C. THE PICTURE GALLERY
[The chief object of interest at Antwerp, even more important than the Cathedral itself, is the Picture Gallery, regally housed in a magnificent Museum at the S. end of the town. The building alone might make Trafalgar Square blush, if Trafalgar Square had a blush left in it. To this collection you should devote at least two or three mornings.
THE PICTURE GALLERY, ANTWERP.
Modern Pictures in the Rooms marked with an Italic capital.
The Antwerp Gallery contains in its palatial rooms a large number of Flemish pictures, many of them collected from the suppressed Churches and Monasteries of the city. (Remember that they were painted for such situations, not to be seen in Museums.) You will here have an opportunity of observing a few good pictures of the early Flemish School, and especially of improving your slight acquaintance with Roger van der Weyden, one of whose loveliest works is preserved in the gallery. You will also see at least one admirable example of Quentin Matsys, as well as several fine works of the Transitional School between the early and the later Flemish periods.
But the special glory of the Antwerp Museum is its great collection of Rubenses. It is at Antwerp alone, indeed, that you can begin to grasp the greatness of Rubens, as you may grasp it afterwards at Munich and Vienna. I do not say you will love him: I will not pretend to love him myself: but you may at least understand him. This, then, is the proper place in which to consider briefly the position of Rubens in Flemish Art.
From the days of the Van Eycks to those of Gerard David, painting in the Low Countries had followed a strictly national line of development. Its growth was organic and internal. With Quentin Matsys, and still more with Bernard van Orley, Pourbus, and the rest, the influence of the Italian Renaissance had begun to interfere with the native current of art in the Low Countries. It was Rubens who finally transformed Flemish painting by adopting to a certain extent the grandiose style of the later Italian and especially the Venetian Masters, at the same time that he transfused it with local feeling and with the private mark of his own superabundant and vigorous individuality.
Rubens was an Antwerp man, by descent and education, though accidentally born at Siegen in Nassau. His father was an Antwerp justice of an important family, exiled for supposed Calvinistic leanings, and disgraced for an intrigue with a royal lady, Anna of Saxony, the eccentric wife of William of Orange. A gentleman by birth and breeding, Peter Paul Rubens painted throughout life in the spirit of a generous, luxurious aristocrat. His master was Otto van Veen, Court Painter to the Dukes of Parma, and himself an Italianised Flemish artist, whose work is amply represented in the Museum. Early in life, Rubens travelled in Italy, where he imbibed to a great extent the prevailing tone of Italian art, as represented by Titian, Veronese, and to a less extent, Tintoretto, as well as by Domenichino and the later Roman School of painters. To these influences we must add the subtler effect of the general spirit of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the age when voyages to America and to India, and the sudden opening of the Atlantic seaboard, had caused in men’s minds a great ferment of opinion and given rise to a new outburst of activity and struggle. Romance was rife. The world was turned upside down. It was the day of Spanish supremacy, the day when the gold and silver of the Indies poured in vast sums into Madrid and the Low Countries. The Mediterranean had given way to the Atlantic, Venice to Antwerp. In England, this age gave us the rich and varied Elizabethan literature; in the Low Countries, it gave us the highly analogous and profusely lavish art of the School of Rubens.