What did Velázquez get from Rome that Spain could not have given him? A sense of pictorial possibility and sheer skilclass="underline" no painting in Spain could rival in confidence, range, and pictorial imagination what Italian art from the Renaissance on—Michelangelo, Raphael, Veronese, Titian, Caravaggio, the Carraccis—magnificently embodied. Then there was the Antique as well, the ancient statues which Velázquez was not there to copy, but which fortified his sense of possible continuity with the long past. There were no Roman paintings that look like Velázquez’s Surrender of Breda (The Lances) (1635), and yet he could hardly have managed that theater of expression, that complex composition in deep space, and that inspired frieze of twenty-four vertical lances (their rhythmic beat broken by just three oblique ones) without knowing and internalizing the achievements of Roman art. For an ambitious artist with the skill and determination to work out its lessons, seventeenth-century Rome was indisputably the school of the world. It gave great liberties and opportunities to artists. For instance, in Velázquez’s case, it encouraged a figure painter to paint naked women. This practice, if not unknown in Spain, was very rare, because of the ignorant moral hostility of the clergy; as for the clientele, they could not display nudes on their walls, for fear of obloquy. But there was no risk attached to painting the female nude in Italy, and somewhere among the horde of potential models who hung out for hire around Piazza di Spagna, Velázquez found the girl whose slender, lovely body was destined to become one of the most celebrated in art history, and the first recorded nude by a Spanish painter: the pensive mirror-gazing subject of The Toilet of Venus, or The Rokeby Venus (c. 1651). Rome also presented Velázquez with the opportunity to create one of the most mesmerizing and inquisitorial images of human power ever put on canvas. This, of course, is the 1650–51 portrait of Pope Innocent X Pamphili, which still hangs in its cubicle in Palazzo Doria, above Piazza Navona. Such is the nature of late-modernist fame that, by now, probably most people who are aware of this painting know about it through the “screaming pope” versions of it done by Francis Bacon. These are among Bacon’s best work, but they do not come near the original (which is of course not screaming: of all men, the one least likely to scream, even privately, is this Pamphili). Indeed, one is sometimes tempted to say that very few portraits, if any at all, approach Velázquez’s pope—even Innocent X himself, on seeing it finished, is said to have called it “too truthful,” and when one confronts its steely, interrogatory glare, it is all too easy to know what he meant.
The fourth great seventeenth-century expatriate to work in Rome was not a Spaniard but a Fleming, originally from Antwerp: Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640). In terms of versatility, influence, and sheer historical and mythical power, there has never been another artist to touch Rubens, and it is likely that there never will be. In his energy and his ability to fulfill great public roles, he puts every twentieth-century painter in the shade. We are apt to regard Picasso’s Guernica as a very important piece of public art, and so it is—for its time. But it is alone in Picasso’s work, whereas Rubens, the greatest Northern painter associated with the Counter-Reformation, could and did turn out such utterances, usually of a religious sort although sometimes descriptive of politics, on the grandest scale and with an eloquence and formal beauty that leave Picasso far behind him. This kind of painting, with such ambitions for the languages of paint, is simply no longer possible; its use has been subverted by the decay of religion, the distrust of politics and politicians, and the evaporation of belief in authority that characterize our own age. There can never be another Rubens, because the intellectual and ethical backgrounds to his work, not to mention the educational systems and reverence for historical prototypes that supported and infused it, no longer exist. Nor can they be willed into being. The enormous fish has no water to swim in, and the estuary is dry.
There is no doubt that Rubens got his sense of the public role of an artist from a long visit to Italy and, in particular, to Rome. He made his first visit there at the end of 1601, when he was serving at the court of Vincenzo Gonzaga, duke of Mantua. In that northern city he had already been able to study the late King Charles I’s collections of Renaissance art. Presently the collection was relocated to Spain, where Velázquez got to study it, and where Rubens would later be able to renew his acquaintance with its Titians, Tintorettos, Veroneses, and other High Renaissance masterpieces now relocated to the royal collection in Madrid. On his first trip to Rome, and during a later sojourn there in 1606–8, Rubens was able to study the chief works of the Grand Manner, all of which were there: Michelangelo’s Sistine frescoes, Raphael’s Vatican stanze. Their impact on him was immeasurable, and it was increased by the fact that the ancient Roman marbles, which had served these earlier artists as authoritative sources, were also there for Rubens to study and copy, side by side: the Belvedere Torso, the Laocoön, and lesser but still instructive works such as the African Fisherman (then thought to be a carved marble figure of the dying Seneca). Thanks to the wholly privileged position of the Church, the greatest collections of such antiquities were in the hands of wealthy clerics: the huge room in Palazzo Farnese, for instance, whose ceiling Annibale Carracci had frescoed, was crammed with ancient statues, and Cardinal Alessandro Farnese had already opened this collection of antiquities to scholars and selected artists (not yet a general public) in 1589. In an age before public museums, this situation was tailor-made for Rubens, who used all his powers of charm, talent, and ingratiation to get access to such aesthetic treasures and draw them, accurately, fast, and from every angle. He made hundreds of such drawings, which served him as memory aids—these being the days before photographic reproduction—and furnished the basis of many of his own figures and compositions to come. Rubens would never cease to be a student of the art of the past, and drawing was his medium of study. To copy a work was to absorb it; to internalize it; to assimilate its DNA. This process is almost lost to us today, in an age of mass mechanical reproduction.
On this early visit, Rubens did not leave many works in Rome. He was not yet well enough known to get big commissions there, although he did an altarpiece for the Church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, commemorating the Empress Helena’s acquisition in Jerusalem of the relics of the True Cross and the Holy Staircase contained in the church itself. But the experience of Rome, and in particular the sense of an immense sacred and aesthetic history transmitted through the ancient fabric of the city to the present day, would never leave him: it remained one of the basic messages of his art, the old vigorously underpinning the new. There was no artist who gave one a stronger sense of continuity in art than Rubens in Rome.