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Peter Paul Rubens, the colossus of 17th-century Flemish art, is remembered these days for his large paintings, plus-size models and a fleshy exuberance that can make even his depiction of the Last Judgment seem like a Saturnalia. But all that pageantry and jollity belies the fact that his world was subdued by conflict, by wars measured in decades.
Rubens (1577-1640) was Baroque Europe's great Renaissance man—a classical scholar, linguist, diplomat, by some measure even a spy, and an entrepreneur, whose thriving Antwerp workshop counted Europe's otherwise warring dynasties among its patrons. Near the end of his life, in the lat4e 1630s, he turned homeward and inward, creating a number of bucolic landscapes purely for his own pleasure, and a remarkable, elaborate, and dire allegory addressing the wars then ripping Europe apart. Commissioned by Justus Sustermans, a fellow Flemish artist active at the Medici court, "The Horror of War" (c 1637-38), as it is now often called, is still in Florence, hanging in the Palatine Gallery in the city's Pitti Palace.
The dark center of the painting is the god Mars, his sword drawn, his shield held upright and his plumed helmet reflecting the darkening skies above. Led into the battle by the Fury Alecto, whose torch can reputedly make blood boil, Mars, in a blood-red tunic, is crushing a depiction of the Three Graces -- the goddesses of beauty, creativity and good will, and a favorite motif of Rubens in more hopeful days. Mayhem unfolds before him, with a mother and child in the lower right, presented here as what we would now call civilian casualties, cowering in fear, and an architect [male], in the far [lower right] corner, exposed and outstretched in a manner recalling the crucified Christ. Venus, the goddess of love and Mars' consort, is failing to constrain him, and a figure [a female wearing a crown that has no jewel] representing Europe [personifying the continent], at the left, has her arms raised in woe. In the upper right, Alecto's monsters, representing Pestilence and Famine, are tugging at the whirlwind. On the ground lies a woman holding a broken lute.
Also known as "The Consequence of War," the painting shows how the blunt passions unleashed by combat threaten art, science, and -- in a provocative allusion at a time of sectarian religious conflict -- Christianity as a whole, representing by a crucifix-topped orb, held by a putto in the shadow of Europe's gown. The painting suggests that the ragged figure of Europe -- "despoiled of jewels," as Rubens described her -- must now succeed where the power of love has failed, and stopped war from destroying the Christian world.
In 1568, around a decade before Rubens was born, the partially Protestant Low Countries rebelled against their Catholic overlords, the Spanish Habsburgs, and the Eighty Years' War, as it came to be called, only ended in 1648, eight years after Rubens's death at 62. Meanwhile, the Thirty Years; War, which broke out in 1618, was raging across Central Europe, involving what is now Flanders, and further complicating the continent's political alliances and religious loyalties. Rubens perfected his signature style of fusing classical, biblical, Italianate and Netherlandish sources by the 1610s, during a lull in the conflict between the Habsburgs and the Dutch, but by the late 1630s, both wars -- which, according to Antwerp historian Luc Duerloo, was experienced as the same war in Rubens's environs -- were approaching their chaotic and deadly end games. Antwerp and its hinterland were not far from the front lines, and Rubens was a first-hand witness, scholars believe, to marauding armies and civilian suffering.
"The horror of War" is dense with allusions to antiquity that viewers at the time would have immediately grasped, such as the columned building that looms at the left-- a depiction of ancient Roime's Temple of Janus, whose doors, according to Roman custom, were locked in peacetime but shown to be flying open. * * *
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发表于 7-16-2022 12:48:52
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