Christ on the Way to Calvary

Entry

The museum sketch – on a composite support of two pieces of oak timber from the Polish/Baltic area and available for use from 1627 – has been accepted as the work of Peter Paul Rubens executed in preparation for the high altarpiece of the church of Sint-Peter en Pauluskerk in the prestigious Benedictine abbey at Afflighem in southern Brabant.⁶ Rubens was in discussion about the commission in 1634 and the altarpiece was delivered in 1637; it is now in the Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België, Brussels. Reservations about the authenticity of the Amsterdam sketch (early harboured by the present author) were first aired in 2007, when the catalogue of Rubens: A Genius at Work attributed it to Rubens and studio; the entry by Peeters and Dubois proposed that studio participation was confined to ‘the figures in the background’, and that the assistant ‘was perhaps assigned the task of finishing the sketch begun by the master’.⁷

In the present work there is a difference in degree of finish between the troop of horsemen at the head of the procession and the group of the two thieves and their escorts at the rear (in the foreground). But it seems likely that only one hand was responsible for the work; and it is here contended that being largely no more than facile in his handling of the brush, the artist should not be identified as Rubens. Clearly he was familiar with Rubens’s work, but he could endow the principal figures with facial expressions little more than feeble and was clumsy at rendering muscles (e.g. the back of the man supporting the cross). Further his control of the formal configuration of the composition was so weak that he could only include the arm of the bad thief’s escort.

Two other sketches also associated with Rubens’s preparation for the commission, in the Vienna Akademie⁸ and the Brussels museum⁹, are no longer considered autograph. Although very different in style, it seems possible that they were also the work of studio hands as they followed Rubens’s drafting sessions.

Only one extant modello for the altarpiece, a large-scale sketch in the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (inv. no. 1856), is generally agreed to be autograph, as can in part be inferred from technical photographs. This is rapidly drawn and brushed mostly in grisaille in at least two phases.¹⁰ In marked contrast to the present painting is the extensive use of underdrawing in black chalk. In many respects, as Verhave and Wadum have shown, in its first phase (before the introduction of the mounted commander), the design of the Copenhagen modello was the same or very similar to that in the Rijksmuseum work. This latter is best understood as partially independent, but chiefly inspired by Rubens as he worked on the Afflighem commission. The altarpiece was installed on 8 April 1637; it may have been available along with the preparatory work, for some time in the studio.

The main source of inspiration for the author of the Rijksmuseum painting, most likely an advanced pupil or assistant in the studio, was the composition as first drafted by Rubens in the Copenhagen sketch; he seems to have had access also to other preparatory work as well as knowledge of the altarpiece itself. The attitude of St Veronica, in which Held found much to praise,¹¹ is to a degree independent of Rubens, but the gesture of wiping Christ’s forehead was inspired by the motif devised in the Copenhagen sketch. From this work is also derived the pose of the child behind Veronica, although the artist’s first idea (as more outstretched) follows that in the prototype of the Vienna sketch. For the configuration of St John supporting the Virgin, the source seems to have been first the arrangement as recorded in the Brussels sketch (with the saint’s arm over the Virgin’s), and then the solution finally arrived at in the altarpiece itself. The soldier restraining the Virgin is a motif derived from that set out in the Vienna sketch. The probable pentiment in the bottom left of the Rijksmuseum picture suggests that the first idea was inspired by either of the formulations preserved in the Brussels or Vienna sketches and showed the group of guards and prisoners moving towards the right (the white cloth binding the bad thief’s arms behind his back is still visible, as is in black and white photographs the image of the soldier pushing the thief along from behind). Then Rubens’s proposal in the Copenhagen modello was selected and the group was switched round. But by placing the foremost Roman soldier (whose left arm, staff and leg are clearly afterthoughts) too near the centre, the artist left insufficient room to show the whole group and was only able to include the left arm of the soldier escorting the bad thief.

With its echoes of Raphael’s Spasimo di Sicilia of 1515¹² in the gesture of the Virgin, in the mounted, Roman ensign and to a lesser extent in the mounted commander, Rubens’s rising, in-depth design is highly original, as is the prominent foreground placement of the thieves at the rear of the procession. An ambiguous and thus controversial sentence in Phalesius’s chronicle of the Afflighem monastery of 1637, in which the history of the commission is briefly mentioned,¹³ has been interpreted by some scholars to mean that Rubens was asked (in October 1634) to alter his first proposal for the altarpiece;¹⁴ the Rijksmuseum sketch has been identified with this supposed first proposal,¹⁵ but such a thesis would no longer be sustainable if our contention concerning its status is correct.

Phalesius gave the altarpiece’s subject (using the genitive) ‘Christi Domini Baiulantis crucem’ (Christ the Lord carrying the Cross) and (in the accusative) ‘Christum Staurophorum Cruci succumbentem’ (The cross-bearing Christ falling under the cross). Following tradition,¹⁶ Rubens relies chiefly on the account given in Luke 23:26-27 and 32, which not only describes how Simon of Cyrene took up the cross behind Christ, but accounts for the presence of the ‘Daughters of Jerusalem’ and the ‘two other, malefactors led with him to be put to death’. But the main emphasis is placed on the legendary St Veronica, who is wiping blood from Christ’s brow with her veil or with what is sometimes described as the Holy Handkerchief.

Gregory Martin, 2022