GRUPO FOCAL PRE AMBIENTE T: Good afternoon dear students!

In the early 1620’s Peter Paul Rubens was to receive a commission from the Infanta Isabella Clara, Archduchess of the Netherlands, for designs for possibly twenty tapestries on the subject of the Eucharist.247_{This tapestry series has been described}

as ”Rubens most ambitious, thoroughly Baroque testament to his Catholic faith.”248

However, this was not the first time Rubens had been commissioned to paint a work on the Eucharist. In 1609, following his return from Rome, Rubens received a commission for a painting to be hung above the altar of the Holy Sacrament in St. Paul’s Church, Antwerp, where it still remains.249 _{The painting is identified in the}

inventory drawn up on July 24, 1614, of the possessions of the Fraternity of the “Holy Sweet Name of Jesus and of the Holy Eucharist” as The Real Presence of the Holy Sacrament.250_{It is not exactly surprising, to find a painting reaffirming the doctrine of}

transubstantiation, in a Dominican church in the town that came to be regarded as a power house of the Counter-Reformation and where as one historian put it, “the religious ideals of the Counter- Reformation were to be manifest in their purest, most rigorous form.”251

Rubens’s return to Antwerp coincided with the successful negotiation of the Twelve Year Truce which suspended the violence and war between Spain and the Northern Netherlands which had begun with the outbreak of iconoclasm in the southern provinces back in July, 1566. Philip II through his Regents had tried to pursue a

247_{The exact date for this commission is unknown. Some art historians have suggested 1625, when it is}

known the Infanta called on Rubens in Antwerp following the surrender of the Dutch at Breda. See Nora de Porter, The Eucharist Series 2 vols., (Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, II). (London : Harvey Miller-Heyden & Son, 1978), 33. It is known that the tapestries were delivered to Madrid in 1628.

248_{Charles Scribner III,}Peter Paul Rubens_{. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 32.} 249_{This church was visited by the author to view this painting in July, 2008.}

250_{H. Vlieghe,Saints 2 vols.(Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard Part VIII). London and New York:}

Phaidon, 1972) ,75.

severe religious policy in the Netherlands with the result that political revolt against Spain was intertwined with religious revolt. By the second half of the sixteenth century the Netherlands had become as Hugh Trevor-Roper put it, “a kind of European Vietnam.”252 _{Now, with the restoration of peace and under the shared}

vision of the Archduke Albert and the Infanta Isabella, the decrees of the Council of Trent were being faithfully implemented. In the decades ahead there was ample scope for the restoration and rebuilding of churches, and the patronage of the many religious orders established in Antwerp, provided commissions to architects artists, engravers and printers. Rubens was to be the recipient of much of this patronage.

Rubens, while in Rome, would have studied Raphael’s famous Disputa in the Stanza Della Segnatura which Professor Frederick Hartt has described as “the most complete exposition of the doctrine of the Eucharist in Christian art”.253 _{The title,}

Disputa, now generally regarded as erroneous,254_{is the title Cornelis Cort gave}

to an engraving he made in 1575 of Raphael’s painting with which Rubens may also have been familiar.255

The arrangement of the figures around the altar in Rubens’s painting is clearly based on Raphael’s painting. A number of saints, monks and church dignitaries are grouped symmetrically about an altar, on which is a

monstrance containing the Host. In the upper part of the picture, God the Father and

252 _{H. Trevor –Roper,} Princes and Artists: patronage and ideology at four Habsburg Courts (_London:

Thames and Hudson, 1976), 127.

253_{Frederick Hartt,}A History of Italian Renaissance Art_{(London: Thames and Hudson, 1970), 460. The}

titleDisputa,is now generally regarded as erroneous, see E.H. Gombrich,Symbolic Images: studies in the art of the renaissance) London: Phaidon, 1972), 85-96; Ingrid Rowland, “the Vatican Stanze”,

Marcia B. Hall ed. The Cambridge Companion to Raphael (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 99.

255_{John B. Knipping ,} Iconography of the Counter-Reformation in the Netherlands, 2 _{vols (Leiden:}

Nieuwkoop De Graaf, 1974), Plate 291, 307.

the Holy Spirit appear among the clouds, and similar to Raphael’s presentation, cherubs float above holding books of the Gospels with texts relating to the miracle of transubstantiation. On the left can be read: CARO (ENIM) MEA VERE EST CIBVS ET SANGVIS MEVS (EST POTVS) Jn 6: 56),and onthe rightHOC EST CORPUS MEUM QVOD PRO VOBIS DA (Lk 22:19)andACCIPITE ET COMEDITE: HOC EST CORPVS MEVM (MT. 26: 26).

Drawing on Hans Vlieghe’s identification of the figures, the imposing personages in the foreground are certainly the four Latin Doctors of the Church. The mitred bishops on the left, he identifies, as St. Augustine and St. Ambrose.256_{In the right foreground is}

St. Gregory the Great, shown according to custom with shaven head, and St. Jerome in cardinal’s robes. 257 _{On the left, beside St. Augustine and St. Ambrose, is a bearded}

figure with long black hair. Vlieghe suggests this may be St. Paul, who was patron of this Dominican church at Antwerp and to whom we owe the oldest account of the last Supper, other than the Synoptic Gospels (1 Cor. 11:23 et seqq.) John Knipping maintains that the two figures in the foreground “unconcealedly reflect the features of Luther and Calvin who both seem to place passages from the Scriptures before the attention of their adversaries.”258 _{Vlieghe does not concur preferring to leave them}

unidentified, and the old, half-naked man in the middle distance he recognizes as the

Senecamotif Rubens uses about the same time in his painting of theDeath of Seneca.

There seems no obvious reason to include Seneca here unless it was intended to present him as a motif for wisdom. The young monk with the broach of the sun on his breast is St. Thomas Aquinas seated behind the altar on the left, in conversation with a Pope. Vlieghe identifies as Pope Urban IV, who instituted the Eucharist feast of Corpus Christi by a bull of 1264. It is generally believed the text for the Office and hymns for that feast were composed by St. Thomas. In the extreme background, on the left five monks are seen in discussion; one, wearing the Dominican habit, is pointing to the monstrance on the altar. In the right background are a number of young men in togas. They, along with the Seneca like figure, may have a reference to Raphael’s painting with its many classically draped figures adding to the sense overall

256_{Hans Vlieghe has pointed out that the altar piece has not been preserved in its original state; the}

figure of St. Augustine, or of St. Ambrose, is cut off at the right side. Vlieghe,Saints,Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard Part VIII, 2 vols, London: Phaidon, 1972, 74.

11.H. Vlieghe,Saints,74.

of the development of the church’s teaching on transubstantiation over time, and, more recently, affirmed as a doctrine at the Council of Trent. The Four Doctors of the Church play a dominant role in this painting. They will feature again in one of Rubens’s design for a tapestry in the Eucharist series and will be the subject of many later engravings from Rubens ‘s designs. It was noted above, fig. 23, that Hans Knipping observed that it was only since the fifties of the Reformation that all four Fathers begin to be portrayed together in art in the Netherlands. The frequency of their portrayal, often in conjunction with the Eucharist, sometimes independently, suggests their promotion as expounders and defenders of Church doctrine, in particular, the doctrine of the Real Presence.

Within two years of Rubens’s painting in the Church of St. Paul in Antwerp, the defence of the Real Presence in the Netherlands was given further affirmation both in word and in art with the publication of the polemic by the Jesuit, Johannes van Gouda, entitled Victorieuse Transsubstantiatie (fig. 28) with its frontispiece engraving by Willem D. Hack, featuring in the upper level a monstrance encircled by worshipping angels, and in the lower level Johannes van Gouda disputing with one of the Brothers Lansberghen.259_{Samuel Lansberghen and his}

brother were Calvinist ministers and preachers in Rotterdam. Faith and Hope stand beside the title-tablet in which Love is symbolized by the Sacrament itself. But of all the affirmation of the Real Presence possibly none can equal Rubens’s designs for the tapestry series on the Eucharist .

Fig. 28. W.D Hack,Victorieuse Transsubstantiatie,engraving, 1611.