Dirk de Quade van Ravesteyn (active c.1576-1612), Venus Riding a Satyr,1602-08, Oil on canvas, 186 x 116 cm, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels
Rudolf II reserved his most prized pictures for rooms that few outsiders ever entered. A French traveller who reached Prague around the turn of the seventeenth century was received not by a chamberlain but by two of the emperor’s own painters, Bartholomeus Spranger (1546–1611) and Hans von Aachen (1552–1615), who held salaried posts as valets of the imperial chamber alongside their easels, and who led him through three rooms of the castle crowded with the rarest paintings, ancient and modern, that Rudolf II (1552–1612) had drawn to Prague from across Europe at a cost contemporaries found scarcely credible. A large part of what covered those walls was erotic, mythology serving as the decent pretext under which a learned court could dwell on the naked body at length, and it was Spranger above all who had perfected the art of dressing desire in the costume of antique fable. This painting was recorded in one of Rudolf’s own inventories, came out of exactly this appetite.
The man who made it had travelled a long way to serve that taste. Dirck de Quade van Ravesteyn (c. 1565 – after 1619), born in The Hague into a family of painters, began modestly, turning out small religious pictures and supplying the figures that peopled the elaborate architectural fantasies of Hans and Paul Vredeman de Vries, before the example of Spranger, von Aachen and Joseph Heintz the Elder (1564–1609) drew him toward the large mythologies the court prized. Prague rewarded him well. First documented there in 1589, he had prospered enough by 1598 to buy a house in the Malá Strana below the castle and, in that year and again in 1602, to lend out substantial sums, most likely to fellow painters needing to subcontract work or to secure property of their own. There is an irony in a court artist doubling as a creditor to his colleagues, and a harder one in the way his own account closed, for the emperor whose appetite he fed was chronically and spectacularly short of money, so that when Rudolf died in 1612, followed seven years later by his brother and successor Matthias (1557–1619), de Quade was still listed among the creditors of both dead emperors, holding paper debts that no treasury would ever redeem. He had drawn his final court payment in 1608 and had most likely returned to the Netherlands long before that reckoning came.
The painting itself is stranger and more crowded than its short title lets on. Venus does not ride alone but shares the burden with her son, a full-grown satyr carrying the goddess while a smaller, younger one bears the winged Cupid, known by his bow and his quiver, so that mother and child sit astride the two creatures as though both had been broken to the saddle. De Quade gives Venus the advantage completely, upright and awake, her pale body turning against the rough dark of the satyr beneath her, and he sets the group in a deep, shadowed forest that fills the tall, portrait-shaped canvas, lingering over the separate textures of fur and feather, flower and flesh and hair. A hare, the old emblem of carnal appetite, crouches between the figures, one more sign that the picture’s learning and its sensuality were meant to be taken together.
The subject carries a motto as much as a scene. Venus and Cupid mastering the satyrs is an image of Omnia vincit Amor [Love conquers all], the tag from the tenth of Virgil’s (70–19 BC) Eclogues that the Renaissance turned into one of its favourite conceits, and the very years that produced this canvas gave Caravaggio (1571–1610) his triumphant Cupid in Rome on precisely that theme. In the most learned company the motif could carry a further turn of wit, since the satyr’s kind belonged to Pan, and pan is the Greek for the Latin omnia, so that Love subduing the goat-god doubled as Love subduing all things. To read the goddess and the creature as a plain contest between reason and desire misses this, and forgets besides that Venus makes an unlikely champion of restraint, since the point is not chastity but dominion, desire itself brought to heel by the higher power of love. What stays genuinely open is how heavily a connoisseur in Rudolf’s Prague weighed the motto against the flesh, and whether the erudition was the reason for the picture or merely its licence.
The world that framed it did not outlast its maker by much. Rudolf, ever more withdrawn and unsteady, was stripped of real power by his brother Matthias in 1611 and died the following year, half a prisoner in the castle he had made the strangest treasury in Europe, and his collection began to disperse almost at once, a scattering the Swedish army completed when it sacked Prague in 1648 and carried the imperial pictures north. What became of this Brussels canvas across the long interval is unknown, though another of de Quade’s Venuses traces the kind of journey it might have taken, a sleeping goddess that had belonged to Rudolf and passed afterwards to Prince Eugene of Savoy (1663–1736), the general who broke the Ottoman armies, before settling in the museum at Dijon.
References
DaCosta Kaufmann, T. (1988) The School of Prague: Painting at the Court of Rudolf II. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press
Evans, R.J.W. (1973) Rudolf II and His World: A Study in Intellectual History 1576–1612. Oxford: Clarendon Press
Fučíková, E. et al. (eds.) (1997) Rudolf II and Prague: The Court and the City. Prague: Prague Castle Administration; London: Thames & Hudson
Turner, J.G. (2017) Eros Visible: Art, Sexuality and Antiquity in Renaissance Italy. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
Virgil (1999) Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid 1–6. Translated by H.R. Fairclough, revised by G.P. Goold (Loeb Classical Library). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press [Eclogue X.69].
Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (n.d.) Dirck de Quade van Ravesteyn, Vénus chevauchant un satyre [Venus Riding a Satyr], inv. 11389, acquired 1992. Brussels. Available at: https://fine-arts-museum.be/fr/la-collection/dirck-de-quade-van-ravesteyn-venus-chevauchant-un-satyre (Accessed: 4 June 2024).
RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Dirck de Quade van Ravesteyn. RKDartists, record no. 65762. The Hague: RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History. Available at: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/artists/65762 (Accessed: 4 June2024).