Rubens Communicates: Tracing Rubens’s Exchanges through Letters
Abigail D. Newman
The great Flemish artist and entrepreneur Peter Paul Rubens was famous for dictating letters in one language while having someone read literature to him in another, even as he stood at his easel to paint. This early multitasker foreshadows our own age, not only in the multiplicity of tasks that he was prepared to embrace at once, but also in the abundance of channels through which he communicated
with a range of interlocutors. Rubens’s visual communications are renowned.
Yet verbally, too, Rubens was an avid communicator. He exchanged letters with close friends and distant colleagues, princes and businessmen, and with many of the international leading lights of his time, such as the Dutch humanist and diplomat, Constantijn Huygens. Rubens’s interlocutors hailed from a range of locations, and so any consideration of his correspondence is necessarily imbricated in both the local histories of numerous places and in the interconnected, international network these letter exchanges created. Just as Rubens’s images communicate via a diversity of styles and approaches, so too do his letters. His linguistic choices themselves display a broad range: written at times in his
native Dutch, his letters also communicated extensively in Italian and sometimes French, frequently with a smattering of Latin. Their verbal form also shows great breadth and diversity. Through Rubens’s letters—letters he wrote, alongside those written to him and those that mention him—we can trace an international network of thinkers, weighing in on a wide array of topics of concern in their time.
Investigation of Rubens’s correspondence intersects with numerous themes that have interested scholars in recent years. Issues related to artists’ biographies, the early modern culture of friendship, the Republic of Letters, exchanges of knowledge, artistic theory, word-image relationships, and mobility, to mention just a few, have driven numerous scholarly studies. Questioning how individuals communicate has rarely seemed more topical than it does today, in our age of Tweeting world leaders, Instagramming teenagers, and myriad professionals corresponding digitally with colleagues across the globe.
Recent books assert that the culture of letter-writing and letter-reading was intimately bound to that of making and viewing images (Shira Brisman, Albrecht Dürer & the Epistolary Mode of Address, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) and that this culture of scholarly knowledge production and exchange was as visual as it was textual (Tine Meganck, Erudite Eyes: Friendship, Art and Erudition in the Network of Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598), Leiden: Brill, 2017). This is all the more reason—in our own era of massive communication via both text and image—to
closely preserve and examine the letters of someone who was also a great visual communicator: investigations of how Rubens communicated so abundantly visually and verbally allow for an exploration of questions about communication itself, and about the varied ways and means used across time and space to transmit ideas.
Beyond Rubens’s own correspondence, there are also the many letters of his contemporaries that shed light on his life and career. These, too, reveal the richly textured ways in which letters functioned in Rubens’s circle. A timely example is the correspondence of Balthasar Moretus, Rubens’s lifelong friend and colleague and head of the Plantin Press. Moretus kept a copybook of the letters he sent, which is preserved in the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp. This example is timely not only given this museum’s forthcoming exhibition, Baroque Book Design: A Tale of Friendship and
Collaboration, opening September 28, 2018 and tracing Moretus’s relationship with Rubens and other artists, but also given the evidence of several of these letters, which relate closely to Rubens’s Martyrdom of St. Andrew (Madrid, Real Diputación de San Andrés de los Flamencos—Fundación Carlos de Amberes). This painting has recently been on loan in the