拍品專文
This vigorous modello is the only complete study for a vast altarpiece (420 x 370cm.) made in the late 1630s to adorn the High Altar of the Church of the Augustinian Priory of Rood Klooster near Brussels, of which Saint Paul was the patron saint. (It was the monastery where Hugo van der Goes spent his final years). The altarpiece was destroyed in the bombardment of Brussels in 1695, leaving the sketch as the principal record of this important, late commission.
Based on the account in Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda Aurea (The Golden Legend) of the final episode in the life of Saint Paul, Rubens imaginatively altered the account to inject a heightened pathos into the terrible event. The Golden Legend tells how the Saint had met Plautilla, a pious Christian woman, on his way to execution and had asked her for her veil to cover his eyes. Rubens instead depicts the kneeling apostle, his hands bound with rope, as he prepares for his martyrdom, with Plautilla wrapping the veil around Paul's head The Golden Legend also relates how three Roman soldiers, part of the escort, were converted by Paul; these are to be identified as the foot soldiers in the foreground and to the left of Rubens' painting.
As a Roman citizen, Paul had the right, if condemned, to death by beheading; the place of execution was said to have been an hour's journey from the Ostian Gate; to indicate the location, Rubens included in the background of his painting one of the most recognizable Roman monuments, the nearby Pyramid of Cestius, which was located near the Ostian Gate. St. Paul, apostle and martyr, is one of the key thinkers and missionaries in the history of Christianity; a Jew and a Roman citizen, his conversion to Christianity while on the road to Damascus is more frequently depicted than his martyrdom in Rome during the reign of the Emperor Nero, AD 54-68, and commemorated on 30th June.
The altarpiece was probably commissioned by Adriaen van der Reest who was elected Prior in November 1635. Rubens was paid for it in 1638, and thus it is likely that the modello was executed circa 1637, the year assigned to it by Julius Held. As Rubens died at the end of May 1640 after increasingly frequent bouts of illness, the present work can be accounted as among his last oil sketches; it would probably have been submitted to the Prior for his approval and then used as a guide while the altarpiece was painted.
The altarpiece probably conformed quite closely to the modello: we know, for example, that it had a semicircular top - as indicated in the sketch - by its architectural frame, which survives in the church of Onze-Lieve-Vrouw-ten-Poel in Brabant; the church acquired it at auction after Rood Klooster was suppressed in 1784. The sketch, which is painted with both sureness of touch and dazzling freedom, reveals black chalk underdrawing throughout, notably around the saint's head and Plautilla's hands, and beneath the legs of the angel who descends with the martyr's wreath.
Sir Robert Holford, who bought the present work in Florence in 1847, was one of the greatest collectors of his generation; R.H. Benson wrote of him: 'His enthusiasm was under control, his choice deliberate, and his range catholic'. His collection was assessed by the peripatetic Dr. Gustav Waagen (connoiseur and director of the Berlin picture gallery) in 1854 as second in Great Britain only to that of the Marquis of Hertford, now preserved in the Wallace Collection, London, but possessing 'a far greater universality of taste.' The sale of the Holford collection, by Christie's in 1927 and 1928 following the death of his son, is still regarded as one of the most momentous dispersals of Old Masters to occur in this century. The morning session of the 1928 sale, comprising 78 lots, fetched the enormous sum of 364,094, and it remained the most valuable collection sold at auction until well after the Second World War.
The present lot was apparently acquired as the work of van Dyck and noted as such by Waagen soon after. He thought it was an early work 'when he [van Dyck] was strongly influenced by Rubens'. By 1888, when it appeared in Max Rooses' fundamental catalogue raisonn of the work of Rubens, the attribution to Rubens was settled and has since been unchallenged. William Gibson, who was to be the keeper of the National Gallery in London, was full of its praise in 1928: '...it is ... 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'.
As is often the case with Rubens, motifs recur as he developed his visual repertoire. Thus here the foreground group of a Roman soldier and Christian spectators connects with the group of soldiers accompanying the thieves on the way to Calvary in the great altarpiece, completed in 1637, for the Benedictine monastery of Saints Peter and Paul at Afflighem. The design of that painting was the culmination of a series of earlier sketches of the theme by Rubens, one connected sketch having been dated by Julius Held as early as 1614-16. The soldier leaning on his spear in the present work was first devised by Rubens for a Roman soldier in the Decius Mus tapestry designs of circa 1617, while the pose of the executioner was first used in the Martyrdom of St. Catherine of circa 1615 (Lille, Muse des Beaux-Arts) and also occurs in reverse and with some difference in his Judgement of Solomon (Prado, Madrid) of 1611-12. The pose was probably inspired by the executioner in Raphael's Stanza della Segnatura fresco in the Vatican.
Rubens' design formed the prototype for an expanded variant in brush in oil colors brushed over an underdrawing of black chalk on several pieces of paper, glued together. The authorship of this drawing in the British Museum is disputed: Vlieghe believes it to be by Thodore Boeyermans (1620-1678), while Rowlands maintains that it is substantially by Rubens. Held's view is that Rubens had a part in it but that he was not responsible for the enlargement. This drawing was probably the modello for an altarpiece, originally painted to adorn the high altar of the Dominican Church in Antwerp, which Vlieghe also believes to be by Boeyermans.
The finished painting must have been a work of considerable influence; yet, it remains singular, the carefully meditated and deeply felt work of a great painter's final phase. Rubens' impassioned vision of an executioner's brutality, a Roman matron's tender act of mercy, and the saint's poignant resignation, imbues this small sketch with remarkable monumentality and an unsurpassed sense of tragedy.
Based on the account in Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda Aurea (The Golden Legend) of the final episode in the life of Saint Paul, Rubens imaginatively altered the account to inject a heightened pathos into the terrible event. The Golden Legend tells how the Saint had met Plautilla, a pious Christian woman, on his way to execution and had asked her for her veil to cover his eyes. Rubens instead depicts the kneeling apostle, his hands bound with rope, as he prepares for his martyrdom, with Plautilla wrapping the veil around Paul's head The Golden Legend also relates how three Roman soldiers, part of the escort, were converted by Paul; these are to be identified as the foot soldiers in the foreground and to the left of Rubens' painting.
As a Roman citizen, Paul had the right, if condemned, to death by beheading; the place of execution was said to have been an hour's journey from the Ostian Gate; to indicate the location, Rubens included in the background of his painting one of the most recognizable Roman monuments, the nearby Pyramid of Cestius, which was located near the Ostian Gate. St. Paul, apostle and martyr, is one of the key thinkers and missionaries in the history of Christianity; a Jew and a Roman citizen, his conversion to Christianity while on the road to Damascus is more frequently depicted than his martyrdom in Rome during the reign of the Emperor Nero, AD 54-68, and commemorated on 30th June.
The altarpiece was probably commissioned by Adriaen van der Reest who was elected Prior in November 1635. Rubens was paid for it in 1638, and thus it is likely that the modello was executed circa 1637, the year assigned to it by Julius Held. As Rubens died at the end of May 1640 after increasingly frequent bouts of illness, the present work can be accounted as among his last oil sketches; it would probably have been submitted to the Prior for his approval and then used as a guide while the altarpiece was painted.
The altarpiece probably conformed quite closely to the modello: we know, for example, that it had a semicircular top - as indicated in the sketch - by its architectural frame, which survives in the church of Onze-Lieve-Vrouw-ten-Poel in Brabant; the church acquired it at auction after Rood Klooster was suppressed in 1784. The sketch, which is painted with both sureness of touch and dazzling freedom, reveals black chalk underdrawing throughout, notably around the saint's head and Plautilla's hands, and beneath the legs of the angel who descends with the martyr's wreath.
Sir Robert Holford, who bought the present work in Florence in 1847, was one of the greatest collectors of his generation; R.H. Benson wrote of him: 'His enthusiasm was under control, his choice deliberate, and his range catholic'. His collection was assessed by the peripatetic Dr. Gustav Waagen (connoiseur and director of the Berlin picture gallery) in 1854 as second in Great Britain only to that of the Marquis of Hertford, now preserved in the Wallace Collection, London, but possessing 'a far greater universality of taste.' The sale of the Holford collection, by Christie's in 1927 and 1928 following the death of his son, is still regarded as one of the most momentous dispersals of Old Masters to occur in this century. The morning session of the 1928 sale, comprising 78 lots, fetched the enormous sum of 364,094, and it remained the most valuable collection sold at auction until well after the Second World War.
The present lot was apparently acquired as the work of van Dyck and noted as such by Waagen soon after. He thought it was an early work 'when he [van Dyck] was strongly influenced by Rubens'. By 1888, when it appeared in Max Rooses' fundamental catalogue raisonn of the work of Rubens, the attribution to Rubens was settled and has since been unchallenged. William Gibson, who was to be the keeper of the National Gallery in London, was full of its praise in 1928: '...it is ... 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'.
As is often the case with Rubens, motifs recur as he developed his visual repertoire. Thus here the foreground group of a Roman soldier and Christian spectators connects with the group of soldiers accompanying the thieves on the way to Calvary in the great altarpiece, completed in 1637, for the Benedictine monastery of Saints Peter and Paul at Afflighem. The design of that painting was the culmination of a series of earlier sketches of the theme by Rubens, one connected sketch having been dated by Julius Held as early as 1614-16. The soldier leaning on his spear in the present work was first devised by Rubens for a Roman soldier in the Decius Mus tapestry designs of circa 1617, while the pose of the executioner was first used in the Martyrdom of St. Catherine of circa 1615 (Lille, Muse des Beaux-Arts) and also occurs in reverse and with some difference in his Judgement of Solomon (Prado, Madrid) of 1611-12. The pose was probably inspired by the executioner in Raphael's Stanza della Segnatura fresco in the Vatican.
Rubens' design formed the prototype for an expanded variant in brush in oil colors brushed over an underdrawing of black chalk on several pieces of paper, glued together. The authorship of this drawing in the British Museum is disputed: Vlieghe believes it to be by Thodore Boeyermans (1620-1678), while Rowlands maintains that it is substantially by Rubens. Held's view is that Rubens had a part in it but that he was not responsible for the enlargement. This drawing was probably the modello for an altarpiece, originally painted to adorn the high altar of the Dominican Church in Antwerp, which Vlieghe also believes to be by Boeyermans.
The finished painting must have been a work of considerable influence; yet, it remains singular, the carefully meditated and deeply felt work of a great painter's final phase. Rubens' impassioned vision of an executioner's brutality, a Roman matron's tender act of mercy, and the saint's poignant resignation, imbues this small sketch with remarkable monumentality and an unsurpassed sense of tragedy.