17th century Belgian painting

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1. Belgian painting in the early period

In the Belgian painting of the period, national distinctive features are more noticeable than in architecture and in sculpture. At the first stage, the most common is gravure painting, which uses a significant variety of subjects: religious, mythological, household. Antwerp becomes the dominant center for the development of painting.

More diverse and colorful than Flemish architecture and sculpture, Flemish painting of the 17th century unfolds in its lush bloom. Even more clearly than in these arts, the ever-Flemish mixture of the northern and southern foundations, as an indestructible national treasure, emerges here. Modern art in them in one country did not capture such a rich and variegated area of ​​plots. In the new or restored churches, hundreds of gigantic baroque altars awaited images of saints painted on large canvases. In the palaces and houses the vast walls yearned for mythological, allegorical or genre easel paintings; Yes, and portrait painting, which developed in the XVI century before the portrait in natural growth, remained a great art in the full sense of the word, combining fascinating naturalness with the nobility of expression.

Next to this large painting, which Belgium shared with Italy and France, flourished here, continuing the old traditions, original cabinet painting mostly on small wooden or copper boards, unusually rich, embracing everything that was depicted, without neglecting religious, mythological or allegorical subjects, preferring everyday life of all classes of the population, especially peasants, cab drivers, soldiers, hunters and sailors in all its manifestations. Designed landscape or room backgrounds of these small-figure paintings were transformed into independent landscape and architectural paintings in the hands of some masters. Images of flowers, fruits and animals complete this series. Overseas trade delivered to the kennels and zoos of the ruling archdukes in Brussels the wonders of the flora and fauna. The wealth of forms and colors they could not lose sight of the artists who have mastered everything.

For all that, in Belgium there was no longer any ground for monumental wall painting. With the exception of Rubens' paintings in the Antwerp Jesuit Church and a few ecclesiastical series of landscapes, the great masters of Belgium created their large, canvas, wall and ceiling paintings for foreign rulers, and the fall of the Brussels tapestry technique, which Rubens’s participation reported only temporary lifting, made participation unnecessary other Belgian masters, what are the Jordaans and Teniers. But the Belgian masters took the famous, though not as deep as the Dutch, participation in the further development of engraving and etching. Dutch natives were even the best engravers before Rubens, and the participation of the greatest Belgian painters: Rubens, Jordans, van Dyck, Brouwer and Teniers in “pictorial engraving” - etching, is partly only a side affair, partly even doubtful.

Antwerp, a rich Low German trading town on the Scheldt, has now become more than ever, in the full sense of the word, the capital of Low-Dutch painting. Brussels painting, unless it was in the landscape that sought independent paths, became a branch of Antwerp art; even the painting of the old Flemish centers of art, Bruges, Ghent and Mecheln, lived at first only by its relationship to the Antwerp workshops. But in the Walloon part of Belgium, precisely in Luttych, one can trace an independent aggression towards the Italians and the French.

For the general history of the 17th century Flemish paintings are important, in addition to the collections of literary sources by van Mander, Goubraken, de Bee, van Gool and Weiermann, Immerzel, Kramm and Wurzbach's vocabulary, combined, only partly outdated, books by Mihiels, Vaagen, Waters, Riegel and Philippi . In view of the prevailing importance of the art of Scheldt, one can also call the history of the Antwerp art of van den Branden and Rooses, requiring, of course, additions and changes. The relevant chapter of the author of this book in his and Voltman "History of Painting" is already outdated in detail.

The complete freedom of pictorial location and execution, the internal unity of drawing and paints, the smoothest breadth and power of the 17th century Flemish painting reached in the creative hands of its great master Peter Paul Rubens, who made Antwerp the centerpiece of painting for all of Europe. There was no shortage, however, in the masters who stood at the transition between the old and the new directions.

In national realistic industries, with small figures against the background of a developed landscape, there were only echoes of the greatness and immediacy of Peter Bruegel the Elder. The transfer of the landscape in a transitional era remains within the framework of the “rocker style” created by Giliss van Konincloo with his beam-like tree foliage and the circumvention of the difficulties of aerial and linear perspective through the development of separate, alternating one after another, differently colored backgrounds. The founders of the current landscape painting, the Antwerp, the brothers Matthäus and Paul Bril (1550–1584 and 1554–1626) proceeded from this conditional style, the development of which is almost unknown. Matthäus Bril appeared suddenly as a painter of landscape frescoes in the Vatican in Rome. After his early death, Paul Bril, his brother's companion from the Vatican, developed a new Dutch landscape style at that time. Little of Mattheus’s authentic paintings have been preserved; the more Paul has come from about whose church and palace landscapes in the Vatican, in the Lateran and in the Palazzo Rospilosi in Santa Cecilia and in Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, I reported in other places. Only gradually do they become influenced by freer ones. with a great unity of executed landscapes by Annibale Carracci, to the above balanced transition style. Further development of Bril, which forms part of the general history of landscape painting, is reflected in its numerous, partly marked, small landscapes on boards (1598 in Parma, 1600 - in Dresden, 1601 - in Munich, 1608 and 1624 - in Dresden, 1609, 1620 and 1624 - in the Louvre, 1626 - in St. Petersburg), abundant as usual trees, rarely seeking to pass a certain area. In any case, Paul Bril belongs to the founders of the landscape style from which the art of Claude Lorrain grew.

In the Netherlands, the Antwerp Joosse de Momper (1564–1644), best represented in Dresden, developed the Koninsloo kulisnyi style in briskly painted mountain landscapes, not particularly rich in trees, on which the “three backgrounds”, sometimes with the addition of a fourth sunlit, are usually in all its brown-green-gray-blue beauty.

The influence of older paintings by Brill affects the second son of Peter Bruegel the Elder, Jan Bruegel the Elder (1568–1625), before his return to Antwerp, in 1596, who worked in Rome and Milan. Crivelli and Michel dedicated separate works to him. He wrote mostly small, sometimes miniature pictures, giving the impression of a landscape, even in cases where they present biblical, allegorical or genre themes. It is they who firmly hold Koninkloo style with bunched foliage, although they transfer the mutual transitions of three backgrounds more subtlely. It is characteristic of the versatility of Jan Bruegel that he painted landscape backgrounds for figure painters like Balen, figures for landscape painters like Momper, flower wreaths for artists such as Rubens. It is known for its freshly and subtly performed “The Fall of Man” of the Hague Museum, in which Rubens wrote Adam and Eve, and Jan Bruegel the landscape and animals. His own landscapes, abundantly equipped with colorful folk life, still not expressively expressing the sky with its clouds, present mainly hilly terrain irrigated by rivers, plains with windmills, village streets with tavern scenes, canals with wooded banks, lively country lanes on wooded heights and wooded roads with lumberjacks and hunters, alive and faithfully observed. Early pictures of his brush can be seen in Milan Ambrosians. It’s richer in Madrid, well in Munich, Dresden, Petersburg and Paris. Of particular importance in the sense of finding new ways was his painting of flowers, highly convincingly conveying not only the beauty of the forms and the brightness of the colors of rare colors, but also their combinations. Madrid, Vienna and Berlin have pictures of the colors of his brush.

Of his employees, we must not miss Gendrick van Balen (1575–1632), whose teacher is considered to be Rubens’s second teacher, Adam van Noort. His altar paintings (for example, in the church of James in Antwerp) are unbearable. He became famous for his small, smoothly painted, sugary paintings on boards with content mainly from ancient fables, such as “Feast of the Gods” in the Louvre, “Ariadne” in Dresden, “Manna Collection” in Braunschweig, but his paintings of this kind also lack artistic freshness and immediacy.

The landscape style of the transitional period described above lasted, however, among weak imitators until the beginning of the 18th century. Here we can mark only the strongest masters of this trend, who transferred it to Holland, David Vinkboons from Mecheln (1578–1629), who moved from Antwerp to Amsterdam, wrote fresh forest and village scenes, and occasionally also biblical episodes in a landscape setting, but more readily temple Holidays in front of village pubs. His best paintings in Augsburg, Hamburg, Braunschweig, Munich, St. Petersburg are quite directly observed and are painted with flowery colors, not without force. Relant Savery from Kurtra (1576–1639), to whom Kurt Erasmus devotedly wrote a study with love, studied German wooded mountains in the service of Rudolf II, after which he settled as a painter and etcher, first in Amsterdam, then in Utrecht. His light-filled, gradually merging the three plans, but somewhat dry in execution, mountain, rocky and forest landscapes, which can be well acquainted in Vienna and Dresden, he equip living groups of wild and tame animals in scenes of hunting, in the images of paradise and Orpheus. He also belongs to the earliest independent painters of colors. Adam Villaerts from Antwerp (1577, died after 1649), who moved to Utrecht in 1611, was a representative of the seascape of this transitional style. Its coastal and marine views (for example, in Dresden, at Weber in Hamburg, in the gallery of Liechtenstein) are still dry in the pattern of the waves, still coarse in depicting ship life, but are captivating with the honesty of their attitude to nature. Finally, Alexander Kerrinks from Antwerp (1600–1652), who transferred his Flemish landscape art to Amsterdam, in the paintings with his signature still follows Koninkslo, but in later paintings by Braunschweig and Dresden, is obviously influenced by brownish Dutch tonal painting by Van Goyen . He thus belongs to the transitional masters in the fullest sense of the word.

Of the Antwerp masters of this style who stayed at home, Sebastian Vranks (1573–1647) reveals undoubted success as a landscape painter and painter of horses. He also depicts foliage in the form of bunches, most often hanging like a birch, but he gives her a more natural connection, gives a clear tone to the airy tone and knows how to communicate the vital character of the actions of confidently and coherently written horses and riders of their battle and predatory scenes that can be seen For example, in Brunswick, Aschaffenburg, Rotterdam and Weber in Hamburg.

Finally, in architectural painting as early as the 16th century, he developed a transitional style along the paths of Steenwick the Elder, consisting in the gradual replacement of the literal nature following the artistic charm of his son, Hendrik Steenwick Junior (1580–1649), who moved to London, and next to him, Peter Neufs the Elder (1578–1656), whose interior views of churches can be found in Dresden, Madrid, Paris and Petersburg.

2. Rubens contribution to Belgian art

Peter Paul Rubens is considered the greatest artist of both Belgium and the whole world. It was he who formed the image of national painting, setting the direction of development for his students and followers. Like most other artists, Rubens began his creative career from studying in Italy; on returning home, he became the court painter of the ruling house.

Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) is the sun around which all the Belgian art of the XVII century revolves, but at the same time one of the great luminaries of the common European art of this period. Contrary to all Italian baroque painters, he is the main representative of the Baroque in painting. Completeness of forms, freedom of movement, domination over the masses, giving picturesqueness to the baroque style of architecture, in the paintings of Rubens are abandoned from the gravity of the stone and, with intoxicating luxury of colors, receive an independent, new right to exist. By the power of individual forms, by the grandeur of the composition, blossomed with the fullness of light and colors, the passion of life in transmitting sudden actions, force and fire in the excitation of the bodily and spiritual life of his fleshy men and women, dressed and undressed figures, he surpasses all other masters. White shines the gorgeous body of his blond women with full cheeks, full lips and a cheerful smile. Burnt by the sun, the skin of his heroes of men glows, and their brave bulging forehead is enlivened by a powerful bend of eyebrows. His portraits are the freshest and healthiest, and not the most individual and intimate for their time. No one could reproduce wild and tame animals as vitally as he did, although, due to lack of time, in most cases he offered to depict them in his paintings to assistants. In the landscape, the fulfillment of which he also assigned to assistants, he saw above all the general effect due to atmospheric life, but he himself wrote, even in old age, amazing landscapes. His art embraced the whole world of spiritual and physical phenomena, all the complexity of the past and present. Altar paintings and altar paintings again he wrote for the church. Portraits and portraits he wrote mostly for himself and his friends. Mythological, allegorical, historical images and hunting scenes he created for the great world. Landscape and genre paintings were random side works.

Orders rained down on Rubens. At least two thousand pictures left his workshop. The great demand for his art caused the frequent repetition of entire paintings or their individual parts by the hands of his students and assistants. At the zenith of his life, he and his hand-made pictures usually provided podmalevyvat assistants. There are all transitions between his handwritten works and paintings of the workshop, for which he gave only sketches. With all the similarities in the basic forms and basic moods, his hand-painted pictures reveal significant changes in style, the same as in many of his contemporaries, from solid plastic modeling and thick, heavy writing to a lighter, free, brighter version, to more lively outlines, to more soft, air modeling and to the full mood, illuminated with flowery colors of tonal painting.

At the head of the latest literature on Rubens is the widely conceived collection work of Max Rooses: “Works of Rubens” (“Loeuvre de Rubens” (1887–1892). The best and most important biographical works belong to Rooses and Michel. Summary works, after Vaagen, published also by Jacob Burchardt , Robert Fischer, Adolf Rosenberg and Wilhelm Bode. Some questions about Rubens dealt with Ruelens, Voltmann, Riegel, Göler von Ravensburg, Grosman, Riemans, and others. Rubens, as an engraver, was engaged in Himans and Forogelm-Schnefogt.

Rubens was born in Siegen, near Cologne, from respected Antwerps and received his first artistic education in the city of his fathers from Tobias Vergegta (1561–1631), a mediocre landscape painter of transitional style, then studied for four years with Adam van Noort (1562–1641), as is now known, one of the middle masters of the mannered italism, and then worked for another four years with Otto van Veen, rich in fabrication, empty in the forms of a false classic, to whom he first closely joined and in 1598 became a shop master. Three teachers Rubens Gaberditsl dedicated extensive articles in 1908. It is impossible to establish with certainty any picture of the early Antwerp period of Rubens. From 1600 to 1608 he lived in Italy; first in Venice, then mainly in the service of Vincenzo Gonzaga in Mantua. But already in 1601, he wrote in Rome for the three altars of the Church of Santa Croce in Jerusalem "The Acquisition of the Cross", "The Crown of Thorns" and the "Exaltation of the Cross". These three paintings, now belonging to the chapel of a hospital in Grasse, in southern France, are still found by self-seeking, still influenced by copies from Tintoretto, Titian and Correggio, but already filled with an independent desire for strength and movement, the style of his first Italian period. A young master went to Spain with a commission from his prince in 1603. Из написанных им там картин фигуры философов Гераклита, Демокрита и Архимеда в мадридском музее обнаруживают еще напыщенные, несамостоятельные формы, но и сильное влечение к психологической глубине. Вернувшись в Мантую, Рубенс написал большой трехчастный алтарный образ, средняя картина которого, с поклонением семьи Гонзага св. Троице, сохранилась в двух частях в мантуанской библиотеке, а из широких, обильных фигурами боковых картин, показывающих все растущую силу форм и действия масс, «Крещение Христа» попало в антверпенский музей и «Преображение» в музей Нанси. Затем в 1606 г. мастер снова написал в Риме для Кьеза Нуова великолепный, уже исполненный рубенсовской мощи в своих залитых светом фигурах, запрестольный образ «Успения св. Григория», принадлежащий ныне гренобльскому музею, а в Риме замещенный уже в 1608 г. тремя другими, ничуть не лучшими картинами того же мастера. Яснее напоминает манеру Караваджо эффектное «Обрезание Христа» 1607 г. в Сант Амброджо в Генуе. Впрочем, такие исследователи, как Роозес и Розенберг, относят к итальянскому периоду мастера, когда он копировал произведения Тициана, Тинторетто, Корреджо, Караваджо, Леонардо, Микеланджело и Рафаэля, еще ряд картин его кисти, по-видимому, однако, написанных позднее. Большие, происходящие из Мантуи, сильные по формам и краскам, аллегории порока и добродетели в Дрездене, если и не написаны, как думает вместе с нами Михель, около 1608 г. в Мантуе, то мы скорее допускаем вместе с Боде, что они явились по возвращении Рубенса на родину, чем с Роозесом, что они написаны до его итальянского путешествия в Антверпен. Уверенно рисованный и пластично моделированный образ Иеронима в Дрездене также обнаруживает своеобразную рубенсовскую манеру, быть может, даже слишком выработанную для его итальянского периода, к которому мы и теперь относим эту картину. По возвращении Рубенса в 1608 г. в Антверпен, уже в 1609 г. он был назначен придворным живописцем Альбрехта и Изабеллы, а его стиль, уже самостоятельный, быстро развился до грандиозной силы и величия.

Cluttered in composition, restless in shape, uneven in light effects is his “Adoration of the Magi” (1609–1610) in Madrid, marked, however, by a powerful movement. Full of life and passion, mighty in muscular body styling his famous three-part image of the “Exaltation of the Cross” in the Antwerp cathedral. Stronger Italian memories are reflected in simultaneous mythological paintings, such as Venus, Cupid, Bacchus and Ceres in Kassel, and the plump, bound Prometheus in Oldenburg. The typical portraits of the large size of this epoch are the landscaped portraits of Albrecht and Isabella in Madrid and the magnificent Munich picture representing in the gazebo of the master's honeysuckle with his young wife, Isabella Brant, brought to his homeland in 1609, an incomparable image of calm pure happiness love

Fig. 148. Self-portrait of Rubens with his wife Isabella Brant, in the Pinakothek in Munich. From the photograph of F. Brookman in Munich

Further flight art of Rubens discovered between 1611 and 1614. The huge picture of "Removing the Cross" with the majestic "Visit of Mary Elizabeth" and "Entry into the Temple" on the doors, in the Antwerp Cathedral, is considered the first work in which the master brought to full development their types and their way of writing. Wonderful passionate vitality of individual movements, even more wonderful is the heartfelt power of pictorial execution. Mythological paintings like “Romulus and Rem” in the Capitoline Gallery, “Faun and Faun” in the Schönborn Gallery in Vienna also belong to these years.

Painting by Rubens in 1613 and 1614, confident in composition, with clearly defined forms and colors, represent some of the paintings, marked as an exception by his name and year of performance. Such are the pure in form, the beautifully colored painting Jupiter and Callisto (1613), full of magic light Escape to Egypt in Kassel, Frozen Venus (1614) in Antwerp, pathetic Mourning (1614) in Vienna and Susanna (1614) in Stockholm, whose body is no doubt more pleasant and better understood than the too luxurious body of his earlier Susanna in Madrid; in the way of painting, these powerful paintings are joined by powerful symbolic images of the lonely crucified Christ against the darkened sky in Munich and Antwerp.

3. The heyday of creativity Rubens and his legacy

At the height of Rubens' creativity, his popularity is extremely high. To fulfill a huge number of orders, he uses the help of students, which include Bruegel, Snyders, Wildens, Van Dyck - the future outstanding masters. After himself, Rubens left more than two thousand paintings that became the property of many countries.

From now on, orders are piled up in the workshop of Rubens, that he gives his assistants more noticeable participation in the performance of his paintings. The oldest, besides Jan Bruegel, belongs to the outstanding painter of animals and fruits, Frans Snyders (1579-1657), according to Rubens himself who wrote the eagle on the above-mentioned Oldenburg picture with Prometheus, and the lively landscape painter Jan Wildens (1586-1653), who worked from 1618 for Rubens. The most remarkable employee was Anton van Dyck (1599–1641), who later became an independent value. In any case, having become a master in 1618, he was until 1620 with the right hand of Rubens. Rubens's own hand-made paintings of these years are usually contrasted to the bluish penumbra of the body with reddish-yellow light spots, while the pictures with the well-established cooperation of Van Dyck are distinguished by their uniform warm light and light and more nervous pictorial transmission. Among them are six large, enthusiastically written images from the life of the Roman consul Dec. Musa, in the Palace of Liechtenstein in Vienna, whose cardboards by Rubens in 1618 made for woven carpets (preserved copies are in Madrid), and large decorative ceiling paintings (1620 ) the Jesuit church in Antwerp, which did not reach us (only the sketches in various collections have survived), and some of the spectacular compositions, with many figures of altarpieces of this church, “The Miracle of St. Xavier "and" Miracle of sv. Ignatius ", rescued by the Vienna Court Museum. There is no doubt that Van Dyck’s cooperation also in the huge Crucifix in Antwerp, on which Longin, on horseback, stabs the Savior’s spear, in Madonna with repentant sinners in Kassel, and in Bod also in Munich’s “Trinity Day” and in Berlin “Lazar”, Rooses is also in a dramatic lion hunt and in a no less dramatic, passionate and quick kidnapping of Leucippus’s daughters in Munich. All these paintings shine not only with the bold power of the Rubens composition, but also with the penetrating subtlety of the Van Dyck painting feeling. Among the handwritten paintings, painted in the main parts by Rubens himself between 1615 and 1620, there are also the best religious paintings - full of vigorous, agitated mass movements “The Last Judgment” in Munich and the full inner animation “Assumption of the Virgin Mary” in Brussels and in Vienna, as well as workshops mythological paintings, luxurious "orgy" and the image of "Fiazos" in Munich, Berlin, St. Petersburg and Dresden, in which the power of the over-the-edge sensual joy of life transferred from Roman to Flemish, apparently, for the first time so the full expression. The “Battle of the Amazons” in Munich (about 1620), a creation inaccessible in the sense of the pictorial transfer of the most frantic landfill and battle, although written in a small size, adjoins here. Then come life-sized naked children, like excellent putti with a garland of fruits in Munich, further stormy hunting scenes, lion hunts, of which the best in Munich, and boar hunts, of which the best hangs in Dresden. Then follow the first landscape paintings with mythological additions, for example, the “Shipwreck of Aeneas” in Berlin full of moods, or with natural surroundings, what is the radiant Roman landscape with ruins in the Louvre (circa 1615) and the landscapes full of life “Summer” and “Winter "(About 1620) in Windsor. Majestically transmitted, widely and truthfully written without hints of old mannerisms, illuminated by the full light of all celestial manifestations, they stand like boundary columns in the history of landscape painting.

Fig. 149. "Battle of the Amazons" in the Munich Pinakothek. From the photograph of F. Brookman in Munich

Clearly, stately, powerfully, finally, portraits of Rubens of this five-year period. The masterpiece is his self-portrait in the Uffizi, his portrait group “The Four Philosophers” in Palazzo Pitti is magnificent. In the prime of his beauty is his wife Isabella in the noble portraits of Berlin and The Hague. Around 1620, the portrait of Susanna Furman in a hat with a feather in the National Gallery in London was also written by an amazing, fanned with the most tender light and shade. Famous male portraits of the master of these years can be seen in Munich and in the gallery of Liechtenstein. As passionately as Rubens depicted episodes from Sacred World History, hunting scenes and even landscapes, he wrote his portrait figures as calmly as he could, transferring their body shell with monumental power and truth, but not trying to spiritualize internally, seized only in general, facial features. Van Dyck left Rubens in 1620, and his wife Isabella Brant died in 1626. A new impetus for his art was a secondary marriage to the young, beautiful Elena Furman, in 1630. However, his artistic and diplomatic trips to Paris also served as an impetus. (1622, 1623, 1625), to Madrid (1628, 1629) and to London (1629, 1630). Of the two large historical episodes with allegories, 21 huge paintings from the life of Marie de Medici (Grosman wrote their history) now belong to the best decorations of the Louvre. Scribed by the workshop with Rubens’s hand, painted by his students, finished by him, these historical paintings are filled with many modern portraits and allegorical mythological figures in the spirit of modern baroque and represent such a mass of individual beauties and such artistic harmony that they will forever remain the best works of painting of the XVII century. From a series of paintings of the life of Henry IV of France, two half-finished fell into the Uffizi; sketches for others are stored in different collections. Nine paintings glorifying James I of English, with which Rubens, after a few years, decorated the plafond fields of the state hall at White Hall, blackened by soot from London, are unrecognizable, but they themselves do not belong to the master's most successful works.

Of the religious paintings painted by Rubens in the twenties, the great fiery Adoration of the Magi in Antwerp, completed in 1625, again marks a turning point in his artistic development with his freer and wider brush, lighter tongue of forms and more golden, airy flavor . The light, airy “Assumption of Mary” of the Antwerp Cathedral was ready in 1626. Then followed the picturesque, free “adoration of the Magi” in the Louvre and the “Raising of the Virgin Mary” in Antwerp. In Madrid, where the master studied Titian again, his coloring became richer and more “flowery”. The “Madonna” with the worshipers of her saints in the Augustinian church in Antwerp is a more baroque repetition of Titian's Madonna-Frari. The meaningfully reworked part of Caesar's Triumph of Mantegna, located in London in 1629 (now in the National Gallery), judging by her letter, could also have arisen only after this time. This decade is particularly rich in large portraits of the wizard. The aged but still full of warming prettiness is Isabella Brant in the beautiful portrait of the Hermitage; the portrait in the Uffizi is already sharper. A double portrait of his sons in the gallery of Liechtenstein belongs to the most beautiful and colorful. Famous for the expressive portrait of Caspar Gevaerta at his desk in Antwerp. And the aged master himself is in front of us with a thin diplomatic smile on his lips on the beautiful chest portrait of Aremberg Gallery in Brussels.

Fig. 150. "The Adoration of the Magi." Rubens painting in the Louvre. From the photo of F. Ganfshtengl in Munich

The last decade that fell to the lot of Rubens (1631–1640) stood under the star of his beloved second wife Elena Furman, whom he painted in all forms and which served him in kind for religious and mythological paintings. Her best portraits of Rubens' brush belong to the most beautiful female portraits in the world: half-length, in a rich dress, wearing a hat with a feather, life-size, sitting, in a luxurious dress open on her chest, in small form, next to her husband for a walk in the garden - she is in the Munich Pinakothek; naked, only partly covered by a fur gown, in the Vienna Court Museum; in a suit for walking in a field in the Hermitage; with his firstborn on the piss, arm in arm with her husband, and also on the street, accompanied by a page, at Baron Alfons Rothschild in Paris.

The most significant church works of this flourishing, radiant late master epoch are majestic and calm in composition, shining with all the colors of the rainbow, the altar of St.. Ildefons with powerful figures of donors on the doors of the Vienna Museum of the Court and a magnificent altarpiece in his own tomb of Rubens in the Church of James in Antwerp, with the saints of the city, written with people close to the master. More simple works, such as: of sv. Cecilia in Berlin and lush Beersheba in Dresden are not inferior to them in color and tone. The precious mythological paintings of this period belong to the brilliant courts of Paris in London and Madrid; and what passionate vitality breathes the hunt of Diana in Berlin, how fabulously luxurious is the festival of Venus in Vienna, with what magical light illuminated Orpheus and Eurydice in Madrid!

Preparatory for this kind of paintings are some genre images of the master. Thus, the character of the mythological genre captured boldly sensual, full-size, "Hour Dating" in Munich.

Fig. 151. "The Garden of Love." Rubens painting in Madrid. From the photo of F. Ganfshtengl in Munich

The prototypes of all Watteau's secular scenes are the famous, with flying gods of love, paintings called “Gardens of Love”, with groups of luxuriously dressed couples at a party in the garden. One of the best works of this kind is owned by Baron Rothschild in Paris, the other by the Madrid Museum. The most important genre paintings with small figures from the life of the people, written by Rubens, are a stately and vital, purely Rubensian peasant dance in Madrid, a half landscape tournament in front of the castle moat, in the Louvre, and a fair in the same collection, the motifs of which are reminiscent of Teniers.

Most of these landscapes of Rubens also belong to the last years of his life: such is the shining landscape with Odyssey in the Pitti Palace, these are new in design landscapes, artistically explaining the flat terrain in which the Rubens dacha was located, and with a majestic, full of mood transmission sky changes. The most beautiful are the fiery sunset in London and landscapes with a rainbow in Munich and St. Petersburg.

For whatever Rubens took, he turned everything into glittering gold; and the one who came in contact with his art, as an employee or a follower, could not escape from his vicious circle.

4. Van Dyke: Early Creativity

Anton Van Dyck was the most significant figure among Rubens' students. Like other artists, he began his career in Italy, after which he worked with Rubens. His early works are in many ways close to the style of his teacher. Van Dyke mainly painted on religious themes, as well as portraits of historical figures.

Of the many students of Rubens, only Anton van Dyck (1599–1641) - whose light, of course, refers to the light of Rubens, like the moon’s to the sun’s, reaches the heavens of art with a brilliantly-lit head. Although Balen is considered to be his real teacher, Rubens himself called him his student. In any case, his youthful development, as far as we know, was influenced by Rubens, from whom he never completely retreats, but, according to his more impressionable temperament, he processes into a more nervous, delicate and subtle painting style and less powerful in drawing style. Long-term stay in Italy finally turned him into a painter and painter. It was not his business to invent and dramatically exacerbate live action, but he knew how to put figures in well-thought-out relations to each other in his historical paintings and to inform his portraits of such subtle features of social status that he became the favorite painter of nobles of his time. The latest consolidated work on van Dyck belong to Michiels, Giffrey, Bush and Schaeffer. Separate pages of his life and art explained Vibiral, Bode, Himans, Rooses, Lau, Menotti and the author of this book. Even now they are arguing about the distinction between different periods of life time, which were connected mainly with traveling. According to the latest research, he worked until 1620 in Antwerp, in 1620–1621 in London, in 1621–1627 in Italy, mainly in Genoa, with a break from 1622 to 1623, conducted, as Rooses showed, in his homeland, in 1627 –1628 in Holland, then again in Antwerp, and from 1632 as court painter Charles I in London, where he died in 1641, and during this period, in 1634–1635 he was in Brussels, in 6140 and 1641 in Antwerp and Paris.

There are hardly any early works by Van Dyck in which Rubens influence would not have been noticeable. Even his early apostolic episodes already reveal traces of Rubens' manner. Of these, some original heads were preserved in Dresden, others in Altorp. Among the religious paintings, written by Van Dyck on his own, at his own peril and risk, from 1618 to 1620, while he was in the service of Rubens, belong to the "Martyrdom of St.. Sebastian ”, with the overloaded composition“ Crying of Christ ”and“ Bathing Susanna ”in Munich,“ Thomas in St. Petersburg ”,“ The Brazen Serpent ”in Madrid. None of these paintings can boast an impeccable composition, but they are well written and flowery.