 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 “Cultures of Knowledge.” This online catalogue—an ongoing project—has already produced an extensive online database of letters digitized from published and unpublished sources. The letters have been scanned and presented with metadata (transcription, writer and location, sender and location, date, language), rendering them easily searchable. In addition to presenting more than 900 letters to, from, or mentioning Rubens, EMLO includes short explanatory essays about Rubens’s life, correspondence, and its content, as well as a short list of relevant sources.
EMLO provides a repository and meeting point for data about Rubens’s correspondence with that of other early modern letter writers. Consequently, it brings scholars in fields normally somewhat removed from one another into closer contact, with searches based on names, places, and other keywords triggering surprising results and revealing little-known connections. Given Rubens’s broad range of activities and connections, his network intersected with some of the most remarkable, court, diplomatic, and
intellectual networks of his time.
The letters included in EMLO are principally those published in Rooses/Ruelens, without scans of the original archival documents. It is thus critically necessary to update and enrich the preliminary online catalogue of Rubens’s
letters by fully documenting these letters via digital photographs of the original letters and investigation of their material properties. Attention to the material qualities of Rubens’s correspondence, thus far a little studied field, would allow his letters to be considered as both objects unto themselves and vehicles carrying ideas. Scholars have recently begun to attend more closely to the material qualities of letters: what kind of paper and ink they employ, their watermarks and dimensions, the writer’s folding techniques, visual flourishes or illustrations included in the letters, handwriting, seals and crossed-out words or phrases, among other characteristics. Investigating such qualities illuminates broad