The Gift of Rubens: Rethinking the Concept of Gift-Giving in Early Modern Diplomacy

Introduction

Sometime in the mid-1620s, Peter Paul Rubens got involved in a plan to reconcile the warring crowns of England and Spain. This plan led him, in 1629, to the London court, where he experienced one of the highlights of his career as a painter and a diplomat. In a recent account of this event, Gregory Martin argues that ‘Rubens was justly proud of the diplomatic role he had played in helping to bring about peace’, not least because he ‘acted with a confidence and assurance more expected of a diplomat of long experience’. According to Martin, ‘that he overcame opposition from governments inimical to his own, the Spanish predilection for prevarication, and a popular English suspicion of Spain, must be to his great credit’. ¹

Interestingly, Martin’s view dovetails not only with the tradition of glorification that set in immediately after Rubens’s death and which reached its peak during the Romantic Era, but also with the other recent interpretations of his diplomatic activities. ² Rubens certainly would have concurred with this belief in the significance of his role as a diplomat. As he concluded, in 1634, in a letter to a friend: ‘I can say without conceit that my missions and journeys in Spain and England succeeded most favorably. I carried out negotiations of the gravest importance, to the complete satisfaction of those who sent me and of the opposite party’. ³

Pace Rubens and his admirers, their vision needs to be revised. It is telling that diplomatic historiography has regarded the conflict between Spain and England as well as the peace it led to in 1630 as barely meriting a footnote in the history of the Thirty Years’ War. Likewise, political historians who have investigated the policy of the kings and leading courtiers involved in the negotiations have scarcely mentioned the part Rubens played. ⁴ Most scholars, in explaining his diplomatic activities, have relied too extensively on an uncritical reading of Rubens’s autographic letters, and have strictly separated his artistic activities from his verbal negotiations. They have thus forged an image of a caesarean Rubens who came to London and, despite encountering a court hostile to peace, quickly conquered the hearts of the king and his courtiers. ⁵ A more historically accurate picture of Rubens the diplomat and of early modern diplomacy can be drawn by establishing patterns of expectations towards Rubens and interpreting his actions towards them. This entails supplementing a closer reading of well-worn material like the document editions by William N. Sainsbury, Max Rooses and Charles Ruelens, and Ruth S. Magurn, with enquiries into the hitherto understudied – in terms of Rubens scholarship – dispatches of the Venetian ambassadors and the notebooks of John Finet, Charles I’s Master of Ceremonies. It also necessitates looking into unused material from the National Archives in Madrid. ⁶ Furthermore, given the multifaceted importance that painting held as a language of diplomacy in early modern Europe, the words of Rubens and his contemporaries need to be placed in dialogue with analyses of the paintings he produced during his diplomatic journeys.

Viewed from this perspective, Rubens’s mission to London should be considered as a gift sent by the Spanish king to his art-loving English cousin. Anthropological theories of gift exchange have long found their way into historical literature, and several students of early modern diplomatic gifts acknowledge that the notions of reciprocity, obligation and honour pervaded contemporary diplomatic culture. However, their focus on ‘material’ presents such as paintings, books, clothing, porcelain and silver plates, does not seem to justify fully the importance they ascribe to gift-giving in early modern diplomacy. ⁷ In this article, I will extend the concept of the diplomatic gift to include the providing of access to the services of a gifted person. The theory of Rubens as gift will demonstrate that the tangled intersection between people as givers and people as gifts fits remarkably well within the structural outlines of gift-giving in early modern diplomatic culture.

A Mere Painter?

In early 1623 Charles, Prince of Wales and George Villiers, Marques of Buckingham, had embarked on a journey to Madrid, with a view to claiming a bride for the Prince – namely, the Infanta Maria Ana, sister of King Philip IV. Their presence at the Spanish court, they no doubt believed, would hasten marriage negotiations that, in the midst of the Thirty Years’ War, could well result in a political alliance between Europe’s most powerful Protestant and Catholic states. However, events transpired rather differently, with Charles departing Madrid feeling that his honour had been besmirched. Upon becoming king, in 1625, he declared war on Spain. ⁸ The failure of this so-called Spanish Match constitutes the framework in which Rubens and Balthazar Gerbier, a painter and connoisseur in the service of Buckingham, began discussing the reconciliation of the two Crowns. Rubens soon confided the details of their political conversations to his mistress Isabella, the governess of the Spanish Netherlands, who ordered him to forward all such information. Isabella subsequently sent Rubens’s reports to Madrid, thus introducing her court painter as a diplomat. ⁹

However, Madrid’s foreign policy makers were quite displeased upon hearing about Rubens’s involvement. As the king noted in a letter to Isabella, ‘I deeply regret that you have used a painter as a minister in affairs of such importance. It is a cause of great discredit … to this monarchy’. ¹⁰ Philip IV was voicing the conventional view that painters were persons whose office was concerned with manufacturing and ‘venal practices’ such as making profit by selling their goods. Such characteristics rendered them unfit to be official representatives of the Spanish crown. This was an age when official diplomats were regarded as the near embodiments of their sovereigns; as such, they had to be of a fitting social status. ¹¹ Isabella thus quickly reassured Philip IV that Rubens’s negotiations were not official, and even convinced him to allow her painter to travel to Madrid in order to explain his conversations with Gerbier to the Junta de Estado. ¹²

Very soon after his arrival in the Spanish capital, however, Rubens disappeared from the diplomatic scene, leading one Venetian ambassador to state that the artist had died. ¹³ Nevertheless, in the spring of 1629 Isabella received two letters from Philip IV. In the first the king referred to the instructions Rubens was to carry out in London. In the second he asked Isabella to name Rubens ‘Secretary of my Privy Council over there’. ¹⁴ Although Philip implicitly stated that he still considered Rubens to be Isabella’s diplomatic agent, his sending a mere painter to England marked a major shift in his attitude. What had happened to change the king’s mind? Why was it advantageous for the Spanish court to send Rubens as an envoy to Charles I?

In early modern Europe the visual arts constituted a vital means of royal representation: in describing how the experience of monarchy was largely an experience of the media through which it was communicated, Kevin Sharpe convincingly argues that a ruler’s authority fundamentally emanated from highly complex negotiations between the representation of his image and its perception by his subjects. To strengthen their negotiating position, rulers thus depended to a considerable extent upon the craftsmanship of image constructors, including painters. ¹⁵ More importantly, painting essentially operated at the highest societal levels of early modern Europe: rulers regularly sent their painted images to each other, so as to create vicarious presences in the realm of international politics. Of course, for such presence to be powerful and persuasive, a ruler had to employ artists that commanded a visual language which would be intelligible in all European courts. ¹⁶

Rubens was highly skilled in such undertakings. He had studied in Antwerp and Rome and had been court painter of the Archdukes; he had completed an impressive cycle of paintings glorifying the life of the French queen mother Maria de’ Medici; and he had recently substantially enriched the Spanish royal collection. ¹⁷ In short, in the late 1620s Rubens had reached the pinnacle of his career. As early as 1621 the circle of courtiers and connoisseurs around Prince Charles had encouraged him to patronize Rubens. The king very quickly came to admire the painter’s artistic talents. Two years later, he made the highly unusual request that Rubens’s Self-Portrait (Figure 1) be sent to him; the work was later hung in a room adjacent to the Royal Bedchamber. ¹⁸ However, because Spain and England were at war, Charles could not secure the services of this leading representative of the visual arts. By sending Rubens to London, Philip IV offered the English king a means of art patronage, the products of which Charles could employ for propaganda purposes. OPEN IN VIEWER

The Spanish court understood how important this was for the Stuart dynasty. Charles’s journey to Madrid in 1623 had been deeply influential in shaping both his and Philip IV’s political-cultural interest in the art of painting. It was most significant for the proceedings of the Anglo-Spanish peace negotiations that two young men who met there would become the most avid royal collectors and patrons of the arts of the seventeenth century. In an age fraught with anxiety about both the physical safety of princes and the correctness of court ceremonial, such ‘summit meetings’ were highly unusual. Their encounters gave rise to conversations between equals, to the memory of which Philip IV had an impressive commemorative column erected. The Spanish king had been amazed by Charles’s fascination with the visual arts; he was particularly struck by Charles’s willingness to spend vast amounts of money so as obtain the finest pieces from Spanish private collections. At a time when Philip’s favourite, the Count-Duke of Olivares, was making every effort to transform the young king into a culturally refined ruler who possessed considerable connaissance of the arts, Philip could only have been impressed by such passion for painting. ¹⁹ Charles’s preference for painting as a means of royal representation and his rivalry with Louis XIII’s favourite, Cardinal de Richelieu, on the international art market in 1627 may have made Philip IV and his courtiers aware that the English king, then at war with France, would gratefully accept an opportunity to patronize the artist who had, in the Maria de’ Medici cycle, so skilfully enhanced the reputation of the French Crown. ²⁰ Just weeks before Rubens’s arrival in London, Charles told one of his pro-Spanish courtiers that he desired to make the acquaintance of ‘a person of such merit’ as Rubens. The message was immediately forwarded to Madrid. ²¹

The tempting prospects of patronage, however, only partially explain why Charles I was so receptive upon hearing about Rubens’s visit. Another dimension to the Spanish court’s decision to send the artist to London concerns the mounting royal interest in gathering paintings. In the early seventeenth century an increasing number of leading European monarchs had begun to expand their picture collections. As Jonathan Brown claims, this was largely due to ‘the conceptual transformation of painting from a manual craft to a liberal art’. The mid-sixteenth century saw the first appearances of art-theoretical treatises like Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters. In this work Vasari adroitly utilized the exemplary lives of the most famous Renaissance artists to depict them as intellectual geniuses. These new ideas found a ready reception within the courts of sixteenth-century Italy, where painting quickly came to be considered an equal of contemporary poetry, and was thus esteemed among the most sophisticated expressions of humanist culture. By the early seventeenth century these ideas had reached most European courts, thereby solidifying the place of high-quality allegorical paintings within the mainstream of European civilization. As a consequence, Brown continues, it was not long before ‘a powerful symbiosis was achieved between the cultural prestige of painting and the social prestige of princes’. ²² This meant that European princes, as promoters of cultural progress, not only needed to be able to acquire a fair amount of these fruits of humanist refinement; it also befitted them to understand the intellectual paintings and to interpret them during learned conversation. These qualities could even enhance a king’s power and authority in the realm of international politics. ²³ It is hardly surprising that in this political-cultural climate, painters and connoisseurs were highly effective in obtaining the favour of princes and thus often judged eligible to be sent on informal diplomatic missions. ²⁴

This widening of the political scope of highly specialized painting deeply influenced the court of Charles I. Malcolm Smuts has argued that the English king and his courtiers associated the accumulation of paintings with ‘a cosmopolitan aristocratic culture they wished to emulate’. Indeed, at the Caroline court, collecting pictures ‘was not just a leisured pursuit; it also provided a means of seeking entry into international high society and politics’. ²⁵ The young Charles I was eager to turn his court into a Mecca for the visual arts and thereby gain his rightful place among Europe’s leading monarchs. His shining example was the court in Madrid, where he had been overwhelmed by how the Habsburgs deployed both rigid court ceremony and effective display of artwork so as to present their dynasty to the political and diplomatic community. After his accession to the throne, he tightened the rules of court life and instructed his Master of Ceremonies to escort all ambassadors and diplomatic agents on a guided tour through Whitehall Palace. The purpose of such tours was to show in as striking a manner as possible the impressive art collection Charles had succeeded in acquiring. ²⁶

Considered from the perspective of the facility required of princes to discuss the visual arts in a civilized and intellectual manner, it flattered him to have Rubens present. Rubens was not only Europe’s leading painter and promoter of the royal majesty; he also held a reputation throughout Europe as a collector and connoisseur. ²⁷ Charles’s request, six years earlier, to receive Rubens’s self-portrait, should be seen in this light. In early modern intellectual circles, the sending of portraits symbolized the willingness of donor and recipient to engage in dialogue. ²⁸ Charles’s conspicuous disregard for boundaries of social status in matters of highly skilled painting did not go unnoticed. Diplomats were highly aware that an audience with the English king could easily veer into more pleasant conversation about the fine arts. ²⁹ Adversaries of Anglo-Spanish rapprochement surely hoped that Charles would not receive Rubens, yet realized that ‘he may under the pretense of pictures, in which he delights greatly’. ³⁰

The Gift of Rubens

Philip IV and his advisers, especially after Rubens’s visit to Madrid, had come to the same conclusion. The painter’s artistic production appears to have inspired the king’s admiration. ³¹ Rubens wrote to a friend that Philip IV ‘really takes an extreme delight in painting’; the artist would have been well aware of this, since ‘I know him already by personal contact, for … he comes to see me almost every day.’ ³² Rubens likely exaggerated the frequency of the king’s visits to him, but his statement is nonetheless striking, as access to the Spanish monarch was so tightly restricted. It also suggests the beginnings of a shift in Philip’s attitude towards Rubens. As Alexander Vergara has suggested, the painter now seized the opportunity to show Philip what he would not dare to say with words. Reworking his Adoration of the Magi, which had ended up in the Spanish royal collection sometime in the mid-1620s, Rubens reinforced the Catholic message of the picture and introduced a self-portrait. He thus exhibited his personal commitment to the Catholic cause while at the same time soliciting a diplomatic function in service of the leading Catholic prince. ³³ While the artist was busy painting, his friend Alessandro Scaglia was ‘getting the Count-Duke to send Rubens on a visit to England’. ³⁴ Scaglia, a Savoyard diplomat and connoisseur who had more than once capitalized on the taste for art collecting at the Caroline court, knew that such a gesture would be warmly welcomed by Charles I. ³⁵ Apparently, he managed to convince Olivares, for in April 1629, the members of the Junta de Estado agreed that ‘because of [Rubens’s] personal qualities, his civilized behaviour and his intelligence, and his profession as a painter, the king being a great aficionado of paintings, he could secure himself of a degree of access that could serve his Majesty very well’. ³⁶

The previous quotation indicates that the decision to send Rubens to England was indeed strategic. This is why the painter, though nominally ‘Secretary of his Majesty’s Privy Council in the Netherlands’, held no authority to negotiate peace between Spain and England and had not received letters of accreditation from Philip IV. Returning from Madrid in the spring of 1629, he carried only letters from Philip’s favourite, the Count-Duke of Olivares, to the pro-Spanish courtiers Richard Weston and Francis Cottington, and some instructions Olivares had drafted. The latter he had to change for instructions from the Infanta on his passage through Brussels. ³⁷ Understandably, upon Rubens’s arrival in England, there was great confusion about his presence. One courtier noted that ‘we understande he is qualifyed a Secretary du conseil privé but what that is wee doe not yeat well understande’. ³⁸ Opposing diplomats like the Dutch Albert Joachimi and the Venetian Girolamo Soranzo did not seem to comprehend the mission of Rubens either. While the former knew that ‘Rubens … hath brought with him no letter of credence, nor the lest thing authenticall or substantiall’, and therefore wondered why ‘there are great ones that mainetaine him in countenance’, the latter, after long enquiries, could only conclude ‘that Rubens has served merely as a transmitter of letters’. ³⁹ Charles’s Master of Ceremonies, who had been ordered to categorize visiting diplomats as either ambassadors or agents, never used these categories but instead identified Rubens differently five times. Such vacillation is remarkable, especially considering that one of his key tasks was to be well acquainted with the diplomats’ ‘severall ranks, qualityes and degrees’. ⁴⁰ Furthermore, when rumours reached Olivares that Rubens, at his first audience with the king, had entered upon conditions of peace, the Count-Duke delivered him a sound admonishment: such discussion was not what he had been dispatched for! ⁴¹ All this suggests that by nominally investing the painter with an office in the Habsburg Netherlands and not granting him any letters of accreditation from the Spanish Crown, Philip IV and Olivares wished to emphasize that the painter was not their official representative. As a diplomatic agent, Rubens may have been suited to represent the Infanta; he could not do so for the Spanish king.

More importantly, this leads to the conclusion that Madrid’s obfuscation concerning Rubens’s status as an envoy was also a suggestion that their sending the renowned artist to London should be seen as a gift from Philip IV to Charles I. It was the best gesture Philip could offer to convince Charles of his sincere ambition to end the Anglo-Spanish War. As Maija Jansson has argued, in the early modern period ‘royal gifts’ were a visible expression of good will and desire to work together: they symbolized the respect the giver held for the receiver and helped to ease tensions before serious negotiations began. ⁴² The letters from Olivares which Rubens was expected to present to Weston and Cottington stated that the Count-Duke had dispatched the painter to England simply to demonstrate that Philip IV shared Charles I’s wish for peace. The journey of Rubens was intended to ‘facilitate the start towards the desire of both Majesties’. ⁴³ Jansson has also demonstrated that the gifts exchanged between kings were personal offerings: they signalled friendship, courtesy and generosity. A prince would present to another prince something that was both unique and characteristic of the former’s lands. ⁴⁴ The gift of a painter from Flanders, a region that since the Late Middle Ages had been renowned for its paintings, follows this principle. The presentation of Rubens was both unique and personal. Gift-giving in early modern Europe indeed involved a transfer of identities: it exteriorized a ‘tie between souls’ and bore the identity of the exclusive relationship between recipient and giver. As such, gifts also conferred honour, providing tangible evidence of one’s status and legitimizing one’s membership of a social community. ⁴⁵ The gift of Rubens was intended to be regarded as a token of friendship between two art-loving kings, as well as recognition on the part of Philip that, at least in terms of civilization and refinement, the English Stuarts likewise ranked among Europe’s leading dynasties.

Such a gift – presenting access to the services of a talented courtier – was rather exceptional in early modern diplomatic culture, yet not wholly unusual. The Habsburgs often sent their court dwarves (famous for their wit and lyrical skill) as presents to friendly neighbours. ⁴⁶ Such manoeuvres should be understood within the historical context of increasing experimentation in the practice of giving gifts and the attribution of new meanings to them. They can be explained as a result of the low level of professionalization that still characterized diplomacy. ⁴⁷ Talented dwarves, like the most gifted court painters, were highly esteemed by several kings and were even sometimes employed on diplomatic missions. They could secure themselves a high degree of access to the rulers who received them, which was useful to those who had sent them. ⁴⁸

The gift of Rubens likewise was not only a sign of good will. Principally, it constituted an astute strategy, one that was entirely adapted to early modern Europe’s political-cultural framework of gift-giving. ⁴⁹ In early modern times the gift, as Luuc Kooijmans has astutely defined it, was ‘a token of affection, of good will … When the receiver gratefully accepted it, he declared himself explicitly or implicitly obliged, meaning that he could be solicited, that in due course he was prepared to return the gesture with a service or a favour’. ⁵⁰ In other words, gift exchange generated power differentials. This was especially true when recipients could not reciprocate a received present, in which case they were to adapt to the hierarchical situation by accepting its legitimacy. ⁵¹ The implications of this conception of the gift were clear to the early modern authors of instructional handbooks for diplomats. Such works routinely warned readers that ‘gifts do oblige and those that receive become slaves to those that give them’. ⁵²

People like Finet, Joachimi and Soranzo, who were not involved in the European and Caroline court culture of art collecting and connoisseurship, could not immediately grasp this aspect of Rubens’s mission. Diplomats and courtiers in Charles’s inner circle surely could. Scaglia even assured an English friend that the Spanish court had sent the painter to England ‘as an extra pledge’ and as a token of the court’s willingness to end hostilities. ⁵³ Charles I, for his part, never took into account Rubens’s diplomatic status; he seems merely to have wanted the painter near him as soon as possible. Upon hearing that Rubens had arrived in London, Charles immediately invited the painter for an audience the next morning and, one observer noted, ‘used him graciously and gave him a fair and full audience’. ⁵⁴

In his letters to Olivares in the first months after his arrival, Rubens suggested that he had been speaking with Charles I several times a week. On one occasion, according to Rubens,

the King … said that since he saw I had instructions which were sufficient and to his satisfaction, he wished to treat with me freely, in order to save time; and that therefore, in case I had some reserved and more private commission, I ought not delay in informing him; but that even if I had no such commission, he was no less willing to declare openly how far it lay in his power to go, in order to make peace with Spain. ⁵⁵

Weston and Cottington, in response to a letter they had received from Olivares via Rubens, expressed their gratitude to him for sending the artist. Weston noted that Rubens had earned respect ‘not just for his talent but also for his capacities’, and Cottington believed it was ‘very effective to send Rubens here, because not only he is very capable and skilful in negotiating, but he also succeeds in appealing to everyone and especially to the King my lord’. ⁵⁷ Uncritical acceptance of such passages could easily lead to overstated glorification of Rubens’s superb negotiating skills. Yet, was it not equally significant that, in explicitly stating that Rubens was also an able diplomat, Weston and Cottington were implicitly emphasizing that his suitability as a diplomat essentially sprang from his qualities as a painter and connoisseur? In any case, the message to Olivares was clear: Charles had gratefully accepted the gift and would soon be obliged. The Spanish court likely calculated that a benevolent demeanour on the part of Charles and his representatives during the peace negotiations would be the ideal return favour.

Rubens’s Gift

This was exactly the attitude Charles I adopted, which has led several historians to emphasize the king’s ignorance of the structural leverage he held for a profitable peace. ⁵⁸ However, Charles would have been well aware that both Brussels and Madrid desperately needed peace with England, as the Dutch Revolt in the Netherlands and the War for the Mantuan succession in Northern Italy required all their attention and because resources were in short supply due to the capture of the Spanish silver fleet by the Dutch captain Piet Heyn. ⁵⁹ As his main motives for reconciliation with the Habsburgs, historians have identified the dreadful condition of Charles’s finances and his personal hatred for Spain’s main enemy, Cardinal Richelieu. ⁶⁰ Sharpe has added that what can only be labelled a charm offensive on the part of the Infanta ‘gained much upon the King’s disposition’. Her covert insistence with Philip IV to have Rubens sent to London formed an integral part of this policy. ⁶¹ Isabella would have known beforehand that the obligation induced by the gift of Rubens would be difficult to redeem with a counter-gift, seeing that Charles I did not dispose of artists with similar qualities.

By November 1629, however, the king gained the impression that Philip IV and Olivares were seeking to exploit his benevolent demeanour. It seemed to him that the court in Madrid was continuing to postpone the departure of the Spanish ambassador, don Carlos Coloma to London, even after his English counterpart had arrived in Spain. Such a delay, of course, would strengthen the reputation of the Habsburg monarchy, as it would appear to diplomats throughout Europe that the crown of England was suing Madrid for peace. Charles I was not happy with this course of events. He wrote to his ambassador: ‘There is nothing we have in more special recomendation then punctually to observe owr Royal word and promise with Princes towards whom we are that way obliged’. But in this situation he would have to abort the negotiations, he continued, for ‘owr honor is too deare unto us to expose it to adventure’. ⁶² Surely, the honour conferred upon Charles by the gift of Rubens did not redress Philip’s disregard for the older, knightly code of honour by which the English king abided more stringently. After further misunderstandings, Charles even threatened to send Rubens back to Brussels. ⁶³ Since he had not yet commissioned any work from the painter, such an action would have amounted to returning an unopened gift.

Rubens saw the storm building: the peace talks, in which he had been involved from the start, were leading to nothing. ‘I consider this delay at the present juncture as so unfortunate’, he confided to Isabella, ‘that I curse the hour when I came to this kingdom. God grant that I come out of it all right!’ ⁶⁴ Remarkably enough, in a letter he sent just a few weeks later to Olivares, his despair had not only completely vanished but had been replaced with a full sense of achievement. Rubens emphasized that he had succeeded in overcoming many of the difficulties his mission had posed, especially regarding the coming of the Spanish ambassador to London. He hoped ‘that my loyal intentions and my good will in the service of His Majesty will merit, if not thanks, at least some indulgence’. ⁶⁵ As Rubens’s letter suggested, the English king’s displeasure had indeed faded. Charles had even ordered his ambassador to resume his mission, the official reason being that ‘wee have received sufficient satisfaction … by letters from the Infanta to Rubens, which give us assurance that Don Carlos shalbe at Dunkerke by the 10th/20th of this present to take his passage’. ⁶⁶ In the end, however, Coloma would not be in Dunkirk until several weeks later. Yet, despite the vigorous attempts of the Venetian ambassador to convince the king and his leading courtiers of how little respect Madrid had shown and continued to show for English honour, the Caroline court remained quiet. ⁶⁷ Could the contents of Isabella’s letters have been so persuasive as to fully mollify Charles I? Perhaps, but it is difficult to imagine that Rubens had passively waited for the Infanta to defuse the crisis.

So close to the presence of an art-loving king, Rubens acted pragmatically and took up his pencils and brushes to protect his interests. Sometime between late November and mid-December 1629, he honoured Charles I with the gift of a painting he had been working on since arriving in England some five months before. This canvas, the Allegory of Peace (Figure 2), represents a helmeted Minerva who drives out the war god Mars, the war fury Alecto and a harpy (a symbol of calamity) from a foreground scene of peace, pleasure and abundance. The painting seeks to convey the idea that peace brings both prosperity and happiness but must be protected fervently from the ever-present threat of war. The work is a call from Rubens to the English king to end the conflict with Spain and allow peace to return to Europe. OPEN IN VIEWER

Although there are no written sources documenting when and why the artist offered the painting to Charles I, Rubens scholars appear to agree that he presented the painting towards the end of his mission, to commemorate the successful resolution of his negotiations with the king. ⁶⁸ However, if the Allegory of Peace was Rubens’s gift in return for the favours Charles I had granted him just before he departed London in March 1630, and if the painting’s primary purpose was commemorative, then surely both Rubens and Charles would have allowed the transfer to receive some degree of publicity, as had the king’s knighting of the painter. It would at least have been mentioned by Finet in his Notebooks, especially considering that a departure gift from a diplomat to the host ruler would have been highly exceptional. At the Caroline court, such farewell gifts were typically donated by the king and took into account the personal presents that diplomats usually gave at the start of their mission. As they served to ensure that he would not be left in a state of obligation, Charles I attached great importance to these ritual practices. ⁶⁹

Furthermore, contemporary sources indicate that Rubens, in March 1629, had made another painting to memorialize his visit to London. In the Landscape with St George and the Dragon (Figure 3), he portrayed Charles I as the saint who has just struck down the dragon. As this theme formed the centrepiece of the jewel of England’s premier order of chivalry, the Order of the Garter, to which the king attached great importance, he would have particularly appreciated the gesture. Interestingly, while Charles certainly knew of the painting and would probably even have seen it, Rubens never offered it to him. Instead, he sent it home to Antwerp, where Charles had it purchased a few years later by one of his courtiers. As such, in March 1629, the painting functioned not as a gift, but merely as a visual expression of Rubens’s gratitude towards Charles I. Furthermore, its message differs from the one conveyed by the Allegory of Peace but is compatible with the stage that the negotiations had reached by then. In the Landscape with St George and the Dragon, the king, having shown courage in defeating the dragon, is represented as a master at the height of his powers, about to offer the slain dragon and thereby peace to the princess, who is generally identified as Henrietta Maria, his Catholic consort. Rubens, in a way, used the painting to congratulate and glorify Charles I for making the right decision in the negotiations with Spain. ⁷⁰ OPEN IN VIEWER

In the Allegory of Peace, the king had yet to make this decision. This painting essentially functioned as a rhetorical instrument of persuasion and was donated to avert the crisis towards which the Anglo-Spanish peace process was heading in early December 1629. In political negotiations, as Anthony Colantuono has convincingly argued, gifts of allegorical paintings could effectively operate as mute diplomats, subtly communicating much more than the envoy was permitted to say. As noted earlier, in the courts of early seventeenth-century Europe, these sophisticated artworks were considered the siblings of contemporary poetry. They functioned in essentially the same way, providing rhetorically structured visual complements to verbal discourses. But they also enhanced the persuasiveness of the diplomat’s oration, by inciting the viewer ‘to certain avenues of thought and as visual devices to be stored in the loci of the memory, whence he or she might later … incorporate them in his or her discourse’. Analogical argumentation was considered most appropriate for this purpose. ⁷¹

As Lisa Rosenthal has demonstrated, in the Allegory of Peace the artist resorted to an analogy which occupied a central place in Charles I’s political philosophy. ⁷² This concerns the analogy between the king, as the father of his subjects, and the father, as the king of his family; in Charles’s philosophy this implied that acceptance of hierarchy within the family strengthened the power of kingship. In the spring of 1629 Charles I’s government without parliament had commenced. When Rubens presented him the Allegory of Peace at the end of the same year, the king was, more than ever before, actively propagating the image of himself as the father of his people. Rubens the painter adroitly responded. Rosenthal suggests that the Allegory’s central focus is fertility. By means of the mother figure nurturing her baby and the satyr offering fruits from a cornucopia to the other children, Rubens would have wished to make the analogy with the fruits of peace bringing life to the next generation. Thus the Mars figure, rather than being enraged, appears tormented and desirous of the intimacy of the mother–child relationship. But Minerva will not permit Mars, the god of war, to take part in the idyllic scene. The painting, as Rosenthal argues, thus makes a double appeal to Charles’s paternal sentiments. On the one hand, Rubens’s gift had to inspire the king to act like Minerva, goddess of wisdom (and of the art of painting), and thus to protect peace from the horrors of war. Reinforcing this message is the youngest girl in the picture, who, wearing contemporary dress, gazes imploringly from the canvas while holding a small cluster of grapes. On the other hand, by presenting the god of war as a father figure yearning for the familial intimacy between mother and child, Rubens combined in Mars ‘the longings of the benign father and the threats of the destructive one’. The appeal to Charles was that he would act resolutely in this conflict and replace the wavering Mars figure with his proper paternal authority so as to allow peace to flourish again. ⁷³

In creating his visual oration, Rubens actively manipulated and invented imagery. ⁷⁴ In this way, the artist associated himself with a Renaissance tradition of donating artworks to intellectual friends. As Michelangelo had theorized, a work of art could only be a true gift if it was given freely and exceeded the receiver’s every possible expectation. More importantly, the gift had to harbour a personalized message to the receiver. Such messages were intended to be understood only after special interpretation and thus could not slavishly follow emblematic conventions. ⁷⁵ Rubens’s gift to Charles I was surely not a token of friendship in its actual meaning (as a relationship between social equals), but was rather a symbolic action that could operate only within the culture of the European intellectual circle of collectors and connoisseurs to which Rubens and Charles belonged. ⁷⁶ Indeed, Rubens honoured Charles with the gift of a monumental painting, which, owing to its abundance of conventional and unconventional allegorical representations, appealed to, and thus recognized, the king’s aptitude as a connoisseur.

The effect his gift had on Charles’s demeanour corresponded perfectly to the painter’s expectations. In combination with the Infanta’s pacifying letters, it had a soothing effect on Charles I. When Coloma finally arrived, the king even accepted his credentials, even though they came from Isabella. ⁷⁷ Owing to the equality between the two crowns, the Spanish ambassador’s credentials should have come from King Philip IV in Madrid. However, this certainly did no harm to Spain’s reputation. Indeed, Rubens’s profession as a painter secured him a degree of access that served his Majesty very well. His gift operated in two ways. On the one hand, it was unthinkable that the painter would have gone to the king’s chambers to state his message verbally. The special quality of painting to speak without words, however, could smooth the way towards persuasion. On the other hand, the Allegory of Peace was a gift and as such obliged its receiver to return the favour, in this case not only to Rubens, who had painted the work, but equally to Philip IV, who had presented him with the painter.

After Rubens had left England, it would take several months before peace was agreed upon and the treaty signed. ⁷⁸ Nonetheless, while aboard a ship between Dover and Dunkirk in late March 1629, Rubens would have felt no small degree of joy. Not only had he been showered with precious gifts and even knighted by the English king, but in many ways Rubens the envoy had – to the puzzlement of many observers – been treated as a departing ambassador. ⁷⁹

Conclusion

The rewarding outcome of his journey to London spurred Rubens to continue his diplomatic activities in the service of the Infanta. In one of many attempts to end hostilities in the Netherlands, Isabella sent him in 1631 on a goodwill mission to the Dutch stadholder Frederik Hendrik, Prince of Orange, who at that time was avidly collecting and commissioning paintings produced by the finest artists. In this way, Frederik Hendrik would have wanted to enforce his dynastic ambitions on the international scene. ⁸⁰ Rubens’s mission to The Hague, however, failed miserably. A Venetian diplomat reported that while ‘Rubens announced at Brussels that he was going to arrange the truce’, Frederik Hendrik told him upon his arrival ‘that if he did not leave at once he would have him arrested as a prisoner of war’. ⁸¹ Rubens thus experienced first-hand that the Prince of Orange’s goal-oriented passion for the visual arts implied that he admired paintings before artists. More importantly, an elected official, the stadholder had to reckon with the States General, who would definitely have opposed the presence of a person so closely associated with Spanish diplomacy. In other words, what worked out well in London did not necessarily have the same effect in The Hague. Upon Rubens’s return, Amy Walsh has suggested, Isabella quickly came to realize this and sent Anthony Van Dyck to paint the portraits of Frederik Hendrik and his family, hoping to regain his favour ‘with the loan’ of a court painter whose diplomatic ambitions were less apparent. ⁸² Although Rubens tried on at least two more occasions to be sent as a diplomat to the Dutch Republic, he would never again cross the border. ⁸³ Nonetheless, in the letter that he wrote to a friend in 1634, he did not mention any of his dealings with The Hague, but merely stated that ‘there were still a few secret negotiations and state matters reserved for me, but these I was able to carry out with little inconvenience’. ⁸⁴

This article has reconsidered Rubens’s correspondence as well as other contemporary documents and focused not so much on the artist’s own perceptions of his diplomatic activities but rather on how his mission to London was regarded by the Spanish and English kings and by leading European courtiers and diplomats. I have sought to demonstrate that, in the Anglo-Spanish peace process, Rubens was as much a diplomatic gift as he was a diplomatic agent. Given the structure of diplomatic practice in an age when ideologies of power were, to a large extent, visually constructed, it was a case of Rubens being essentially the right man in the right place at the right time. Rubens, while involved as a diplomat in negotiations between two art-loving kings who actively deployed the visual arts in pursuing their policies, could use the fruits of his professional talents to help ensure the success of his commitment. Philip IV and his advisers astutely used their gift of Rubens to prompt and ultimately oblige Charles I to adopt a benevolent attitude in the settling of their differences. Surely, geopolitical and economic interests would have driven both kings towards an agreement eventually, but in an age of personal monarchy and informal diplomacy, sending a gift that would likely garner reciprocation ensured the giver a smoother route towards a profitable peace. The diplomatic culture of the early seventeenth century, which underscored the importance of painting as a means of communication and in which reciprocity was regarded as a fundamental mechanism, profoundly influenced the favourable outcomes of both Rubens’s and the Spanish court’s diplomatic strategies.

Recent historical literature on diplomatic gift exchange has demonstrated that gifts between rulers were generally about competing status and prestige in a friendly atmosphere. They could effectively communicate symbolic messages of political and cultural power. Princes used such gifts to boast about the wealth of their dynasties. Such wealth was surely easily visualized via valuable works of art or by exotic animals, yet to what degree did such gifts effectively oblige their recipients? If gift-giving in early modern diplomatic culture was indeed as important as recent historiography claims, we might expect royal givers and their advisors to have made more creative and compelling use of the possibilities offered by this diplomatic strategy. They would have known that sending diplomats to end a war inevitably incited adversarial rulers to assume a defensive attitude, even if these diplomats offered precious gifts to mark the goodwill of their sovereigns. One way to overcome such difficulties would have been to send a gift that possessed considerable diplomatic agency, or better yet, to send a diplomat wrapped as a gift.