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拍品專文
Among the very last inventions of Peter Paul Rubens, this vigorous modello is the sole surviving complete record of one of his late monumental altarpieces: The Martyrdom of Saint Paul, commissioned for the High Altar of the Augustinian convent of Rouge-Cloître near Brussels, where the apostle was venerated as patron saint. Executed circa 1637, the small panel condenses Rubens’s extraordinary ability to convey tragic grandeur with unforced immediacy, at once an experimental study and a pictorial testament to the master’s late style. The completed altarpiece, of immense scale, was destroyed during the French bombardment of Brussels in 1695; this oil sketch remains the principal witness to the commission.
The subject derives from Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea (The Golden Legend), in which Paul, on his way to execution, encountered the Christian matron Plautilla and asked her for her veil to cover his eyes. Rubens, however, transformed the medieval account into a profoundly moving drama of pathos and conversion. Plautilla is shown tenderly binding the apostle’s eyes as he kneels, hands bound with rope, while soldiers hover in tense expectation. According to The Golden Legend, she begged Paul to pray for her, and he promised to return the veil – a detail that underscores the poignancy of her gesture, later mocked by the executioners when she received it stained with the saint’s blood. Three of the guards, according to the legend, were converted by the saint, a detail preserved here in the Roman foot soldiers to the left and foreground. Overhead, an angel descends, poised to crown Paul with the martyr’s laurel wreath, while two putti carry his palm, amplifying the symbolism of triumph over death. In this fusion of brutality and mercy, Roman force and Christian grace, Rubens reveals his genius for dramatising moral paradox in paint.
Topographical accuracy underpins the drama: in the distance rises the Pyramid of Cestius, the familiar landmark near the Ostian Gate in Rome, traditional site of Paul’s execution. The apostle, a Jew and Roman citizen whose conversion on the road to Damascus is far more often represented, here receives one of his rare visual commemorations in death, executed under Nero between AD 54 and 68. By uniting hagiographic tradition with antiquarian veracity, Rubens elevated the martyrdom into both history and exemplum. Colour serves to heighten this synthesis: Paul in muted grey-violet, Plautilla robed in sombre purple, the executioner in olive-green, the centurion vivid in red and helmeted, while behind them a mounted soldier in rose on a white horse rides across the background. Such orchestration of tones intensifies the scene’s psychological contrasts, binding the human drama into Rubens’s chromatic theatre.
The commission probably stemmed from Adriaan van der Reest, who was elected prior of the monastery in November 1635. Rubens is documented as having received 1,500 Rhenish florins for the work in 1638. Max Rooses accordingly assigned the modello to circa 1637 (op. cit.), a dating consistent with Rubens’s failing health in these final years before his death in May 1640. The format corresponds with the architectural frame, semicircular at the top, which survives today in the church of Onze-Lieve-Vrouw-ten-Poel in Tienen, Brabant, having been purchased at auction after the suppression of Rouge-Cloître in 1784 by Joseph II, the Austrian emperor. The original altarpiece would have measured no less than 420 by 270 centimetres.
Infrared reflectography reveals that the draughtsmanship corresponds closely to Rubens’s rapid sketches on paper (Sutton, op. cit., p. 77): through fluid, searching movements, he defined the essential rhythms and directional forces of the composition (fig. 1). A continuous, freely handled underdrawing in a dry medium, such as graphite or black chalk, extends across the entire surface of the panel, visible through the glazes beneath the saint’s head, Plautilla’s hands and the legs of the descending angel. Rather than describing contours, the lines operate as a kind of pictorial shorthand or aide-mémoire that roughly indicated the placement of figures and architecture. This fusion of drawing and painting lies at the heart of Rubens’s mature process, where invention, design and execution were conceived as a single, kinetic act.
As Vlieghe (op. cit., 1973), Held (op. cit., 1980) and others have noted, the composition reflects Rubens’s habitual practice of redeploying and recombining motifs: the soldier resting on his lance recalls the figure in Decius Mus Addressing the Legions of circa 1617 (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art); the group of Christian spectators and the Roman soldier seen half-length in the foreground evokes the arrangement of the soldiers in the Bearing of the Cross, painted in 1637 for the Benedictine monastery of Saints Peter and Paul at Affligem (for related oil sketches, see Held, ibid., I, nos. 347-348; II, pls. 341-342); the pose of the executioner finds an early precedent in the Martyrdom of Saint Catherine of 1615 (Lille, Musée des Beaux-Arts) and appears again, in reverse, in the Judgement of Solomon of circa 1611-12 (Madrid, Museo del Prado). The type of the executioner, finally, may trace its lineage to Raphael’s fresco in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican, a classical prototype Rubens absorbed and made his own.
The lost altarpiece for Rouge-Cloître inspired a later and larger version formerly in the Dominican church at Antwerp and now in the church of La Madeleine, Aix-en-Provence (Vlieghe, ibid., II, no. 138). Long attributed to Rubens’s pupil Theodoor Boeyermans (1620-1678), the painting was subsequently assigned to Gaspar de Crayer and at times even to Rubens himself, before Leo van Puyvelde persuasively reinstated the attribution to Boeyermans (‘La Décollation de Saint Paul d’Aix-en-Provence, non de Rubens mais de Boeyermans,’ Revue belge d’Archéologie et d’Histoire de l’Art, 27, 1958, pp. 29ff), a view supported by Vlieghe (ibid.) and consistent with the date 1670 inscribed on its frame. The principal difference between the Aix altarpiece and the composition of the present modello lies in the full-length treatment of the foreground figures. In this respect it closely parallels a large drawing in the British Museum (fig. 2), whose authorship has long been debated: reworked repeatedly and assembled from cut sections, it presents the same full-length configuration that most closely corresponds to the Aix composition, attesting to the enduring vitality of Rubens’s original invention as embodied in the present modello. Conceived in the twilight of Rubens’s career, its modest scale belies its monumentality, the freedom of his brush transforming the sketch into an image of profound humanity.
A note on the provenance:
The panel’s provenance is equally distinguished. Acquired in Florence in 1847 by Sir Robert Holford – described by R.H. Benson as a collector whose ‘enthusiasm was under control, his choice deliberate, and his range catholic’ (Letters of R.H. Benson to Arthur C. Benson, London, 1924, p. 39) – it entered what Gustav Waagen in 1854 judged the second greatest collection in Britain after that of the Marquess of Hertford, though superior in universality of taste (Treasures of Art in Great Britain, London, 1854, III, pp. 338-40). Following the dispersal of the Holford collection at Christie’s in 1927-28, one of the landmark Old Master sales of the century, the modello was briefly thought to be an early van Dyck. Waagen himself described it as ‘when he [van Dyck] was strongly influenced by Rubens’ (ibid., p. 340). By the time of Max Rooses’s Oeuvre de P.P. Rubens (op. cit.), however, the attribution to Rubens was secure and has not been contested since. William Gibson, later Keeper of the National Gallery, London, praised it in 1928 as ‘of the highest rank as containing a very great pictorial idea […] in a study like this one sees what profundity, what subtlety Rubens was capable of, that he was not merely an amazingly powerful rhetorician, and perhaps the greatest executant in paint, but a very great artist’ (op. cit.).
The subject derives from Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea (The Golden Legend), in which Paul, on his way to execution, encountered the Christian matron Plautilla and asked her for her veil to cover his eyes. Rubens, however, transformed the medieval account into a profoundly moving drama of pathos and conversion. Plautilla is shown tenderly binding the apostle’s eyes as he kneels, hands bound with rope, while soldiers hover in tense expectation. According to The Golden Legend, she begged Paul to pray for her, and he promised to return the veil – a detail that underscores the poignancy of her gesture, later mocked by the executioners when she received it stained with the saint’s blood. Three of the guards, according to the legend, were converted by the saint, a detail preserved here in the Roman foot soldiers to the left and foreground. Overhead, an angel descends, poised to crown Paul with the martyr’s laurel wreath, while two putti carry his palm, amplifying the symbolism of triumph over death. In this fusion of brutality and mercy, Roman force and Christian grace, Rubens reveals his genius for dramatising moral paradox in paint.
Topographical accuracy underpins the drama: in the distance rises the Pyramid of Cestius, the familiar landmark near the Ostian Gate in Rome, traditional site of Paul’s execution. The apostle, a Jew and Roman citizen whose conversion on the road to Damascus is far more often represented, here receives one of his rare visual commemorations in death, executed under Nero between AD 54 and 68. By uniting hagiographic tradition with antiquarian veracity, Rubens elevated the martyrdom into both history and exemplum. Colour serves to heighten this synthesis: Paul in muted grey-violet, Plautilla robed in sombre purple, the executioner in olive-green, the centurion vivid in red and helmeted, while behind them a mounted soldier in rose on a white horse rides across the background. Such orchestration of tones intensifies the scene’s psychological contrasts, binding the human drama into Rubens’s chromatic theatre.
The commission probably stemmed from Adriaan van der Reest, who was elected prior of the monastery in November 1635. Rubens is documented as having received 1,500 Rhenish florins for the work in 1638. Max Rooses accordingly assigned the modello to circa 1637 (op. cit.), a dating consistent with Rubens’s failing health in these final years before his death in May 1640. The format corresponds with the architectural frame, semicircular at the top, which survives today in the church of Onze-Lieve-Vrouw-ten-Poel in Tienen, Brabant, having been purchased at auction after the suppression of Rouge-Cloître in 1784 by Joseph II, the Austrian emperor. The original altarpiece would have measured no less than 420 by 270 centimetres.
Infrared reflectography reveals that the draughtsmanship corresponds closely to Rubens’s rapid sketches on paper (Sutton, op. cit., p. 77): through fluid, searching movements, he defined the essential rhythms and directional forces of the composition (fig. 1). A continuous, freely handled underdrawing in a dry medium, such as graphite or black chalk, extends across the entire surface of the panel, visible through the glazes beneath the saint’s head, Plautilla’s hands and the legs of the descending angel. Rather than describing contours, the lines operate as a kind of pictorial shorthand or aide-mémoire that roughly indicated the placement of figures and architecture. This fusion of drawing and painting lies at the heart of Rubens’s mature process, where invention, design and execution were conceived as a single, kinetic act.
As Vlieghe (op. cit., 1973), Held (op. cit., 1980) and others have noted, the composition reflects Rubens’s habitual practice of redeploying and recombining motifs: the soldier resting on his lance recalls the figure in Decius Mus Addressing the Legions of circa 1617 (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art); the group of Christian spectators and the Roman soldier seen half-length in the foreground evokes the arrangement of the soldiers in the Bearing of the Cross, painted in 1637 for the Benedictine monastery of Saints Peter and Paul at Affligem (for related oil sketches, see Held, ibid., I, nos. 347-348; II, pls. 341-342); the pose of the executioner finds an early precedent in the Martyrdom of Saint Catherine of 1615 (Lille, Musée des Beaux-Arts) and appears again, in reverse, in the Judgement of Solomon of circa 1611-12 (Madrid, Museo del Prado). The type of the executioner, finally, may trace its lineage to Raphael’s fresco in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican, a classical prototype Rubens absorbed and made his own.
The lost altarpiece for Rouge-Cloître inspired a later and larger version formerly in the Dominican church at Antwerp and now in the church of La Madeleine, Aix-en-Provence (Vlieghe, ibid., II, no. 138). Long attributed to Rubens’s pupil Theodoor Boeyermans (1620-1678), the painting was subsequently assigned to Gaspar de Crayer and at times even to Rubens himself, before Leo van Puyvelde persuasively reinstated the attribution to Boeyermans (‘La Décollation de Saint Paul d’Aix-en-Provence, non de Rubens mais de Boeyermans,’ Revue belge d’Archéologie et d’Histoire de l’Art, 27, 1958, pp. 29ff), a view supported by Vlieghe (ibid.) and consistent with the date 1670 inscribed on its frame. The principal difference between the Aix altarpiece and the composition of the present modello lies in the full-length treatment of the foreground figures. In this respect it closely parallels a large drawing in the British Museum (fig. 2), whose authorship has long been debated: reworked repeatedly and assembled from cut sections, it presents the same full-length configuration that most closely corresponds to the Aix composition, attesting to the enduring vitality of Rubens’s original invention as embodied in the present modello. Conceived in the twilight of Rubens’s career, its modest scale belies its monumentality, the freedom of his brush transforming the sketch into an image of profound humanity.
A note on the provenance:
The panel’s provenance is equally distinguished. Acquired in Florence in 1847 by Sir Robert Holford – described by R.H. Benson as a collector whose ‘enthusiasm was under control, his choice deliberate, and his range catholic’ (Letters of R.H. Benson to Arthur C. Benson, London, 1924, p. 39) – it entered what Gustav Waagen in 1854 judged the second greatest collection in Britain after that of the Marquess of Hertford, though superior in universality of taste (Treasures of Art in Great Britain, London, 1854, III, pp. 338-40). Following the dispersal of the Holford collection at Christie’s in 1927-28, one of the landmark Old Master sales of the century, the modello was briefly thought to be an early van Dyck. Waagen himself described it as ‘when he [van Dyck] was strongly influenced by Rubens’ (ibid., p. 340). By the time of Max Rooses’s Oeuvre de P.P. Rubens (op. cit.), however, the attribution to Rubens was secure and has not been contested since. William Gibson, later Keeper of the National Gallery, London, praised it in 1928 as ‘of the highest rank as containing a very great pictorial idea […] in a study like this one sees what profundity, what subtlety Rubens was capable of, that he was not merely an amazingly powerful rhetorician, and perhaps the greatest executant in paint, but a very great artist’ (op. cit.).