The life and career of Peter Paul Rubens were defined by his foreign travels, both artistic and diplomatic. In a near-constant to and fro across Europe, two seemingly essential journeys and exchanges with other artists amount to something of black boxes to which historians of art have little access. One is his famous stay at the Spanish court in Madrid from 1628 to 1629, during which he clearly spent a significant, if wholly mysterious, amount of time with Diego Velázquez studying the collection of Phillip IV. We can only imagine the two of them jointly inspecting the many paintings by Titian that Rubens copied during his sojourn or what sorts of workshop aid Velázquez’s assistants may have offered – and what tricks they may have picked up in the process. Though we know little about the specifics, the meeting features prominently in the art historical imagination of both specialists and non-specialists alike. The second episode – the earlier 1612 journey of Rubens to the Dutch Republic and the time he spent with master engraver and, by this point, painter Hendrick Goltzius – is far less familiar. Even the reasons for Rubens’s travels are not entirely clear, though the fact that he undertook them in the company of fellow painters Jan I Brueghel and Hendrick van Balen suggests they were artistically motivated.
Careers by Design shines a spotlight on this fateful encounter with Goltzius. More specifically, the exhibition catalogue – for a show mounted at the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München (SGSM) – looks at the impact that Goltzius’s career, work, and working model had on Rubens’s approach to printmaking and the way that print figured, even more broadly, within the ambitions and careers of the two artists. The volume’s introductory essays provide a useful backdrop for these matters. Essays by Nadine Orenstein and Nils Büttner offer overviews of the careers of Goltzius and Rubens, respectively, with particular emphasis on the place of print. Additionally, an important essay by Filip Vermeylen and Karolien De Clippel usefully lays out the extensive artistic cross-pollination between the northern outpost of Haarlem and the southern bastion of Antwerp. Though a version of this essay originally appeared in similar form in 2012, Vermeylen and De Clippel’s insights into the widespread artistic migrations in both directions, the interconnectivity of the two city’s publishing industries, and the specific pictorial exchanges of Rubens and Goltzius still feel fresh given the many confessional and political divides that have continued to keep such traffic between Haarlem and Antwerp from being fully appreciated by scholars.[1]
An introduction by Nina Schleif, the show’s curator, sets the stage for these contributions, explains the organization of the book, and lays out the critical questions driving her own investigation and analysis: “How did [these two artists] plan, realize, and distribute their prints, and how did they become the most famous artists of their time in Europe as a result?” (15). Renown is this project’s key term, and Schleif suggests that all artists must contend with answering, “How do I become famous? How do I stay famous?” (17). For Goltzius and Rubens, this catalogue perhaps unsurprisingly argues, becoming and staying famous meant controlling design and reproduction, which entailed carefully selecting works of art that would be disseminated in prints, producing these oneself or having them made under one’s own watchful eye, publishing in house, placing them in the world through strategic dedication, and attempting to control their dissemination via selectively procured privileges (all themes treated in individual sections). In this sense, Goltzius’s vertical integration of the design, printing, and publication processes of prints is seen as the model for Rubens’s own shrewd business maneuvers. And Goltzius’s close working relationship with his assistants Jacob Matham, Jacques de Gheyn II, and Jan Harmensz. Muller is positioned as the reason that Rubens was so controlling in his supervision of Cornelis Galle, Lucas Vorsterman, Paulus Pontius, and Christoffel Jegher, artists who Rubens insisted work directly in his presence and under his watchful eye. There is little to quibble with on these points, though the way that Goltzius’s model may have been reified or shifted via Rubens’s close relationship with Balthasar Moretus might have been worthy of mention or exploration.
The catalogue is at its best – as was the exhibition – when bringing together a range of related works by Rubens and Goltzius and in showing little-known objects and impressions. Goltzius’s preparatory drawing for Christ before Pilate (Leipzig), joins the print he crafted after this design (SGSM) so that we can look over Rubens’s shoulder as he made a youthful copy (Frankfurt), cropping Goltzius’s larger scene to the central drama of Pilate’s fateful decision. Beyond such comparisons, the product of excellent loans and artful catalogue design, a full reappraisal of the SGSM’s holdings in preparation for the show led to some terrific discoveries. The line structure of a counterproof of Rubens/Jegher’s woodcut Hercules Slaying Envy, for instance, is unusually indistinct. Schleif’s careful eye, deductive reasoning, and consultation with Ad Stijnman lead her to surmise that the counterproof was not made for Rubens to make adjustments (in fact, the sheet is free of corrections) but instead represents a much later, likely posthumous effort, whereby an original print was wetted extensively, perhaps even with lye, so as to render it a fresh surface for the duplication of the printed design.
These close, materially specific insights are wonderful. However, overly broad conceptual framing categories like “Portraiture” or “Antiquity,” which are applicable to many early modern artists, offer little purchase on the intersection of these particular figures. Moreover, various contradictions in the text are more frustrating. We are told that “Rubens did not have prints made of the paintings he retained for his own collection” (274), when only a few sections earlier we had read that two printed portraits “were based on painted copies Rubens has made of Titian’s originals to have for his personal collection” (237). Discussing Rubens’s famous self-portrait, engraved by Paulus Pontius, Schleif introduces a counterproof of this print from the SGSM and notes that it features no corrections. She rightly explains that counterproofs were normally made to compare the print to the copperplate in the same direction to ease correction and finally concludes that “Most likely the counterproof was pulled for this very purpose” (253). But why, then, would there be no evidence of correction? Such inconsistencies result in missed opportunities – in this case, for instance, to think through alternate uses and potentials of the counterproof.
Alternatively, one of the project’s great strengths is to have taken more seriously a category of reproductive engravings – those of the artists in Rubens’s employ – than previous analysts often have. Writing of these reproductive engravings, Timothy Riggs noted “The emergence of the ‘Rubens school’ of engraving marks on the one hand a perfection of engraving as a reproductive technique; on the other, it marks the end of a period of dynamic evolution in that technique.”[2]In such a view, “Rubens was not satisfied evidently with virtuoso linear performances that called as much attention to the skill of the engraver as to the beauty of the work being reproduced.”[3] Whether we follow along with Riggs’s notion that the graphic language of reproductive engraving was thus fairly static, unchanging, for the roughly three centuries to come, the lack of dynamism he describes has certainly made the engravings produced after Rubens’s work (and never by him) far less lovable, in the eyes of most print specialists and curators, than those produced by Goltzius’s hand and by the artists he mentored and employed – all of whom were mobilizing the dramatically swelling and tapering lines pioneered by Cornelis Cort to ever more expressive potential. The many, many prints produced after Rubens’s work thus often languish in storage, unloved, often unmounted, and seldom exhibited enthusiastically.
In contrast, Schleif labels reproductive prints by Cornelis Galle and the impressively large renditions crafted by Hans Witdoeck as masterworks and includes others by such underappreciated engravers as Alexander Voet II. Doing so implicitly levels the playing field with Goltzius’s more obviously impressive showpieces. This is a revisionist position and one that opens such prints up to important reappraisal and integration into a print history that would not necessarily prize graphic experimentation and innovation as its central metric of valuation. But whereas Schleif devotes specific attention to some of these objects’ grand scale, the graphic qualities of reproductive engravings after Rubens’s work go far less commented upon. This leaves unarticulated some of the exhibition and catalog’s strengths and productive radicality.
A particularized focus on engraving – Goltzius’s master achievement – minimized some of the important intermedial questions that placing him in dialog with Rubens naturally raises. Discussing the trio of objects related to Christ before Pilate mentioned above, Schleif makes the passing observation that “The style Goltzius had chosen for his lines in the print was of no interest to Rubens in his drawing. Like all aspiring artists of the time, Rubens copied important paragons for practice, in this case Goltzius” (152). But, of course, one can copy the formal structure of lines themselves just as much as one can transpose a figural grouping. No one knew this better than Goltzius, who – as the catalogue repeats often – had a Protean ability to shift his graphic language to imitate other artists; and an exquisite penwerk by Jakob Matham in the SGSM collection, Three Heads Symbolizing the Three Ages of Man and Utensils of Drawing and Engraving, makes clear just how inspired artists in Golztius’s wake could be to think through the graphic quality of one medium by means of another. Even more to the point, Goltzius had himself given up engraving entirely for the art of painting by the time Rubens arrived in Haarlem. Thus, whatever discussions we imagine them having about engraving were necessarily refracted through Goltzius’s new dedication to painting. This matter is little explored.
The primacy of engraving in this account also leaves woodcut in a somewhat awkward position. That both artists experimented with the medium to great effect is noted throughout the catalogue but given little sustained attention. Each artist made precisely one woodcut of a portrait; and both seem to have felt it a poor match for that particular genre. This is offered as something of an implicit suggestion that woodcut’s importance – for them and also for us – might be circumscribed. Yet both artists produced many more woodcuts (many seen in this catalogue), and it is here again that thinking about issues of intermediality in such artistic exchanges could have been helpful. Rubens turned to the art of woodcut only late in his career, in 1633, engaging the medium intensively for a period of just a few years during which he relied upon Christoffel Jegher to push blockcutting to expressive extremes. The decision to do so came, notably, on the heels of Rubens’s other formative artistic journey to Spain and the discussions he had with Velázquez, discussions that undoubtedly focused at least occasionally on Rubens’s extensive practice of copying the many paintings by Titian. Titian, one should note, had himself also pressed woodcut – both its scale and its graphic idiom – into the service of reproducing his designs. Could it have been that Rubens’s turn to woodcut came from thinking about copying Titian’s painterliness and, in turn, the kinds of graphic production capable of transmitting that aspect of his work?[4]
Schleif notes in passing that “After [Goltzius] returned from Italy, he also found inspiration in Titian’s woodcuts” (234). One might then ask: were both Rubens’s and Goltzius’s interest in woodcut conditioned by encounters with their Italian predecessor and his language of painterliness? Was Goltzius particularly drawn to this as he himself prepared to make a move from engraver to painter? Would this explain Goltzius’s fascination while in Italy with the (now lost) sgrafitto designs of Polidoro da Caravaggio – works that toggle between linear incision and brush-applied surface? And what sort of evidence would we need, as art historians, to chart relationships that are less about compositional and figural borrowings than modes of formal working and pictorial thinking? These are the kinds of questions that could have been significant to explore and would have been more readily apparent if the catalogue’s framework had been slightly less focalized on the art of engraving. Nevertheless, it is in part this hefty volume’s juxtapositions of lavishly reproduced works, brought together cleverly between its covers and in the related exhibition, that offer the chance to think through these and, undoubtedly, other ideas.
Aaron M. Hyman
Universität Basel
[1] Filip Vermeylen and Karolien De Clippel, “Rubens and Goltzius in dialogue. Artistic exchanges between Antwerp and Haarlem during the Revolt,” in De Zeventiende Eeuw 22, no. 2 (2012): 138–60.
[2] Timothy Riggs, “Graven Images: A Guide to the Exhibition,” in Graven Images: The Rise of Professional Printmakers in Antwerp and Haarlem, 1540–1640, ed. Timothy Riggs, exh. cat. (Evanston, IL: Mary and Leigh Block Gallery, Northwestern University, 1993), 102.
[3] Ibid, 115.
[4] Rubens’s indebtedness to Titian in woodcut, though not the matter of the Spanish sojourn, was suggestively noted by Ger Luijten, “Titiaan als rolmodel: Rubens en de prentenkunst,” in Copyright Rubens: Rubens en de grafiek, ed. Nico Van Hout, exh. cat. (Ghent: Ludion, 2004), 18–29.