Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) , Study of a head of a woman, 1630-1631, paper, black chalk, red chalk, 193.0 x 167.0 mm, The Albertina, Vienna, on short-term loan to The Dulwich Gallery, London
This head study, once part of the collection of Duke Albert Casimir of Saxe-Teschen (1738–1822), founder of the Albertina in Vienna, offers a clear view of Rubens’s preparatory method. Executed in black and red chalk on paper, the drawing establishes crisp outlines in black and uses red to shape the planes of the face, lending volume and softness to the features. The result is an idealised female type with lowered gaze and calm expression, directly recalling models from Raphael and Perugino. The sheet was used without alteration in the central panel of Rubens’s Ildefonso Altarpiece, where the Madonna’s face repeats the drawing with striking fidelity.
The Ildefonso Altarpiece was commissioned in 1629 for the chapel of the Ildefonso Brotherhood in Brussels under the patronage of the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia. Conceived in memory of her late husband Archduke Albert of Austria, the triptych combined themes of dynastic remembrance and Marian devotion. It was also a political statement: the visual language of Burgundian and Habsburg sacral kingship was invoked to affirm continuity and stability in a period of renewed conflict with the Dutch Republic.
Rubens frequently developed head types in such drawings and reused them in later works. The idealised features first fixed in this Madonna reappear, with variations, in several of his devotional paintings of the Virgin. The same serene type can be detected in the Virgin and Child with St Anne (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) and again in later treatments of the Madonna and Child produced in Antwerp in the 1630s. This continuity shows how preparatory sheets functioned in his studio not as single-use designs but as a repertory of forms to be drawn upon repeatedly across commissions.
The loss of Rubens’s notebook in the Louvre fire of 1720, said to contain some 250 drawings and annotations, has left major gaps in our knowledge of how he organised and revisited such material. Surviving examples like this study are therefore critical in tracing the genealogy of his pictorial types. They reveal how he fused Italian Renaissance prototypes with his own invention and redeployed these solutions to meet devotional and political needs alike.
The Albertina’s preservation of both the head study and the finished Ildefonso Altarpiece allows the rare opportunity to compare preparatory work with its painted outcome, illustrating the coherence of Rubens’s method and the endurance of his ideal types across the span of his career.