“And this is the birthplace of Rubens”! (MS VIII; MS IX; Works [1903])—The birthplace
of Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) has been disputed since the seventeenth century,
when writers made claims for both Antwerp and Cologne.
The controversy became heated in 1853, thirty years after the Ruskinsʼ visit,
when a Dutch historian uncovered a story about Rubensʼs father, who was arrested for an adulterous affair with Anna of Saxony, imprisoned,
and then sent to Siegen in Westphalia,
where he lived under conditions of house arrest. He was joined in 1573 by his wife and children, who had been living in Cologne. According to this account,
the family stayed in Siegen until 1578, a year after Rubensʼs birth, and then they returned to Cologne,
where Rubens spent his boyhood until 1589. In that year, his father died, and the family relocated to Antwerp.
These revelations of the affair in the nineteenth century—far from settling the question of Rubensʼs birthplace, by placing the event logically in Siegen—only
fired the respective champions of Cologne and Antwerp to defend their claims. Scholarly debate on the subject persists to the present day, but the most persuasive arguments
point to Siegen.
Cologne may have become known as the birthplace not only because
Rubens definitely grew up there,
but also because his mother connived at identifying the city as the familyʼs continuous residence prior to her husbandʼs death and the move to
Antwerp.
She had strong motives to suppress the familyʼs associations with
Siegen, since exposure of the scandal of her husbandʼs love affair
would have disastrously damaged her familyʼs fortunes. The house in
Cologne that was marked
for tourists as the birthplace was the
Gronsfelder Hof, no. 10, in the
Sternengasse, a mansion that was also known for providing a refuge for
Marie deʼ Medici in the final years of her exile from the French court
(
Velde and Valkeneers, Birth of Rubens, 7–12, 52, 58, 70).
The
French queen was a major patron of
Rubens, as was another seventeenth‐century resident of the
Sternengasse, the important collector
Everhard Jabach IV. He commissioned
Rubensʼs altarpiece painting for the cathedral, the
Crucifixion of Saint Peter (see below).
“Rubensʼ last picture, . . . , the crucifixion of St Peter, bequeathed by him at his death to his native city”
(MS VIII; MS IX; Works [1903])—The
Crucifixion of Saint Peter,
ca.
1637,
High Cathedral of Saint Peter,
Cologne. Toward the end of his life,
Rubens painted this harrowing work for the high altar of the church in which he was probably confirmed as a boy, and in which his father was entombed.
In the picture,
Peter is martyred by being nailed by his feet and hands while being hung upside down on a cross.
While the personal connections were compelling for
Rubens, with
Peterʼs upside‐down cross effectively pointing at his fatherʼs tomb,
the commission came from the collector,
Everhard Jabach IV, who was interested more in creating an epitaph
for his own father. A tradition relayed by
Ruskin, therefore, that
Rubens
“bequeathed . . . [the altarpiece] at his death to his native city”
is not accurate. Nonetheless,
Rubens overrode his patronʼs suggestions for more dignified subjects
from
Peterʼs life in favor of this scene.
Along with any personal significance the subject may have held for
Rubens, artistic fame was also connected with the subject,
which had prompted competition among painters in the sixteenth and the earlier seventeenth centuries
(
Sauerländer, The Catholic Rubens, 219–32).
The upside‐down crucifixion of
Peter was the subject also of
Michelangeloʼs last painting,
his fresco
The Crucifixion of St. Peter for the
Pauline Chapel
in the
Apostolic Palace,
Rome.
Joshua Reynolds did not admire
Rubensʼs
Crucifixion
in particular, although his appraisal of
Rubens overall gradually rose in estimation.
In
A Journey to Flanders and Holland (
1797),
Reynolds
acknowledged that
Rubens expressed “his own approbation of this picture”, which was “painted a little time
before
Rubensʼs death”, and which the painter declared “the best he ever painted”. Thanks to this comment,
the painting held “great fame”,
Reynolds admitted, and he traveled from
Düsseldorf to
Cologne
“on purpose to see it; but it by no means recompenced us for our journey”, for he considered parts of the figure “ill drawn, or rather in a bad taste of drawing”.
“Many parts of this picture are so feebly drawn, and with so tame a pencil, that I cannot help suspecting that
Rubens died before he had cmpleted it,
and that it was finished by some of his scholars” (
Reynolds, Works [1797], 2:111).
Ruskin appears unacquainted with this opinion; and indeed, the Ruskins may have been responding primarily to the fame bestowed on the painting
by
Rubensʼs own assessment of it. Another influence besides traditions presented to tourists was changing taste:
the huge flow of Old Master paintings into
Britain during the Napoleonic era had shifted taste from neoclassicism
to “the warmth and colour of Venetian, Dutch, and Flemish masters”
(
Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art, 87).
According to accounts published
1833–36—in guidebooks to the
Continent
by
Mariana Starke and by
John Murray III, and in a
Rhine tour by the English artist and teacher,
James Mathews Leigh (
1808–60)—it
was commonly known that the altarpiece regularly on view in
Cologne Cathedral
was “a most wretched copy” of
Rubensʼs
Crucifixion, as
Murray warns,
“painted at the time when the original . . . was carried away to
Paris” during occupation by the French Republic.
The painting was repatriated, however; and
Leigh describes how, “for a small fee”, the sacristan turned the frame on a pivot to display the original, mounted behind the copy.
The original was regularly on view on Sundays and during festivals, according to
Murray
(
Hand‐book for Travellers on the Continent, 206;
Leigh, Rhenish Album, 103; and see
Starke,Travels in Europe, 677).
The Ruskins viewed the painting on a Monday,
27 May 1833. In her diary,
Mary Richardson
described the “expression of agony and resignation of
St Peterʼs face and the indifference in those of the executioners” as “wonderfully done”—a
strange impression, given that the expression of the principal executioner, which is turned fully to the viewer, shows demonic viciousness
(
Diary of Mary Richardson, 1833, 19–20). If
Ruskin
did see the
Crucifixion in
1833, but,
for whatever reason, chose not to write about it, in later years his opinion of the painting did not improve. Privately, he wrote that he considered it among
“the most brutal and beastly pictures I ever saw in my life”; and publicly, he listed it among the proofs that, in Counter‐Reformation painting,
“the Flemish and Dutch masters are always languid unless they are profane”
(
Ruskin, Works, 7:328–29).
In another significant encounter with Catholic art in
Cologne,
Mary Richardson recorded that the family
“went to see a private collection of pictures belonging to a
Mr. Walroff”. This would have been the exhibited portion of an extensive collection
of paintings, drawings, sculptures, engravings and woodcuts, manuscripts, books, and other artistic and scientific objects willed to the city of
Cologne
by
Ferdinand Franz Wallraf (
1748–1824). Donated on condition that the collection be kept publicly accessible “in the service of Art and Science”,
the “
Wallrafianum”, as it was called, was housed throughout the
1830s in the
Kõlner Hof, a dilapidated
eighteenth-century residence formerly belonging to
the Archbishop of
Cologne. The paintings included an unusually large and representative collection of Gothic and early Renaissance art from the
thirteenth through sixteenth centuries,
both southern and northern European.
Mary dwelled on a
“Last Judgment”—likely
a
1435 panel (from a larger work on that theme) by
Stefan Lochner—that
Mary described as “
Christ sitting in the clouds [being] the principal object, and round
Him . . . many angels of strange shapes”,
while “below in foreground of picture are evil spirits of different odd shapes, pulling people out of graves and dragging them away to everlasting punishment”,
the condemned including “several Roman Catholic priests and cardinals”. Of later art, she mentions “a large one of
St. Francis
by
Rubens, very fine and rather different from his usual colouring”—surely the
Stigmatization of St. Francis,
which measures 382 by 243 cm. Both works were included in the original
Wallraf collection
(
Diary of Mary Richardson, 1833, 18–19;
Budde, Wallraf‐Richartz Museum, 6, 16, 30, 54).
“There is, in many, in most, of the pictures of Rubens . . . an unpleasingness, that does him dishonour”
(MS IX; Works [1903])—In British criticism of Rubens, a foundation was laid by Jonathan Richardson (1667–1745)
in the Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715),
in which Richardson followed the French critic, Roger de Piles (1635–1709), in assessing Rubens in terms of the persistent academic debate over the merits of color versus line,
personalized as the rubenistes versus the poussinistes, although Richardson listed Rubens as a master in both categories.
Joshua Reynolds (1723–92), in the Discourses
(1769–90), frames his discussion in the same terms of Rubens versus Poussin, but he finds Rubens wanting both in composition and coloring.
In composition, Reynolds asserts in Discourse 5, his “art is too apparent”, his figures exhibiting “expression” and “energy”, but lacking “simplicity and dignity”; and in coloring, there is
“too much of what we call tinted”. In what perhaps comes closest in the Discourses to the criticism relayed by Ruskin in “Cologne”, Reynolds believes that,
in the “higher walks of painting” (i.e., history and religious painting), Rubens failed in a “nicety of distinction and elegance of mind”.
Despite these detractions, Reynolds regarded Rubensʼs work overall as “a remarkable instance of the same mind being seen in all the various parts of the art”
so that “whilst his works continue before us, . . . his deficiencies are fully supplied”.
In 1781, when Reynolds took a tour of the Low Countries, his estimation of Rubens was raised by observing more of the painterʼs work.
The change is summarized in “Character of Rubens”, an essay within Reynoldsʼs notes from the tour, which were
published posthumously as A Journey to Flanders and Holland (1797). The “Character of Rubens” begins by challenging criticism
with “the works of men of genius”, in which “great faults are united with great beauties”. As in Discourse 5,
Reynolds understands Rubens according to “the genius which prevails and illuminates the whole”, but
the English critic goes on to develop his ideas oppositely to the young Ruskinʼs, for now he finds: “It is only in large compositions that his [Rubensʼs]
powers seem to have room to expand themselves. . . . His superiority is not seen in easel pictures”—the more intimate scale preferred by Ruskin.
Rubensʼs best works, Reynolds goes on,
“flow with a freedom and prodigality, as if they cost him nothing”. Respecting the traditional contest between color and line, Reynolds reflects Richardsonʼs assessment by placing Rubens high in both categories:
“The striking brilliancy of his colours, and their lively opposition to each other, the flowing liberty and freedom of his outline, and animated pencil,
with which every object is touched, all contribute to awaken and keep alive the attention of the spectator”. Thus, a view that in the Discourses was offered as
a concession, now reads as an inevitability: Rubens achieves “the complete uniformity in all the parts of the work”,
a unity that seems to “grow out of one mind”. The “confidence” of that mind places Rubens above rules, which are “subject to his control”,
rather than he being “himself subject to the rules”. His “originality of manner” can therefore “be truly said to have extended the limits of the art”.
Even in the
“Character of Rubens”, however,
Reynolds admits to some shortcomings
in
Rubensʼs “excellencies, which would have perfectly united with his style”, and this list of failings
possibly corresponds to some of
Ruskinʼs comments in
“Cologne”.
In the figures,
Reynolds finds wanting a “poetical conception of character”; and in his “representations of the highest characters
in the christian or the fabulous world, . . . the spectator finds little more than mere mortals, such as he meets with every day”
(
Reynolds, Works [1797], 1:89–90; 2:115, 117, 118–19, 121–22;
and see
White, “Rubens and British Art”, 30, 33–35).
Throughout
Modern Painters I,
Ruskinʼs estimate of
Rubens remained high,
and he followed
Reynolds in reverencing the “mind” of the painter,
although tempering this judgment with an early Victorian alertness for a lack of earnestness: “I never have spoken,
and I never will speak, of
Rubens but with the most reverential feeling; and whatever imperfections in his art may have resulted from his unfortunate want of seriousness
and incapability of true passion, his calibre of mind was originally such that I believe the world may see another
Titian [
1447–1576]
and another
Raffaelle [
1483–1520],
before it sees another
Rubens” (
Ruskin, Works, 3:290).
In
Modern Painters V,
Ruskin reassessed
Rubens as a type of the Counter‐Reformation,
as “having no belief in spiritual existences, no interests or affections beyond the grave” and as better understood in terms of “pure animalism”
(
Ruskin, Works, 7:328, 329).
“Reader, beware of the Grosser Rheinberg hotel . . . you will have some idea of the Rhine,
as seen from the bedroom windows of the Grosser Rheinberg” (MS IX; Works [1903])—According
to
Mary Richardson, when the family reached
Cologne,
they went first to the
“Rheinbergh”, where they were given
“not good apartments, house so full, a so so dinner”; therefore, after their meal, they decamped to the
“Couronne Impèriale”,
“where
George IV stopped”, and found better accommodations
(
Diary of Mary Richardson, 1833, 17–18).
In his
1836 guidebook,
John Murray III identifies the
“
Gross Rheinberg” as an inn near the river,
“conveniently placed on the waterʼs edge, and close to the steamers”, but warns that the hotel is “deficient in comfort
and badly managed”; by comparison, the
“Cour Imperial” or
“Kaiserlicher Hof” was “situated in the middle of the town,
and a long way from the
Rhine”, but still “far the best” in quality
(
Hand‐book for Travellers on the Continent, 206).
The artist
James Mathews Leigh, who lodged in this hotel possibly in the same year as the Ruskinsʼ tour, wrote with a sardonic edge similar to (if more easy going than)
Ruskinʼs narrator about the German cuisine, and about the view from the “brilliancy of the saloon at the
Grosse Rheinberg” with its “nine lofty windows which overlook the
Rhine”.
More bemused than
Ruskin is by the preponderance of the activities of the “bourgeoisie” over the effects of the picturesque,
Leigh describes the view of the bridge of boats extending across the river, with its toll booth manned by Prussian guards,
who raised a crossbar to admit carriages on business as well as Colognese promenaders, “the little swarthy forms
of the gay and the idle of the inhabitants, who ever and anon profiting by the raising of the barrier, rushed to the scene of their enjoyment”.
As
Leigh watched, the promenadersʼ safety seemed threatened by the bridge parting to allow passage of huge raft carrying commercial provisions
(
Leigh, Rhenish Album, 96–100).
“[D]eparted from Cologne . . . to trace the mighty
Rhine to his source among the Rhetian Alps”
(MS IX; Works [1903])—In imagination, the narrator casts forward to the farthest limits of the
Rhine journey, to the riverʼs
Alpine source.
Rhaetia is an ancient name for a province of the
Roman Empire that was bounded on the south by a broad arc of the
Alps.
In
1833, the
Penny Cyclopædia defined the
Rhaetian Alps as extending “from the sources of the
Rhine to the
Dreyherrn‐Spitz [Dreiherrenspitze], east of the valley of the
Adige,
about 80 miles”, and including five major passes with good carriage roads at that time, from the
San Bernardino to the
Brenner (
Penny Cyclopædia, 1:388–89).
Ruskin was probably thinking of the western segment of this arc, which lay in the eastern cantons of modern
Switzerland; and among the sources of the
Rhine,
he probably had in mind the
Hinterrhein, a tributary that flows through the valley of the
Rheinwald in the
Swiss canton of Graubünden (Grisons). (
William Brockedon refers to the
Grisons as “modern
Rhætia” in
Illustrations of the Passes of the Alps
[“The Passes of the Bernardin and the Splugen”, 15].)
The
Hinterrhein flows through the dramatic gorge, the
Via Mala,
before joining another principal tributary, the
Vorderrhein, near
Chur (Coire),
where the river first takes on the name of the
Rhine, thence flowing north toward
Lake Constance.
Ruskin, approaching from the north,
learned to regard the
Rhine Falls below
Konstanz, near
Schaffhausen, as the gateway to the
Alps.
In
1833, the family proceeded south through the
Via Mala,
and turned aside from the
Hinterrhein to enter
Italy via the
Splügen Pass, descending to
Chiavenna and
Lake Como.
Had they continued westward along the
Hinterrhein through the
Rheinwald, instead of taking the
Splügen Pass,
they would have entered
Italy through the
San Bernardino Pass, and descended to
Bellinzona and
Lake Maggiore. For the cluster of sections of the
“Account”
that
Ruskin intended to represent the passage via the
Splügen, see the glosses to
“Passing the Alps”. See also
Ruskinʼs Knowledge of the Alps.