 |
|
|
|
|
Featured Prints from the Pompa Introitus Ferdinandi
July 14, 2007
Born in Siegen, Westphalia in 1577, Peter Paul Rubens was one of the most celebrated painters of seventeenth century Northern Europe. Renowned for his Counter-Reformation altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and history paintings of mythological and heavily allegorical subjects, his exuberant Baroque style, emphasizing movement, color, and sensuality, won him many admirers among the European elite. He also worked as a classically-educated humanist scholar, art collector, and even a diplomat, knighted by both Philip IV of Spain and Charles I of England.
Though he moved around Europe frequently during his lifetime, many of his years were spent in Antwerp, where he enjoyed financing from the court and kept a large and successful studio. In 1635, having just completed the famed canvases for the Whitehall ceiling, the aging ‘renaissance man’ was asked to design the street decorations for the ceremonial entry into the city of the Ferdinand of Austria, the newly appointed governor of the Spanish Netherlands. Rubens was undeterred by the knowledge that his triumphal arches and stages would stand only temporarily, and succeeded in creating a tremendous array of large-scale festival architecture.
Rubens drew from a long tradition of triumphal procession dating back to the Roman Empire. The Joyeuse Entrée of a monarch into the major cities of his kingdom had become a well-established custom in Italy and France by the end of the sixteenth century, and acquired special significance in the Low Countries (ruled over by the dukes of Burgundy, Charles V, and the kings of Spain, successively). Antwerp’s magistrates enlisted Jean Casper Gevartius (Gevaerts), Rubens’ friend and colleague, to prepare the inscriptions for Rubens’ great structures and paintings. On 17 April 1635, the Cardinal-Infante entered Antwerp, receiving a hero’s welcome of unprecedented scale and pageantry.
In 1640 Rubens finally succumbed to gout, but plans were already in motion for a folio volume describing the festive decorations and the elegant inscriptions invented for the 1635 Entry. Gevartius took responsibility for the commemorative book, recruiting the painter Theodor van Thulden to execute engravings from Rubens’ preparatory oil sketches. At the end of 1642, over forty etchings showing the arches, stages, and principal paintings, together with the exhaustive supplementary text of Gevartius, were published in the sumptuous Pompa Introitus Ferdinandi Austriaci Hispaniarum Infantis in Urbem Antverpiam (“The Festival Entry of Ferdinand, Infante of Spain, into Antwerp”), more commonly known as the Pompa Introitus Ferdinandi. Our collection includes thirty-nine of Van Thulden’s forty-three plates.
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
