Peter Paul Rubens, The Adoration of the Magi

We're in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp in an enormous gallery. One of the few that I can think of big enough to hold these monumental canvases. At the far end is the Adoration of the Magi by Peter Paul Rubens. You're rightly mentioning that it's one of the few galleries large enough to hold such work because it was in fact especially constructed to hold these large-scale altarpieces by Rubens. The Adoration of the Magi is a biblical story. It tells of the event soon after the birth of Christ when three kings followed the star of Bethlehem from the east to pay homage to the newly-born child and they come bearing gifts. According to the text, they bring gold, which you can see with the Red King. Then there is myrrh, which you can see with the king dressed in green. And then there is incense, which you can see with the king in white. There's very little about the kings but their gifts mentioned in the Bible. But by the time Rubens was painting it, there was a long tradition of painters painting this story and he would have referenced both the biblical story as well as the long tradition of images of it. Mind you, he always gave things his own twist. And his twist is evident in the complex postures and interrelations of these figures, in the fluidness of the brushwork, in the incredible interactions of these brilliant colors. In the previous century, you had in Venice painters like Tintoretto and Titian and Vironese who painted large canvases with many figures on them in a certain theatricality. In Rome, there were painters like Caravaggio playing with light. In Bologna, there were painters like de Caracci examining light and color. And Rubens sort of synthesizes all of this. And importantly, Rubens visited Italy and stayed there for an extended period of time, learning from those great painters, but bringing those skills back to Antwerp at a moment that was especially fraught. What would become Belgium had lived through enormous violence and upheaval in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, the destruction of artwork during the iconoclasm, but Catholicism then reasserting itself in the city of Antwerp. In Rubens' time, Antwerp was back under the Spanish crown and decidedly Catholic. And there came an effort to redecorate the churches which had been damaged in the century before, but also new churches were built with altars that also needed decorations. It was Rubens who cornered this market niche for altar painting. And so he would become the most sought-after painter for such large works meant for churches, first in what is today Belgium, but then also beyond. And I think we can see emphases in this painting that refer to the historical moment in which Rubens is painting. One of the ways in which this picture is said to deviate from the norm is an active pose of the Virgin Mary. Unlike many other depictions, she's not seated, but she's standing upward, really presenting the Christ child to the Magi. Mary was an important figure in the city of Antwerp. She was patron saint of the city and there was a very strong cult of the Virgin Mary. And in the Counter-Reformation, this was also encouraged. Mary is active and she holds, perhaps, an even more active Christ child who seems to be reaching out towards the gifts that are being presented to him. And incense here is being used in association with the idea of the Eucharist, that is, with the bread and wine that is transformed miraculously during Mass into the blood and flesh of Christ. And so here the censer is referencing the Holy Mass, that takes place in Catholic churches. There was a tradition of always presenting Malchio, who was here dressed in red, with the gold closest to the Christ child. Rubens deviated from this norm by placing the king with the incense closer to him. And it has often been said that this is a reference to Catholic Mass, to the Eucharist. If you look at the dress of the king, he's actually wearing liturgical clothing, meaning clothing which would have figured in Mass. So this adds substance to that idea. All of these figures are set in this relatively shallow interior space. On the left, you can see a classical column. On the right, what seems to be the worn, almost ruins of this shed-like structure. And if you look very closely, in the corner, you can see a spiderweb. You have the Son of God, not in a big palace, but in a very humble stable. And so emphasizing these humble and human beginnings. But somewhat at odds with the stable interior is the classicizing column. It's so clear, with a kind of full light of day on it, as opposed to the shadows that we see elsewhere. This work was painted for the high altar of St. Michael's Abbey. And works like this would be presented in what is called an altar entablature, a sculptural frame. Now, the column also figured in the altar entablature. So Rubens would, in the pictorial space, reference the architectural space in which his painting was presented at the time. After spending a bit of time looking at the canvas, my eye comes to rest at the ox that's looking out directly at us. You can see just a few simple brushstrokes that indicate the tufts of hair. But if you look even more closely, you can see that much of the snout is actually just the ground color of the painting. There's a kind of economy of brushwork here. We look at this work today in the museum, but it was painted for the high altar of a church. And Rubens knew that viewers would only see it from afar. And he knew exactly the minimum amount of paint he needed to give the illusion of texture or volume. And this was painted with great speed. Rubens had a very large workshop in the sense that there were many young painters active there. And it was geared at the production of monumental paintings. Now, an old tradition has it that Rubens painted this work entirely by himself, which is exceptional for a painting this scale. The last catalog of Rubens's paintings alone counted 1,400 objects. And then he also made designs for tapestry. He made designs for sculpture and architecture, then had many prints made after his compositions. So the totality of his works is said to range in the 2000s. To achieve this, he required a large enterprise, which was a large body of workers, often very specialized. It was also a large workspace that could hold paintings like this, which was really exceptional at the time. But then also, Rubens had an archive of drawings, for example, studies of heads, which were painted after life and which he could insert in different compositions, but also drawings of animals, of costumes, of antique sculptures. And he would piece together his compositions from these, allowing him to achieve such a vast output. Which seems in and of itself superhuman, and yet this artist was also sent on diplomatic missions across Europe, so also lived a political life. Diplomat, but then also a scholar. He was also an antiquarian. He practiced the different branches of the arts. It's unfathomable that one person could have found the time for all of this. ♪