Since the painted area is approximately one hundred square yards, this participation is not surprising. In his art, however, these antique and Italianate elements were assimilated and transformed in a truly masterly way.Ĭlose examination of the large canvases proves that certain parts should clearly be attributed to Rubens's atelier. Italy, the "nutrix of art," profoundly influenced Rubens reliance on and incorporation of masterpieces from both antiquity and the Renaissance, so evident in the Decius Mus cycle, demonstrate the lessons he had learned from Italy. Ten years earlier, when he completed the Vallicella altarpiece for the Chiesa Nuova, Rome, Rubens took great pride in challenging the achievements of his Italian colleagues. Furthermore, as a commission from Genoa, the Decius Mus cycle would be studied by contemporary Italian connoisseurs. And by working in oil, rather than the traditional technique of charcoal and colored chalks on paper, he could prove his cartoons to be technically superior to those of his predecessor. Since he had studied Raphael's cartoons, he might have longed for the opportunity to create an important cartoon series of his own. We continually find him placing himself in competition with the masters of the Renaissance as well as of the classical past. The concept of the agon-the eagerly entered contest with predecessors or contemporaries-is characteristic of antique art revived during the Renaissance, it was one of the vital forces that drove Rubens. Given the personality of Rubens, it seems not unlikely that he would want to prove to Genoa and to the world that he was capable of works that would equal or perhaps even surpass Raphael's cartoons. It was in Genoa that Raphael's models for the tapestry cycle The Acts of the Apostles (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London) were preserved, and Rubens studied and recorded these cartoons in drawings. Rubens repeatedly visited Genoa during his Italian sojourn, particularly in 16, and he became well acquainted with patrons in that city, serving them with splendid portraits and, later, in 1622, publishing their residences in a volume of engraved views and plans collected during his stays there. Other Flemish artists, especially Jacob Jordaens, followed Rubens's example, thus reaffirming Flanders as the center of tapestry weaving in seventeenth-century Europe.ĭocumentary evidence indicates that Rubens's preparatory work on the cycle took place between November 1616 and May 1618 and that the commissioners of the series were Genoese noblemen, who have not been identified. The Decius Mus cycle was a successful debut for Rubens into the field of tapestry weaving, a time-honored art that was developed in his native Flanders and later spread throughout Europe. These larger paintings were not planned as autonomous works of art instead, the canvases were composed as cartoons, designs that were followed by the weavers as they transformed the master's compositions into tapestries. The Decius Mus cycle also represents the artist's debut into tapestry design. As a member of a circle of humanists around Justus Lipsius, the great master of classical philology and Neostoical philosophy, Rubens was well acquainted with antique thought, literature, and art, regarding as preeminent the authority of these ancient thinkers. Rubens himself can be understood only in the context of his extensive classical education. It is one of the earliest works in which he presented an episode from Roman history here he made one of his first forays into classical antiquity, a domain that later inspired some of his most important paintings. The Decius Mus cycle is a seminal force in Rubens's career in yet another sense. Again and again he turned his artistic energy to creating cycles, the foremost being the huge paintings celebrating the life of the French queen Maria de' Medici (Louvre, Paris). The development of a sequence of monumental works with abundant imagery and forceful visual impact had a great attraction for Rubens. In it the artist uses for the first time the cycle form-that is, the narration of a story through a series of paintings. The sequence of paintings on the history of the Roman consul Decius Mus, which has been one of the greatest glories of the Liechtenstein collection since its acquisition in 1693, occupies a significant position in the work of Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577–1640).
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