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Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), The Massacre of the Innocents, Oil on panel, 142 by 182 cm. Estimate: £4,000,000–6,000,000 ($5,800,000–8,700,000) |
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Sotheby’s Sells Rubens Masterpiece for £49.5 million
History was made at Sotheby’s in London on July 10 when a completely unknown early work by Sir Peter Paul Rubens, Massacre of the Innocents, sold for £49.5 million ($76.7 million, the third most expensive price for a painting in dollars). The work, a record for Rubens, is also a record for an Old Master Painting at auction. The historical context of this masterpiece is explored below.
The Massacre of the Innocents...
Learning that his mother was ill, Rubens returned from Italy to Antwerp in the autumn of 1608. By the time he reached Antwerp on 11th December, she was already dead. Rubens had no intention of staying in the north to start with, and his letters show how much he was missing Italy, but he was deluged with commissions, and stayed in Antwerp, eventually relinquishing any intention of returning south and marrying his first wife, Isabella Brandt.
At some point in the three years or so after his return he painted The Massacre of the Innocents. Such a picture must have had an extraordinary impact upon the Flemish public, in comparison to what was familiar to them. In pictures such as this Rubens brings the full-blown Baroque to the north; to a public largely unprepared for it. This is a brutal, unrestrained depiction of an horrific subject, but Rubens, a deeply religious man, would not have seen any reason for toning down the horror of one of the most appalling incidents in the Bible, one which has blackened the name of Herod for all time. The manner of its execution matches the subject: the long strokes of the fully-laden brush are bold and confident; there is no hesitancy in any part of this picture, which is painted with an immediacy and power that is itself overwhelming.
Underlying the savage energy of this picture is a remarkably complex composition. The central figure group, though technically unstable, is visually held together by the centrifugal force of the flattened circle formed by the heads of the leading figures, by the alternating tension and compression of the figures whose limbs stretch and press, and by the interlocking network of triangles that unite the figures in different ways. Though the central figure group occupies a remarkably compact space, within their interlocking forms is an intricate series of receding layers – seen most clearly in the sword, limbs, heads and torsos to the left of the armoured soldier.
This picture is full of what Rubens saw in Italy, as Christopher Brown has observed. To depict three of Herod’s soldiers, engaged in an orgy of butchery, in the nude, or barely draped in the manner of an Antique marble, is to place an immeasurable distance between this picture and Pieter Bruegel’s contemporary soldiery unemotionally impaling babies in a quotidian act of cruelty, which by the early 17th century was the standard manner of treating this subject in Flanders. Nonetheless, Rubens has adapted and concealed his Classical sources, so that what we see, though unimaginable without a deep understanding of Antique sculpture of all sorts, remains the unadulterated product of his own imagination. In this he has outshone so many later, and some earlier, artists of all schools, who risk descending into pedantry and stylization when drawing on Classical sources.
Rubens is the antithesis of our popular conception of the great artist as a precocious genius. In this he stands in stark contrast to his own pupil, Van Dyck, and to Rembrandt. Rubens was well into his thirties by the time he painted this picture. Very little of his work before he departed for Italy at the age of 23 is known, and though his surviving paintings from his Italian period reveal an artist of enormous talent, and the equal of the best of his Italian contemporaries, it is not until immediately after his return to Antwerp that he suddenly starts to produce pictures that reveal the true depth of his genius. These are hyperbolic phrases, but in pictures such as Samson and Delilah in London, Susanna and the Elders in Madrid, The Raising of the Cross in Antwerp cathedral, and in the present extraordinarily well-preserved Massacre of the Innocents, we sense that Rubens finally becomes aware of what he is capable of and understands the full extent of his own powers.
That this picture should have remained unrecognized since 1767, when it was first mis-catalogued in Vincenzio Fanti’s inventory of the Liechtenstein collection, until late last year when identified by Sotheby’s, is extraordinary, though the London Samson and Delilah, painted at about the same time, and also in the Liechtenstein collection for nearly two centuries, suffered the same fate. It may have something to do with a partial misunderstanding, until the second half of the 20th century, of the nature of Rubens’ style immediately after his return to Italy, since by 1613 his style had moved on, and he was painting
pictures that are closer to our familiar conception of his work. Such misunderstanding is not new, since correspondence between the Forchondt family discussing their attempts to persuade the Prince Johann Adam Andreas I of Liechtenstein to buy this picture in 1698 reveal a difference of opinion over what constitutes Rubens’ first style. They clearly overcame his objections, since to our knowledge no pictures were bought by the Liechtensteins between his death in 1712 and 1733, the year when a wax seal was applied to all Liechtenstein pictures, including this one. It remained in their collection until 1920 when it was sold to the father of the present owner.
George Gordon is a board director, Sotheby’s Europe. |
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