Van Dyck, Rubens, and the Status of Portraiture Adam Eaker Submitted
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Lore of the Studio: Van Dyck, Rubens, and the Status of Portraiture Adam Eaker Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2016 ©2016 Adam Eaker All rights reserved ABSTRACT Lore of the Studio: Van Dyck, Rubens, and the Status of Portraiture Adam Eaker This dissertation offers a new interpretation of Anthony van Dyck’s art and career, taking as its point of departure a body of contemporary anecdotes, poems, and art theoretical texts that all responded to Van Dyck’s portrait sittings. It makes a decisive break with previous scholarship that explained Van Dyck’s focus on portraiture in terms of an intellectual deficit or a pathological fixation on status. Instead, I argue that throughout his career, Van Dyck consciously made the interaction between painter and sitter a central theme of his art. Offering an alternate account of Van Dyck’s relationship to Rubens as a young painter, the opening chapter examines Van Dyck’s initial decision to place portraiture at the heart of his production. I trace that decision to Van Dyck’s work on a series of history paintings that depict the binding of St. Sebastian, interpreted here as a programmatic statement on the part of a young artist with a deep commitment to life study and little interest in an emerging hierarchy of genres that deprecated portraiture. The second chapter surveys the portrait copies of both Rubens and Van Dyck, demonstrating that imitative and historicist investigations link their approaches to portraiture. Van Dyck drew upon his copies of Titian and Raphael in paintings such as his epochal portrait of Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio, which awakened an ambivalent response on the part of Italian artists and critics. But Van Dyck’s practice of imitation also extended to his comportment and self-presentation in public, as exemplified by his emulation of Sofonisba Anguissola. A discussion of Van Dyck’s encounter with Anguissola leads to the contention that Van Dyck saw himself as participating in an alternate genealogy of art that placed court portraiture at the heart of an ambitious career and offered a rare opening to female practitioners. Van Dyck’s reception by one such painter, the English portraitist Mary Beale, provides a Leitmotiv throughout the dissertation. The third chapter situates Rubens’s and Van Dyck’s contrasting approaches to female portraiture within a larger shift in the status of portraits of women in the early seventeenth century, as embodied by the pan-European phenomenon of the “Gallery of Beauties.” This chapter also offers readings of the two artists’ contrasting depictions of Maria de’ Medici, who visited both of their homes during her exile in the Southern Netherlands. Such visits to Van Dyck’s studio provide the subject of the fourth and final chapter, which reexamines early biographers’ accounts of Van Dyck’s sittings and surveys his legacy for English painting and art theory over the course of the long seventeenth century. Whereas in their own writings, artists emphasized the opportunities for courtly self-assertion afforded by the sitting, poets and playwrights were more likely to depict sittings as threats to the sexual and moral order. Both attitudes represent important aspects of Van Dyck’s critical reception. The conclusion looks ahead to the tenacious hold of the portrait sitting on modern imaginings of the studio. Examining the portrait practices of such artists as Lucian Freud, Andy Warhol, and Alice Neel, the conclusion reveals the persistence of a fascination with the sitting that had its origin with Van Dyck. Table of Contents List of Figures ii Acknowledgments viii Introduction 1 Chapter One: Between Master and Model 24 Chapter Two: Historians of Portraiture 65 Chapter Three: The Portrait in the Gallery 110 Chapter Four: The Scene of the Sitting 149 Conclusion: The Sitter’s Tale 185 Figures 192 Bibliography of Works Cited 269 i List of Figures Introduction Fig. 1 Anthony van Dyck, Nicholas Lanier, ca. 1628, oil on canvas, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum Fig. 2 Anthony van Dyck, Nicholas Lanier, ca. 1628, black chalk, heightened with white, Edinburgh, National Galleries of Scotland Chapter One Fig. 3 Anthony van Dyck, Self-Portrait, ca. 1621, oil on canvas, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art Fig. 4 Anthony van Dyck, St. Sebastian Bound for Martyrdom, ca. 1618, oil on canvas, Paris, Musée du Louvre Fig. 5 Anthony van Dyck, St. Sebastian Bound for Martyrdom, ca. 1618, ca. 1621, oil on canvas, Munich, Alte Pinakothek Fig. 6 Anthony van Dyck, St. Sebastian Bound for Martyrdom, ca. 1618-20, oil on canvas, Munich, Alte Pinakothek Fig. 7 Anthony van Dyck, Study of a Nude Youth, ca. 1618, oil on canvas, Dublin, The National Gallery of Ireland Fig. 8 Peter Paul Rubens, Four Studies of a Man’s Head, ca. 1615, oil on panel, transferred to canvas, Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts Fig. 9 Peter Paul Rubens, St. James the Apostle, ca. 1612-13, oil on panel, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado Fig. 10 Anthony van Dyck, An Apostle, ca. 1618-21, oil on paper mounted on panel, Berlin, Gemäldegalerie Fig. 11 Anthony van Dyck, Simon, ca. 1618-21, oil on panel, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister Fig. 12 Anthony van Dyck, Self-Portrait, ca. 1620, oil on canvas, Munich, Alte Pinakothek Fig. 13 Peter Paul Rubens, Study of a Kneeling Man, ca. 1609-10, black chalk, with white heightening, Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen ii Fig. 14 Arnout Vinckenborch (attr.), Study of a Kneeling Man, ca. 1618, black and red chalk, heightened with white, and wash, Düsseldorf, Museum Kunstpalast Fig. 15 Anthony van Dyck, Study of a Kneeling Man, ca. 1618-20, black, red, and yellow chalk, heightened with white, Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen Fig. 16 Willem Panneels (attr.), Study of a Nude Youth (after Van Dyck), ca. 1628, black chalk, Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst Fig. 17 Peter Paul Rubens, St. Sebastian, ca. 1614, oil on canvas, Berlin, Gemäldegalerie Chapter Two Fig. 18 Anthony van Dyck, Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio, 1623, oil on canvas, Florence, Palazzo Pitti Fig. 19 Raphael, Leo X with Two Cardinals, 1518, oil on panel, Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi Fig. 20 Anthony van Dyck, The Italian Sketch-Book (fol. 107v), ca. 1621-27, pen and ink, London, British Museum Fig. 21 Titian, Paul III and His Grandsons, 1545-6, oil on canvas, Naples, Museo di Capodimonte Fig. 22 Anthony van Dyck, The Italian Sketch-Book (fol. 108v), ca. 1621-27, pen and ink, London, British Museum Fig. 23 Guido Reni, Gregory XV, 1622, oil on canvas, Wiltshire, Corsham Court Fig. 24 Domenichino, Gregory XV and His Nephew, ca. 1621-23, oil on canvas, Béziers, Musée des Beaux-Arts Fig. 25 Guercino, Gregory XV, ca. 1622-23, oil on canvas, Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum Fig. 26 Raphael, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, 1512, oil on panel, Naples, Museo di Capodimonte iii Fig. 27 Peter Paul Rubens, “Ansegisus and Begga,” ca. 1612, oil on panel, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum Fig. 28 Peter Paul Rubens, Charles the Bold, ca. 1618, oil on panel, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum Fig. 29 Peter Paul Rubens, Maximilian, ca. 1618, oil on panel, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum Fig. 30 Antonio de Succa (attr.), engraving, frontispiece to Ducum Brabantiae Chronica, 1600 Fig. 31 Theodor Matham, St. Begga (After Rubens), before 1676, engraving, London, British Museum Fig. 32 Robert Campin (attr.), A Man and Woman, ca. 1435, oil on panel, London, National Gallery Fig. 33 Frans Francken the Younger, Interior of a Collector’s Cabinet, ca. 1639-41, oil on panel, London, The Courtauld Gallery Fig. 34 Peter Paul Rubens, Agrippina and Germanicus, ca. 1614, oil on panel, Washington, National Gallery of Art Fig. 35 Raphael, Portrait of a Young Man, 1514, oil on panel, formerly Krakow, Czartoryski Museum Fig. 36 Anthony van Dyck, Self-Portrait, ca. 1621, oil on canvas, St. Petersburg, The Hermitage Fig. 37 Guido Reni, Cardinal Roberto Ubaldino, ca. 1627, oil on canvas, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art Fig. 38 Guido Reni, Cardinal Bernardino Spada, ca. 1630, oil on canvas, Rome, Galleria Spada Fig. 39 Anthony van Dyck, The Italian Sketch-Book (fol. 110), ca. 1621-27, pen and ink, London, British Museum Fig. 40 Mary Beale, Self-Portrait, 1665, oil on canvas, London, National Portrait Gallery Chapter Three iv Fig. 41 Peter Paul Rubens, The Presentation of the Portrait of Marie de’ Medici, 1623- 1625, oil on canvas, Paris, Musée du Louvre Fig. 42 Florentine School, Portrait of Maddalena Strozzi Bardi, ca. 1600, oil on canvas, Florence, Palazzo Pitti Fig. 43 Hans von Aachen, Archduchess Anna of Austria, 1603, oil on canvas, Innsbruck, Schloss Ambras Fig. 44 Nicolas Poussin, Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well, oil on canvas, 1648, Paris, Musée du Louvre Fig. 45 Frans Pourbus the Younger and Workshop, The Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, Archduchess of Austria c.1598-1600, oil on canvas, The Royal Collection Fig. 46 Peter Paul Rubens, “Caterina Grimaldi” with a Dwarf, 1606, oil on canvas, Kingston Lacey (The National Trust) Fig. 47 Peter Paul Rubens, The Marriage by Proxy of Maria de’ Medici, ca. 1623-25, oil on canvas, Paris, Musée du Louvre Fig. 48 Peter Paul Rubens, Self-Portrait, 1623, oil on canvas, The Royal Collection Fig. 49 Peter Paul Rubens, Madonna della Vallicella, 1608, oil on slate, Rome, Chiesa Nuova Fig. 50 Nicolas Poussin, Cephalus and Aurora, ca. 1630, oil on canvas, London, The National Gallery Fig. 51 Ferdinand de Braekeleer, Rubens Painting the “Chapeau de Paille,” 1825, oil on canvas, Paris, Musée du Louvre Fig. 52 Luca Giordano, Rubens Painting the Allegory of Peace, ca. 1680, oil on canvas, Madrid, Museo del Prado Fig.