A Flemish painter born in Siegen, Peter Paul Rubens spent his formative years on the Italian peninsula (1600–08) in the employ of Vincenzo I Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, before returning to Antwerp and setting up shop. The edited volume Rubens e la cultura italiana asks anew Michael Jaffé's question, “How much did this Flemish painter absorb of Italy, and how did Italy respond to him?” (Rubens and Italy [1977], 7). Editor Raffaella Morselli argues that Rubens left Italy with not just a pictorial repertoire but also a modus operandi, indeed the very sense of himself as a pictor doctus (13, 16–17). Essays by established and emerging scholars cover Rubens's engagement with Italian culture, broadly defined, as well as his status in the local art market. The authors present documentary research, points for revision, and some theoretically ambitious arguments. Together with Morselli's Tra Fiandre e Italia (2019) from the same publisher, the present volume is an important reference point for students of Rubens's Italian sojourn.
Section 1, on diplomacy, deals with Rubens's Italian patrons, with a focus on archival discoveries. Madeline Delbé discusses the artist's stays in Florence, highlighting for further study relations with the Grand Duchy of Tuscany (64). Rubens traveled widely across the peninsula not just to copy antique and Renaissance art but also to further his humanist education, making all the cities he visited potential sites of cultural encounter.
Northerners sojourning in Italy did not think they were traveling back in time, even if the extant literature focuses overwhelmingly on them sketching ancient ruins. In the early modern period, cities on the Peninsula were among the wealthiest in Europe, putting them at the cutting edge of science as much as art. As section 2 discusses, Rubens's emulation of modern Italian painters was a two-way street. Nils Büttner gives a fascinating excursus into Rubens the “Caravaggist avant la lettre” (103). While Caravaggism might mean any seventeenth-century painter with a penchant for severed heads and dim lighting, Rubens's Caravaggism was case-specific: the Crowning with Thorns for Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, Rome; the Death of the Virgin that he brokered for the duke of Mantua; and the Rosary Madonna, purchased for St. Paul's Antwerp by Rubens and his friends (113). Marina Daiman presents one of three essays on the Chiesa Nuova in Rome, highlighting how art theory influenced Rubens's decision not to publicly exhibit the first version of the high altarpiece after it was rejected.
Section 3, on architecture, features Marcia Pointon's highly original research into Rubens's lithic inspirations. While his love of antique cameos is well known, Rubens's depictions of gems and richly colored stone had epistemic value of their own, in which light the peacock in Juno and Argus is shown to have “agate eyes” inset into its tail (189–91).
As a self-appointed uomo universale, Rubens nurtured interests far beyond his brief as a painter and courtier. These extended into the occult sciences, namely “physiognomy, Paracelsian alchemy, Christian cabala and hermeticism,” as discussed by Teresa Esposito in section 4, which is about literature and philosophy. When Rubens's theoretical notebook was published, the corresponding chapters were excised on account of being “useless and absurd” (235). In fact, such pursuits were actively encouraged by the Italian aristocracy, not least the alchemy-obsessed Gonzagas. As with lithic influences, occult interests were fostered by Rubens's membership of the Italian intelligentsia. Catherine Lusheck challenges clichés about painting as a liberal art. Seen through the lens of working-class heroes like Hercules, Rubens's oeuvre made the labors of the craft a virtue, albeit couched in Neo-Stoic terms.
The editing standards are not always consistent, and in several instances the images should have been in color. While very useful, published volumes of conference proceedings are inevitably fragmentary, inhibiting discussion of the bigger questions. Rubens emerges as a dyed-in-the-wool Italianist, yet his sources of inspiration came from across Europe and, indeed, an ever-shrinking world. Rubens's cosmopolitanism is more apparent when taking a global perspective, allowing scholarship to move past parochial binaries like Flanders versus Italy. To give one example, in Italy Rubens encountered envoys of Shah ʿAbbas, whose extravagant dress and gifts of Persian miniatures later fed into history paintings like Tomyris and Cyrus in the MFA Boston. But that is another story.
