Rubens, Rembrandt, and the Spousal Model/Muse

CHAPTER 13 Rubens, Rembrandt, and the Spousal Model/Muse

H. Perry Chapman

The idea that art originates in love—expressed in the topos liefde baart kunst, love begets art—was central to early modern Netherlandish art theory. In the triad of art’s motivations, love ranked above honour and profit; it was the artist’s driving force and highest goal.1 Conceptualized as a lofty love of God, or love of art, it encompassed both erotic love and conjugal love. Love’s power to inspire and impassion was encapsulated, conceptually and visually, in the relation between artist and model. Tales in which the artist’s model is also his (or her) lover and muse originated in antiquity; were retold by the early modern artists’ biographers; and had pictorial currency in the seventeenth century. The painter and theorist Joachim von Sandrart illustrated the story of the Greek sculptor Butades’s daughter, who, when her lover was going abroad, drew on a wall the outline of the shadow of his face that was cast by a lamp.2 Von Sandrart took from this that ‘love was the inventor of this beautiful science’ of drawing.3 Pliny’s account of Apelles painting Campaspe is an origin story about the power of erotic love to impassion the painter and inspire the creation of the beautiful, seductive female nude. Alexander the Great engaged Apelles to paint Campaspe, the most beloved of all his concubines, ‘undraped’, and when the painter fell in love with his model, Alexander made him a present of her.4

1 Woodall J., “Love Is in the Air: Amor as Motivation and Message in Seventeenth- Century Netherlandish Painting”, Art History 19 (1996) 208–64; idem, “Wtewael’s Perseus and Andromeda: Looking for Love in Early Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting”, in Arscott C. – Scott K. (eds.), Manifestations of Venus: Art and Sexuality (Manchester: 2000) 39–68; and Jongh E. de, Portretten van echt en trouw: Huwelijk en gezin in de Nederlandse kunst van de zeventiende eeuw [exh. cat., Frans Halsmuseum, Haarlem] (Zwolle: 1986) 57–59, 270–278. Sluijter E.J., Seductress of Sight: Studies in Dutch Art of the Golden Age, Studies in Netherlandish Art and Cultural History 2 (Zwolle: 2000) 108–159, discusses the inspirational powers of Venus, love, and female beauty. 2 Pliny, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham (London: 1968) 35.43.151, 373. 3 Sandrart Joachim von, Teutsche Academie der Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste (Nuremberg: 1675) Kirchner T. – Nova A. – Blüm C. – Schreurs A. – Wübbena T. (eds.), 2008–2012, II, Vorrede 3, http://ta.sandrart.net/en/text/201, 06/19/16: ‘Etliche machen die Liebe zur ersten Erfinderin dieser schönen Wissenschafft’. 4 Pliny, Natural History, 35.36, 85–87.

This anecdote is often taken as a courtly tale about the mutually beneficial relation between an artist and a ruler who demonstrated his self-command by sacrificing his passions in favour of the artist. And, indeed, Joos van Winghe painted his large Apelles Paints Campaspe for Emperor Rudolph II [Fig. 13.1]. Above all, the story enshrined the female nude, represented from life and transformed into an ideal beauty, as the most perfect subject of art. In retelling it, Karel van Mander emphasized the erotic power of the nude model: ‘Because Apelles had more knowledge than Alexander about the beauty of the perfect human body and the appearance of a beautiful woman, so too he was more powerfully confronted with and overcome by unchaste love due to the con- stant observation of her when he was painting’.5 Of Van Winghe’s work, he wrote, ‘Apelles paints the delightfully beautiful Campaspe, as his love for her ignites’.6 Van Winghe has portrayed himself in the guise of Apelles, his heart pierced by Cupid’s arrow.7 The shell identifies Campaspe with Venus, following Pliny’s suggestion that she was the model for Apelles’s Venus Anadyomene (rising from the sea). Hence, Venus, goddess of love, becomes the artist’s model and muse. At just this same time Hendrick Goltzius conflated Venus with Pictura, the personification of painting.8 Thirty years later, when Willem van Haecht staged the story of Apelles and Campaspe in a grand, fictional Antwerp gallery, he would have little to do with nudity inflaming passion [Fig. 13.2]. Instead, in a kind of domestication of the artist’s model, he cast Campaspe as a muse, in the turban of a sibyl and an ex- cess of drapery, and with one breast exposed, signifying virtuous love. A nearby drawing of the Judgement of Paris identifies her with Venus. The juxtaposition of the modest Campaspe with this gallery’s many sculpted and painted nudes, most notably Correggio’s carnal Venus and Cupid with a Satyr, hanging at upper right, encapsulates the complexities surrounding the depiction of nudity in Counter-Reformation Antwerp.9 Following the Council of Trent’s prohibitions

5 Sluijter E.J., Rembrandt and the Female Nude (Amsterdam: 2006) 309, 317, citing Mander Karel van, Schilder-Boeck (Haarlem, Paschier van Wesbusch: 1604), fol. 79 recto: ‘maer alsoo Appelles de volmaeckte schoonheyt eens Menschen lichaems en gedaente eender schoonder Vrouwen beter kende als Alexander, soo werdt hy met oncuysscher liefden te crachtelijcker bestreden en verwonnen, in haer stadich aen te sien alsoo hy met het schilderen doende was’. 6 Mander, Schilder-Boeck, fol. 264 verso: ‘en van de Liefde gheprickelt wort’. 7 For confirmation that Apelles is a likeness of Van Winghe, compare his portrait in Hondius Hendrick, Pictorum aliquot celebrium, præcipué Germaniæ Inferioris, effiges (The Hague, Henricus Hondius: 1610) 89. 8 For Hendrick Goltzius, Venus/Pictura (Germany, private collection), see Sluijter, Seductress of Sight, Fig. 109. 9 Correggio’s Venus and Cupid with a Satyr is now in the Louvre, Paris.