7

Introduction Rubens and the Capital of the North

Mariet Westermann

When Rubens left for in 1600, he found the road well paved. Many ambitious Netherlandish artists before hirn had traveled across the Alps looking for teachers and patrons, art past and present, the latest techni• cal inventions, a social standing not readily available at horne. Albrecht Dürer's wistful insight from Venice - 'Here I am a gentleman, at horne a parasite' - overstated the case, but perhaps not by much. I Among the earliest Netherlandish panel painters, Jan van Eyck, Petrus Christus, and Hierony• mus Bosch may have traveled to the Iberian peninsula or Italy; artists in those countries appear to have been aware of their inventions, and Italian and Spanish contemporaries recorded their farne In the sixteenth century the journey south was de rigueur for all ambitious Netherlandish artists: , Maarten van Heemskerck, Lambert Lombard, Antonis Mor, and Pieter Bruegel went, some drawing extensively after antique monuments, one becoming court portraitist to Philip 11, and the most celebrated of them all regutgitating his knowledge of the Alps onto his panels, in Van Mander's famous phrasing. Rubens' more immediate predecessors and peers also sought out Italy. In the late 1590S, when Rubens was drawing inventive copies after ' latest prints, the older artist had only just returned to Haarlern from his Italian peregrinations (figs. 1-3).3 Pieter Last• man was so enamored ofhis experience in Italy that he favored Pietro for his signatures ever after. Precedent alone might have compelled Rubens to visit Italy, but Otto van Veen, or Vaenius, his last and most significant teacher, directed Rubens in his own footsteps. In the late , Van Veen had studied with Federico Zuccaro in Rome. In 1608, Rubens left Rome hastily upon news of his mother's dying. The interruption in his Italian sojourn was meant to be brief: having just won the commission for the high altarpiece of the Chiesa Nuova, Rubens could look forward to a grand Italian career. Few artists could have been more capable than Rubens of handling the rough-and-tumble competition and infinite artistic possibilities of early Baroque Rome. 'Baroque', that now discredited term, seems customized to the artist, with its pro mise of abun• dance, energy, splendor, persuasiveness, and profusion, with its assumption of a knowledgeable yet creative stance toward inherited form. 4 Rubens repeatedly professed to want to return to Italy, and surely could have. But he never did. Numerous strands of circumstance kept Rubens north, and Filip Vermeylen's essay in this volume disentangles them neatly. What has never