If Sir Dudley Carleton could speak of Antwerp in 1616 as Magna civitas, magna solitudo, there was no place nevertheless which could give a wider scope to artistic enterprise. Spain and the United Provinces were for a time at peace; almost all the churches had been stripped of their adornments ; monastic orders were powerful, and corporations eager to show the fervour of their Catholic faith, now that the "monster of heresy" seemed for ever quelled. Gothic churches began to be decorated according to the new fashion adopted in Italy. Altars magnified to monuments, sometimes reaching the full height of the vaulted roof, displayed, between their twisted columns, pictures of a size hitherto un known. No master seemed better fitted to be associated with this kind of painting than Rubens. The church of St. Charles, erected by the reverend fathers in Antwerp, was almost entirely the painter's work, and if he did not, as we often find asserted, design the front, he certainly was the inspirer of the whole build ing. Hitherto no Fleming had undertaken to paint ceilings with foreshortened figures, and blend the religious with the decorative art after the style of those Italian buildings which owe their decorations to masters like Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto.
Thirty-nine ceiling-panels were composed by Rubens, and painted under his direction in the space of two years. All were destroyed by fire in 1718.
Rubens delighted in undertakings of the vastest kind. "The large size of a picture," he writes to W. Trumbull in 1621, "gives us painters more courage to represent our ideas with the utmost freedom and semblance of reality. . . . I confess myself to be, by a natural instinct, better fitted to execute works of the largest size." The correctness of this appreciation he demonstrated by a series of twenty-four pictures, illustrating the life of Marie de' Medici, queen-mother of France. The gallery at the Luxembourg Palace, which these paintings once adorned, has long since dis appeared, and the complete work is now exhibited in the Louvre. The sketches of all these paintings—now in the Munich Gallery— were painted in Antwerp, a numerous staff of distinguished col laborators being entrusted with the final execution. But the master himself spent much time in Paris, retouching the whole work, which was completed within less than four years. On May 13, 1625, Rubens writes from Paris to his friend Peiresc that both the queen and her son are highly satisfied with his paintings, and that Louis XIII. came on purpose to the Luxembourg, "where he never has set foot since the palace was begun sixteen or eighteen years ago." We also gather from this letter that the picture repre senting the "Felicity of the Regency" was painted to replace another, the "Departure of the Queen," which had caused some offence. Richelieu gave himself some trouble to get part of the
work, intended to represent the life of Henry IV., bestowed upon Cavalier d'Arpina, but did not succeed. The queen's exile, how ever, prevented the undertaking from going beyond a few sketches, and two or three panels, one of which the "Triumph of Henry IV.," now in the Uffizi Gallery, is one of the noblest works of Rubens or of any master.
Rubens's comprehension of religious decorative art is disclosed in the "Assumption of the Virgin" at the high altar of Antwerp cathedral, finished in 1626. Every outline is bathed in light, so that the Virgin is elevated to dazzling glory. Rubens penetrates into the spirit of his subjects more deeply than, at first sight, seems consistent with his prodigious facility in execution. The "Massacre of the Innocents," in the Munich Gallery, is a com position that can leave no one unmoved.
Rubens and Buckingham met in Paris in 1625; a correspond ence of some importance had been going on between the painter and the Brussels court, and before long it was proposed that he should endeavour to bring about a final arrangement between the Crowns of England and Spain. The infanta willingly consented, and King Philip acceded on hearing that the negotiator on the English side, Sir Balthasar Gerbier—a Fleming by birth—was like wise a painter. Rubens and Gerbier met in Holland, and Rubens volunteered to go to Spain and lay before the council the result of his negotiations (1628). The nine months then spent at Madrid rank among the most important in Rubens's career. He had brought with him eight pictures as presents from the infanta, and he was also commissioned to paint several portraits of the king and royal family. Philip delighted to see Rubens at work in the studio prepared for him in the palace, where he not only left many original pictures, but copied for his own pleasure and profit the best of Titian's. In Spain Rubens and Velazquez met, to the delight and advantage of both.