Leseprobe

355 FIG. 4 Peter Paul Rubens, Minerva protects Pax fromMars (Allegory on the blessings of peace), 1629–1630, oil on canvas, h. 203.5 cm, w. 298 cm, London, National Gallery, inv. no. NG 46 Otto van Veen and became a master in the Antwerp Painters’ Guild in 1598. In 1600 he went to Italy, where he began his international career as a court painter in the service of Vincenzo I Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua. Returning to Antwerp at the end of 1608, he soon became the most prom- inent painter of his home city and the most sought-after painter in Europe. Rubens was forty years old when the events of 1618—the Prague Defenestration—caused the military con- flict that had broken out before his birth between the House of Habsburg and some Dutch princes to expand into a war that threatened the whole of Europe and whose impact was felt in the farthest corners of the inhabited world. Unlike other painters of his day, Rubens did not depict battles and acts of war in genre paintings.Whether portraying the patri- archs of the Old Testament or representing a cavalry battle, Rubens always followed models from antiquity or Renais- sance art. While his contemporaries such as Jan Snellinx, Sebastiaen Vrancx and Pieter Snayers9 referenced things they had themselves seen or experienced, Rubens always drew on artistic precedents. An eloquent example is his image of marauding soldiers raiding a farm (fig.3).10 Instead of representing this malevolent scourge on the rural popula- tion in the real context of contemporary everyday life,Rubens finds precedents for the Landsknecht mercenaries and their aggressive acts in German and Swiss Renaissance art. This