Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), Minerva Protects Pax from Mars (‘Peace and War’), 1629–30, Oil on canvas, 203.5 cm × 298 cm (80.1 in × 117 in), National Gallery, London
Rubens arrived in London in June 1629 and took lodgings with Sir Balthasar Gerbier (c.1592–1663) at York House on the Strand. Gerbier had been painter, art agent, and intelligence operative for George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham (1592–1628), whose assassination at Portsmouth ten months earlier had destabilised the English court and contributed directly to the diplomatic impasse Rubens was now sent to resolve. The Duchess of Buckingham had tried to have Gerbier removed from the house after her husband’s death; he had remained through the chaos of the estate settlement. It was a disconcerting domestic situation in which to begin a painting about the blessings of peace. Rubens had himself helped Buckingham build his collection, had painted canvases for him when they met in Paris in 1625, and had been in back-channel correspondence with Gerbier since 1627 (Donovan, 2004). The political world the painting was meant to address was also, in its specifics, a world Rubens had been inhabiting for years.
His official position was that of envoy extraordinary for Philip IV of Spain (1605–1665), charged with preparing the ground for a resumption of full diplomatic relations after five years of Anglo-Spanish war. But Rubens was a peculiar kind of envoy. He held no diplomatic title, was not a professional negotiator, and operated partly through the access his reputation as a painter gave him to people who would not have received an official ambassador. He had remarkably frank conversations with Charles I (1600–1649), who was genuinely eager for a Spanish alliance and who received him, as the dispatches Rubens sent to Madrid record, with something warmer than formal courtesy (Donovan, 2004). Writing to his friend Jan Gaspar Gevaerts from London on 23 November 1629, while the canvas was presumably already in progress, Rubens described his dearest wish as being to return home and ‘remain there for the rest of my life’ (Magurn, 1955, letter to Gevaerts, 23 November 1629). The diplomatic mission was not what he was for. From an earlier stay in Madrid he had written to his correspondents that he kept ‘to painting here, as I do everywhere’ (Magurn, 1955, letter to Peiresc and Dupuy from Madrid, c.1628). The painter who happened also to be a diplomat, rather than the other way around.
Understanding what the canvas is and what it was for requires holding two things in view at once. The first is the specific quality of Rubens’s classical learning. Where other painters of the period assembled iconographic programmes from Cesare Ripa’s (c.1555–1622) Iconologia [Iconology] (1593) or similar handbooks, Rubens composed from ancient sources directly, from Ovid (43 BC–AD 17/18), Virgil (70–19 BC), Homer (c.8th century BC), and the Roman historians, whose texts his classical education under Jan Verdonck in Antwerp had given him in the original languages. He maintained an extensive correspondence with the scholar Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637) on questions of ancient coins, inscriptions, gems, and iconographic traditions. He later described painting itself, in a letter to Peiresc of 18 December 1634, as his dolcissima professione, his sweetest profession (Magurn, 1955, letter to Peiresc, 18 December 1634). The mythological programmes he constructed were not assembled but thought, in the specific sense that they were arguments built from primary reading rather than from conventional image catalogues. The second thing to hold in view is what this kind of learning made possible diplomatically. John Adamson, in an essay published in the 2016 Brepols volume The Age of Rubens: Diplomacy, Dynastic Politics and the Visual Arts in Early Seventeenth-Century Europe, argues that Rubens was presenting himself through this canvas as a pictor doctus, the Renaissance ideal of the learned painter whose combination of skill and scholarship qualified him for a standing among courts that no mere craftsman could occupy (Adamson, 2016). The pictor doctus was not simply a well-read artist: he was someone whose classical learning gave him a right to be heard in rooms where painters were not normally admitted as equals, someone who could address kings in the language of counsel rather than the language of service. That is the claim this painting was making about its maker, and it was also the claim that made the painting politically possible.
The reason it was politically possible is that the diplomatic world of 1629 was confessionally divided in ways that made almost any direct political argument hazardous. The Thirty Years’ War, then in its eleventh year, had made the distinction between Protestant and Catholic powers a live military question across most of the continent. England under Charles was a Protestant kingdom in complicated negotiation with a Catholic Habsburg empire: any argument made in religious terms carried a charge that could harden positions rather than soften them. Ancient mythology occupied different ground. The gods of Rome and Greece preceded Christianity and were claimed by no confession; they belonged to the humanist formation shared equally by Catholic and Protestant courts, by Spanish grandees and English earls. A painting about Minerva and Mars was not a painting about the Pope and Calvin, and yet it could say what a painting about the Pope and Calvin could not. But this neutral language only worked if the painter using it had the depth of learning to make the programme operate as argument rather than decoration. A pictor doctus deploying mythology in a learned court was making a case; a lesser painter using the same figures was merely making pictures. Rubens’s classical formation was not incidental to the diplomatic function of this canvas: it was what gave the mythological language its authority. The deniability was inherent in the form, and the authority was inherent in the maker.
The composition separates into two zones that the eye reads as visual and moral opposites simultaneously. To the right, in turbulence and shadow, Mars in armour is being driven back physically by Minerva, who interposes her shield and body between him and the central group; Alecto, the fury associated with the madness of war, accompanies him into the darkness. To the left and centre, in full light arranged as a pyramid whose geometric stability is itself part of the argument, the figures of peace embody what Mars’s expulsion makes possible. Pax, the central nude figure, breastfeeds Plutus, the god of wealth: the image states directly that prosperity is nourished at the breast of peace and cannot exist independently of it (National Gallery, n.d.). A satyr holds fruit forward for the children; a goddess draped in embroidered silk carries golden cups, pearls, and a ruby brooch; a leopard, wild nature subdued by concordia, reclines as though domesticated; a cornucopia spills its abundance. Hymen, the god of marriage, his torch raised, leads the children toward this zone. Marriage alliances were a standard instrument of early modern diplomacy, and the figure of Hymen guiding the next generation toward prosperity carried a pointed suggestion to a king whose dynastic options were still open.
The children themselves were among the most carefully placed elements in the whole programme. They are portraits of the three eldest children of Gerbier, in whose house Rubens was working: George appears as Hymen, crowning his sister Elizabeth with a wreath; their sister Susan faces directly outward from the canvas with an expression the National Gallery has described as ‘hopeful and slightly anxious’ (National Gallery, n.d.). Inserting identifiable living children into a cosmic allegory collapsed the distance between the universal claim and the specific room. The viewer who recognised the Gerbier children understood that Rubens was not speaking abstractly about ancient gods but about the children sitting in the same building, about what war or peace would mean for them. The allegory became, at that moment of recognition, a form of counsel: personal, specific, and immediate, while retaining the authority of the classical programme behind it. This was the pictor doctus at full stretch: ancient learning made present and personal, addressed to a specific recipient who had the formation to receive it.
An accredited Spanish ambassador arrived in London in January 1630, which officially ended Rubens’s diplomatic role. For reasons that are not fully documented he remained for two further months. He left in April 1630, having been knighted by Charles I. The Anglo-Spanish peace treaty was signed that November. The painting, in a way, accompanied it, Rubens, who described his diplomacy as ‘the connecting knot in the chain of all the confederations of Europe’ (Magurn, 1955), believed the two activities were genuinely connected.
The painting’s subsequent history puts a different kind of pressure on that belief, and on both arguments the canvas was making simultaneously. It was presented to Charles I and catalogued in the Bear Gallery at Whitehall by Abraham van der Doort (c.1575–1640), the Dutch-born Keeper of the royal collection, in or around 1639 (National Gallery, n.d.). Following Charles’s execution in 1649, the Commonwealth trustees valued it at £100, a figure that placed it well below the most prized works in the dispersed royal collection and suggests either that Rubens’s market value had contracted sharply in the new political climate or that the trustees had reasons of their own for undervaluing it. It was sold for that figure to Edmund Harrison in October 1651 and had left his possession by December 1652. What happened to it across the following century is not clear; it reappears only in 1768, recorded at the Palazzo Doria in Genoa, with no surviving account of how it crossed the Channel or through whose hands it passed in the intervening period. It was bought from Genoa in 1802 by the dealer William Buchanan acting through an agent, offered to the British Government the following year and turned down, and eventually purchased by Lord Gower, later Duke of Sutherland. He presented it to the National Gallery in 1828, one of the earliest acquisitions of a collection founded only four years before (National Gallery, n.d.).
That trajectory is more than an interesting provenance. It is evidence about the limits of both claims the painting was making. The claim that mythology could serve as a politically neutral diplomatic language was true, but only for as long as there was a court with the humanist formation to read it. Once Charles was dead and that court had dispersed, the neutral language became simply obscure. The claim that a pictor doctus could intervene in the affairs of kingdoms through learned counsel was equally conditional: it depended entirely on the existence of a recipient who recognised the category and took it seriously.
Rubens appears to have reached a version of this conclusion before the canvas left his possession. By 1637, when he painted The Horrors of War (c.1637–38, Palazzo Pitti, Florence) for Ferdinando II de’ Medici (1610–1670), Grand Duke of Tuscany, the Thirty Years’ War had run for nearly twenty years with no end in sight. In that later canvas Mars is no longer being restrained; he has broken through entirely, and the allegorical figures of civilisation lie trampled beneath him. The shift is not simply a change of mood or compositional energy. It marks the point at which Rubens stopped making the argument that wisdom and counsel and the right kind of learned persuasion could hold war back and accepted instead that they could only bear witness to what war had done. The 1629 canvas believed that a pictor doctus addressing the right king in the right language at the right moment could change the course of events. The 1637 canvas knew otherwise. Both paintings are arguments about what painting can do. Only one of them turns out to have been right.
References
Adamson, J. (2016) ‘Policy and Pomegranates: Art, Iconography, and Counsel in Rubens’s Anglo-Spanish Diplomacy of 1629–30’ in Duerloo, L. and Smuts, M. (eds.) The Age of Rubens: Diplomacy, Dynastic Politics and the Visual Arts in Early Seventeenth-Century Europe. Turnhout: Brepols
Alpers, S. (1995) The Making of Rubens. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
Brown, J. (1995) Kings and Connoisseurs: Collecting Art in Seventeenth-Century Europe. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
Donovan, F. (2004) Rubens and England. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
Magurn, R.S. (ed.) (1955) The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
McGrath, E. (1997) Rubens: Subjects from History. Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, Part XIII. London: Harvey Miller.
National Gallery, London (n.d.) Rubens, Minerva protects Pax from Mars (‘Peace and War’), 1629–30 (NG46). Available at: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/peter-paul-rubens-minerva-protects-pax-from-mars-peace-and-war (Accessed: 23 August 2024).
RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Rubens, Minerva Protects Pax from Mars (‘Peace and War’), 1629–30. RKDimages, image no. 49978. The Hague: RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History. Available at: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/49978 (Accessed: 23 August 2024).
Ripa, C. [1593] (1976) Iconologia [Iconology], ed. E. Mandowsky. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag.
Vergara, A. (1999) Rubens and his Spanish Patrons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press