ow 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 Rubenshuis in Antwerp (through September 17, 2018) and I discuss it further in a publication accompanying the loan (Rubens’s St. Andrew “de los Flamencos”: Altarpiece Enframed by a Spanish-Flemish Community / Altaarstuk omkaderd door een Spaans-Vlaamse gemeenschap, Antwerp: Rubenshuis/BAI, 2018).
From Moretus’s letters to Jan van Vucht, a Flemish merchant living in Madrid, we learn that in 1630 the merchant was eager to commission a painting from Rubens. Although Van Vucht hoped to negotiate a lower price, Moretus was not encouraging. He informed Van Vucht that what the merchant was willing to pay would not get him much, perhaps a piece with one or two figures. Several months later, he mentioned having spoken with Rubens and that, for the amount Van Vucht was prepared to pay, Rubens could not possibly do any of the three desired subjects, which are not specified. At best Van Vucht might acquire a “Diana with two nymphs” or another subject with two or three figures.1
By the time Rubens painted The Martyrdom of St. Andrew for Van Vucht in 1638–39, Van Vucht had no doubt resigned himself to paying a far higher sum, since the composition is
richer, more complicated, and more densely peopled than Moretus’s proposals almost a decade earlier. Rubens’s compelling rendering of the apostle’s crucifixion at the orders of a Roman proconsul and against the wishes of the populace is a far cry from a blithe scene of Diana and her nymphs.
There is consensus among scholars that Rubens’s correspondence and others’ letters that intersect with his career are a critical yet rather inaccessible trove of primary material, scattered across numerous countries and institutions. While some sources are digitally available (e.g. the letter excerpted above), many are not. Fortunately, there is now a digital resource that enables scholars to apply more varied approaches when conducting research on Rubens’s letters: Early Modern Letters Online, an initiative of Oxford University, its Bodleian Library, and the Oxford-based research project “Cul