptune in the foreground, even lovingly adding beadlike drops of water on their ample buttocks.
Rubens shared the Baroque era’s love of pomp, indicated by the painting’s exuberant colors, rich costumes, and golden barge. He approached his life and work with vigor. No matter what the subject, he gave his paintings an air of triumph. As Rubens said, “It is not important to live long, but to live well! ”
Rubens, “Marie Arrives at Marseilles,” 1622-25, Louvre, Paris. Rubens painted the arrival of the French queen as a sensory extravaganza spilling over with color and opulence.
Van Dyck, “Charles I at the Hunt,” 1635, Louvre, Paris. Van Dyck specialized in flattering portraits of elegant aristocrats, posed informally to give the official portrait new liveliness.
VAN DYCK: THE INFORMAL, FORMAL PORTRAIT. A true child prodigy, Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) was an accomplished painter when only 16. For a few years he worked with Rubens in Antwerp but, not content to play second fiddle, he struck out on his own, first to Italy and later to England to become court painter to Charles I.
The handsome, vain, fabulously gifted painter was dubbed “il pittore cavalleresco” (painter who gives himself fancy airs) for his snobbish dandyism. He was addicted to high society and dressed ostentatiously, strutting about with a sword and adopting the sunflower as his personal symbol. Van Dyck was a supreme portraitist, establishing a style, noble yet intimate and psychologically penetrating, that influenced three generations of portrait painters.
Van Dyck transformed the frosty, official images of royalty into real human beings. In this new kind of portrait, he posed aristocrats and royals in settings of Classical columns and shimmering curtains to convey their refinement and status. Yet van Dyck’s ease of composition and sense of arrested movement, as though the subjects