Flesh and Oil: The Trademark Techniques of Sir Peter Paul Rubens
This Baroque masterpiece epitomizes the artistic virtuosity for which Sir Peter Paul Rubens has long been celebrated. Painted in Antwerp around 1620 when the Flemish artist was at the height of his creative powers, Portrait of a Man as Mars blends the genres of portraiture, allegory, and mythology. Rubens depicts the armor-clad figure wearing an all’antica helmet once owned by the artist himself. Imbued with a magnetic virility, the man conveys the self-assurance of the classical deity Mars. His dynamic pose is inspired by Titian, whose work Rubens encountered during his stay in Italy at the outset of his career, but the composition’s originality and bravura brushwork are hallmarks of the northern master.
Set against a dark background and bathed in golden light shining from the right, the imposing figure, just over life-size, fills the composition. He holds a martial pike and wears a helmet, scarlet tunic, mail shirt, and cuirass, over which a lion’s pelt is draped. Raising his brawny forearm and turning back over his left shoulder, he confronts the viewer with a steadfast gaze. The powerful plasticity of his dynamic pose expresses pride and confidence. His features are rendered with physiognomic precision: his clear grey eyes, subtly curved nose, and bow-shaped lips are offset by tight chestnut curls, a sloping mustache, and a stubbled jawline. He possesses the physical presence of an individual, but conveys the heroism of a god. The intense physicality of the man’s muscularity coupled with his elaborate attire elevate him from the realm of the terrestrial to the divine.
Portrait of a Man as Mars showcases Rubens’s mastery of his medium. As though reveling in the manifold ways that he manipulates paint, Rubens differentiates the work’s varied textures with painterly finesse. Executed with great flair, the white plume’s individual brushstrokes appear light and feathery yet remain distinctly articulated. The smoothly rendered skin displays a warm chromaticism: the rich flesh tones suggest a fighting spirit coursing through the man’s veins. The hard metal of the armor has a cool sheen, accentuated by thick passages of wonderfully preserved impasto, where Rubens applied paint so richly that it both depicts the armor’s shiny glint and catches actual light reflecting on the work’s surface, thereby eliding the work’s fictive artifice and its painterly manufacture.
Rubens the Artist
The most influential and multifaceted Baroque artist working in northern Europe in the seventeenth century, Rubens (fig. 1) was widely celebrated during his lifetime. As the head of a large workshop of assistants and students, he oversaw the creation of tapestries, prints, book illustrations, and ephemeral civic decorations, in addition to paintings. Then as now, patrons and critics lauded his inventive compositions, striking color palettes, and brilliant handling of paint. Working over the course of several decades in royal courts and commercial centers throughout Europe, he produced religious works, mythological scenes, and modern and classical history paintings, as well as portraits for the period’s most influential and discerning patrons, among them Marie de’ Medici in France, Charles I in England, and Philip IV in Spain.

Erudite, entrepreneurial, and politically astute, Rubens was admired both for his artistic output and as a cultural polymath. From a respected Calvinist family that fled Antwerp amid religious and political turmoil, Rubens was born in 1577 in Siegen (today part of northwest Germany) and spent his childhood in Cologne. Following his father’s death during Rubens’s adolescence, the family returned to Antwerp, by then at peace and rapidly becoming a thriving commercial and cultural center once again. There the young Rubens obtained a premier classical education and began his artistic training. He studied with Tobias Verhaecht, Adam van Noort, and Otto van Veen, before joining Antwerp’s Guild of Saint Luke in 1598, when he became an independent master.
In May 1600, Rubens left Antwerp and traveled to southern Europe, where he immersed himself in Renaissance and Greco-Roman art and culture. This formative period, much of it spent in Mantua, Genoa, and Rome, with stays in Venice and Florence, sparked the painter’s creative imagination in countless ways and introduced him to early patrons.1 During his seven years in Italy and eight months on a diplomatic mission to Spain, Rubens built a visual corpus from which he would continuously draw over the course of the three subsequent decades of his illustrious career.

Rubens traveled first to Mantua, a humanist court city in eastern Lombardy, where he was exposed to works by the greatest exponents of the Venetian Renaissance, including Titian, whose indelible mark on the young Flemish artist is especially evident in Portrait of a Man as Mars. Titian’s influence can be gleaned in the rich coloration—particularly the deep, velvety reds—and loose brushwork, both of which would become defining characteristics of Rubens’s mature artistic style. Moreover, Rubens draws compositional inspiration from Titian’s series of paintings depicting eleven armor-clad Caesars, then installed in the Gabinetto dei Cesari, a room specially designed for the canvases in Mantua’s Ducal Palace.2 While Titian’s originals from the 1530s are no longer extant, Aegidius Sadeler II produced a series of engravings after the series. The prints reveal how essential Titian’s Titus Vespasian (fig. 2), in particular, was to Rubens’s conception of Portrait of a Man as Mars.

The half-length format and serpentine pose are Titianesque, but perhaps the more important lesson for Rubens was Titian’s conceit of updating a classical image by reinterpreting and, in a sense, revivifying antique prototypes. In the present work, Rubens breathes new life into Titian’s pictorial precedent by infusing it with a frank Northern realism, partially inspired by Lucas van Leyden’s 1520 engraving of Mars, Venus, and Cupid (fig. 3), thereby forging a modern interpretation of a classical hero.
During two periods in Rome, Rubens encountered the work of Raphael and Michelangelo, the great monuments of the classical past, and the most prestigious private collections of antique sculptures—those of the papacy as well as the Farnese, Borghese, Cesi, Savelli, Giustiniani, and Medici families. Hellenistic sculpture particularly captivated Rubens, and he studied such canonical works as the Belvedere Torso (fig. 4), Laocoön (fig. 5), and Farnese Hercules (fig. 6).3 Rubens ultimately internalized the heightened sense of musculature and pronounced physicality of these works and would populate his later paintings with cognate figural forms.
In 1608, after eight years absorbing the art of southern Europe, Rubens returned to Antwerp. Possessing new artistic dynamism and ambition, he was soon appointed court painter to Archduke Albert and his wife and consort Archduchess Isabella, who jointly governed the Spanish Southern Netherlands from Brussels. Inundated with commissions from Antwerp’s wealthy patrician merchants, Rubens produced some of the most thrilling paintings of his career thus far, including another work from the Fisch Davidson collection, Salome Presented with the Head of Saint John the Baptist, circa 1609, and two monumental triptychs The Raising of the Cross and The Descent from the Cross, both now in Antwerp’s Cathedral.4 His circle of patrons grew rapidly in the 1610s, when he began to receive commissions from an international clientele that included Maximilian I, Duke of Bavaria; James Hamilton, 1st Duke of Hamilton; and Philippe-Charles, 3rd Count of Arenberg.
Rubens the Antiquarian

As Portrait of a Man as Mars makes evident, Rubens’s interest in the antique never waned, even though he never returned to Italy. Well-versed in classical literature, philosophy, and art, Rubens declared himself a devoted admirer of the ancient painters Apelles and Timanthes, “Geniuses” whom he “followed with the profoundest veneration.”5 He penned an essay, De Imitatione Statuarum (On the Imitation of Statues) on classical art theory and had Tacitus’s Historiae read aloud as he worked. Rubens shared his antiquarian passion with his brother, Philip Rubens, a jurist and humanist whose book Electorum Libri II offered glosses on classical texts and included illustrations by Peter Paul (fig. 7).
In the years preceding the present work’s execution, Rubens’s enthusiasm for the antique seems to have been particularly strong. In 1616, he embarked on the Decius Mus tapestry commission (fig. 8), based on episodes from Livy’s History of Rome and focusing on the heroic Roman consul who ultimately sacrificed himself in battle to save Rome. In 1619, at nearly the same moment that Rubens executed Portrait of a Man as Mars, he also produced a bust-length painting of Julius Caesar (fig. 9), the painter’s contribution to a jointly-executed Caesars series for either Maurits, Prince of Orange, or his brother, Frederick Hendrik, Prince of Orange, in The Hague. That laurel-crowned figure similarly wears antique armor, but the present painting has a more dynamic composition and was executed with greater painterly verve.
Rubens the Collector

In addition to being an influential painter, Rubens was also a celebrated collector, a facet of his artistic personality equally indicative of his passion for the antique. His grand, Italianate house in Antwerp contained a “museum” as well as living quarters and a large studio (fig. 10).6 He owned several hundred paintings and over one hundred classical sculptures, but his approach to collecting was ecumenical and extended to drawings, works of decorative art, as well as antique gems, cameos, and coins.

Rubens’s acquisitive enthusiasm for classical portraiture reached its zenith just before he produced Portrait of a Man as Mars. Rubens had begun to collect in Italy, where he acquired several antiquities, including one of his prized possessions, a marble bust of Seneca (fig. 11). Between 1617 and 1618, the artist negotiated an exchange with Sir Dudley Carleton, the British ambassador to the States General at The Hague: the painter received over ninety antique sculptures, including eighteen imperial portrait busts, in return for eight of his own paintings and several tapestries.7 Rubens even constructed a domed semicircular room, intentionally evocative of the Pantheon in Rome, to display the Greco-Roman statues. This part of his collection would develop into one of the largest and most important in the Low Countries.

While collecting was a popular pastime enjoyed by Antwerp’s elite, Rubens’s pursuit was intimately intertwined with his own artistic activities. He frequently drew inspiration from objects in his collection, an aspect of his working practice encapsulated in Portrait of a Man as Mars. Rubens owned a significant number of works by Titian—at Rubens’s death in 1640, his collection included ten such paintings as well as over thirty paintings by Rubens himself after Titian. These included some of the latter’s most celebrated portraits, his depiction of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V clad in armor, among them (fig. 12).
The all’antica Helmet
Among Rubens’s possessions was the elaborate helmet worn by the man in the present painting. Although the artist believed the helmet to be antique, it was actually an antique-inspired sixteenth-century parade burgonet, a type designed for splendid visual impact rather than practicality. Fashioned in the shape of a dolphin’s head, the burgonet was almost certainly produced by the Milanese master armorer Filippo Negroli (circa 1510-1579). Regardless, Rubens valued the object highly, even sending a drawing (likely produced by a member of his workshop and then retouched by the master) of “the ancient helmet, in the same size as the original,” (fig. 13) to the passionate antiquarian and scholar from Aix-en-Provence, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, with whom Rubens intended to produce a pioneering book on antique gems and cameos.8 Recognizing the helmet’s high level of craftsmanship, Rubens inscribed the drawing: “The design and carving of this helmet are the most beautiful and done in a singular style indicating that it must have been made in Imperial Rome.”9 Fabricated using a single piece of iron, the object was as much a demonstration of the armorer’s technical mastery as the painterly showpiece in which Rubens included it.
Peiresc shared Rubens’s enthusiasm for the helmet, which both believed had originally been gilded. In a letter to Pierre Dupuy, the Keeper of the King’s Library, Peiresc characterized the piece of armor as “a fully complete antique helmet that had once been gilded and one of the most beautiful and elaborate pieces that survives from antiquity.” He added, “it must be extremely rare, because on all of my travels, I have never seen another like it.”10 Peiresc shared Rubens’s drawing of the helmet (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France) with Jacob Spon, who included an engraved illustration of it in his 1685 Miscellanea eruditae antiquitatis (fig. 14). Accompanying a discussion of military costumes, the piece was described as a “gilt steel” antique helmet “formerly preserved by the celebrated painter and antiquarian Peter Paul Rubens in his Museum and was drawn by him for Peiresc from whose sketches it is reproduced here.”11 The helmet’s two graphic renderings make clear its intricate design: the helmet’s brim serves as the dolphin’s rippling snout, behind which are the marine creature’s wide-set eyes. The bowl is embellished with scales and arabesque acanthus leaves and hinged cheek pieces act as large fins.12 Negroli specialized in such imaginative showpieces and fashioned a similarly anthropomorphic helmet for Guidobaldo II della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, suggesting that Rubens’s helmet may have been created for an equally important patron.13
Rubens later included the helmet—in a more perfunctory manner—in two works produced in the mid-1630s. In Road to Calvary the helmet is worn by a soldier in the right foreground, while in Finding of the Pagan Treasures and Judas Maccabaeus’s Prayer for the Dead it can be spotted in the upper right.14 Other Netherlandish artists were apparently also familiar with and inspired by the object. It appears in several paintings executed in Amsterdam between 1619 and the mid-1650s, which suggests that either the helmet itself, or (more probably) a drawing after it was circulating in artistic circles.15 Jacob Adriaensz. Backer situates the overturned helmet beneath the foot of Bellona in Allegory of the Republic of Holland, perhaps the most intriguing inclusion of the object.16
Portrait or Allegory?
As yet, the sitter’s identity remains unknown, an aspect of the painting perhaps compounded by its inventive iconography.17 While the cuirass, pike, and helmet associate the man with Mars, at no other time in Rubens’s career did he depict the Roman god of war isolated in a composition. Typically, Rubens situates Mars within a narrative context, either alongside his pacifying lover, Venus, or in the throes of battle. Moreover, Mars is almost never shown wearing a lion’s pelt, an attribute normally associated with Hercules, who slayed the Nemean lion as his first labor. Herculean figures in Rubens’s oeuvre, however, are largely nude wild men who wield wooden clubs and eschew armor. The painting’s historical nomenclature underscores this iconographic ambiguity: the painting was first identified as a depiction of Mars only in 1927. One may speculate that the peculiarity could derive from a special request from the painting’s original patron, perhaps a man named Herakles (or Ercole).

Allegorical portraits, in which living people are depicted in mythological, historical, or literary guises, are exceedingly rare in Rubens’s oeuvre. Portrait of a Man as Mars is the sole example of a standalone portrait historié, or “historiated portrait.” On only one other occasion did Rubens employ this multilayered form of representation: in the twenty-four magnificent canvases glorifying Marie de’ Medici, the Queen Mother of France, and her deceased husband, Henry IV. In Henri IV Receives the Portrait of Marie de’ Medici (fig. 15), for example, the two protagonists appear in the painting’s upper register as Jupiter and Juno, French royals who have ascended to Olympian heights. Similarly, in Portrait of a Man as Mars, the sitter is at once himself and as the Roman deity, an emblem of valor and heroism, a slippage that enables Rubens to elevate the individual to the realm of the epic.
This type of historiated, or “disguised” portrait in certain ways anticipates Rembrandt’s production of tronies in Amsterdam a decade later.18 Such character studies, in which figures wearing elaborate costumes adopted more expressive poses than permissible in traditional portraits, similarly fused the individual and the universal. For Rubens and Rembrandt alike, working in these liminal genres afforded a creative freedom that allowed for expanded forms of artistic experimentation. Indeed, both took their cue from Titian, the artist whom each admired above all others.
The painting’s hybrid nature, eliding the genres of allegory, mythology, and portrait, is virtually unique in Rubens’s oeuvre. Defying simple art historical categorization, the work will therefore be included in a future Addenda volume of the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard.19
Critical History and Dating
From the earliest mentions of Portrait of a Man as Mars in the early nineteenth century, the painting’s attribution to Rubens has remained consistent. Debate continues, however, over the work’s dating, a topic of discussion that began following the painting’s arrival in the United States in 1929, when it entered the collection of Samuel H. Kress. As was typical of the collector, soon after purchasing the work, he solicited opinions from a group of eminent art historians—including Max Friedländer, Giuseppe Fiocco, Raimond van Marle, Frederick Mason Perkins, William Suida, and Adolfo Venturi—about his new acquisition. Ludwig Burchard, the leading Rubens scholar in the first half of the twentieth century, wrote to Kress that the painting was “an important, especially careful and fully authentic work of Peter Paul Rubens from the years 1620 to 1625. The preservation is faultless and the painting has a freshness, as can be found in the 17th Century, only in Rubens.”20 Burchard would later revise his dating of the work, proposing a date of creation between 1615 and 1618, with which Erik Larsen and Michael Jaffé both concurred. Max Friedländer and Wilhelm Valentiner dated Portrait of a Man as Mars to about 1620, while Colin Eisler, Peter Sutton, and David Freedberg thought it was executed sometime between 1620 and 1625. Following a proposal by Walter Liedtke in the 1990s, Jeremy Wood has more recently suggested that the painting dates to 1628, based on a reinterpretation of the word “recouvré” in the letter Peiresc sent to Pierre Dupuy on 18 December 1628.21 According to Wood, Rubens purchased the helmet worn by the sitter in that year. However, based on the style of Portrait of a Man as Mars, the work likely dates to the period between 1619, following on the heels of the Decimus Mus cycle, and 1622, when Rubens’s left Antwerp for France to embark on the Marie de’ Medici cycle.22
Rubens’s Legacy
Fascination with Rubens has persisted from his own time to our own. Few of his contemporaries remained unaffected by his influence, and Rubens’s monumental Baroque style would shape artistic production in Northern Europe for the duration of the seventeenth century. Successive artists—as varied as Antoine Watteau, François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Joshua Reynolds, John Constable, Théodore Géricault, and Eugène Delacroix—have found in Rubens a font of artistic inspiration. Indeed, Giorgio de Chirico (fig. 16) even produced a self-portrait directly inspired by Portrait of a Man as Mars, which he likely encountered when in New York between August 1936 and December 1937.

History of Ownership
The earliest trace of Rubens’s Portrait of a Man as Mars is in the collection of the painter and engraver Louis-Bernard Coclers, who offered the work in his sale on 7 August 1811 in Amsterdam. The painting, lot 68, was described as “A Warrior dressed in Roman style, wearing a helmet decorated with a white feather, holding a pike in his left hand, his shoulders covered with a lion’s skin that falls over his breastplate. This painting bears the stamp of the best period of this skilled colorist.”23 The dimensions listed in the catalogue—“Height 33, length 26”—correspond exactly with those of the present painting.24 How and when Coclers acquired the work remains unknown, but following Holland’s invasion by the Prussian army, in 1787 he relocated to Paris, where he began working as a dealer. By 1802 he had returned to Amsterdam, but he continued to conduct business between the two cities over the next two decades.

The painting next appears on the market in the posthumous sale of Gerrit Muller’s collection on 2 April 1827, held at his residence in Amsterdam. The work, lot 58, was described as “A Roman Warrior, dressed in armor, wearing a lion’s skin and a helmet, holding a spear in his left hand. Excellent in color and powerful in painting, and from the master’s best period.”25 As in the case of Coclers, it is not known when and how Gerrit Muller acquired the work. An amateur landscape painter and an active member of Amsterdam’s art world (fig. 17)—he was a member of the Felix Meritis intellectual society and the Zonder Wet of Spreuk drawing society, as well as on the Royal Academy of Art’s board of Directors—he was also a prominent collector. The eighty-eight paintings included in his posthumous sale comprised almost equal numbers of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch pictures, a smaller number of Flemish works, and a handful of paintings by living artists.26
At Muller’s sale, Portrait of a Man as Mars was purchased for 1550 florins by “Nieuwenhuys,” almost certainly C.J. Nieuwenhuys.27 Though sometimes identified as a collector, Nieuwenhuys was an active dealer, who, with his father and brother, operated a thriving business between Brussels, Paris, and London. They acted as the main advisors to William II of the Netherlands and served as his primary purveyors of paintings. A brochure published by the Duveen Brothers later described C.J. Nieuwenhuys as “one of the leading authorities on Dutch and Flemish art,” noting that “it was to him that many of the great English and foreign collections owed either their origin or many of their choicest treasures.”28
C.J. Nieuwenhuys probably brought Portrait of a Man as Mars to London, where in September 1826 he settled at 14 Argyll Street. Four years later, the dealer John Smith, in his catalogue raisonné of Rubens’s work, listed the painting in the collection of Edward Gray. From a Quaker family of vintners and merchants in spirits, Gray was a partner in the law firm Gray, Whitworth & Gilbee of Leadenhall Street. He possessed “one of the finest small collections of pictures, which is in this country,” including celebrated works including Rembrandt’s Portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels (London, National Gallery, inv. no. NG6432).29 Gray’s collection, predominantly of Dutch and Flemish pictures, hung at Harringay House, Hornsey, which he had built in 1792.30 Its extensive gardens and vast steam-heated greenhouses housed a renowned assemblage of plants, including a celebrated specimen of Magnolia Grandiflora. After Gray’s death Harringay House and its contents were sold at auction, but the collection of 134 paintings was acquired en bloc in February 1839 for £15,000 by the “Merchant Prince” and collector James Morrison, working in partnership with William Buchanan. A Scottish lawyer turned art dealer, Buchanan had supplied Gray with many of his paintings, including the Rembrandt, and a number of Dutch works from the Talleyrand collection.31
By 1854, Rubens’s Portrait of a Man as Mars had entered the collection of the banking scion Sir Anthony de Rothschild (fig. 18) in London, where the art historian Gustav Waagen, possibly some years earlier, had seen the work. Waagen described it as “of masterly execution, and with a tone of colour approaching the glow of Rembrandt.” (He believed he had a basis for comparison close at hand, because two works then considered to be by Rembrandt also hung in Sir Anthony’s drawing room.32) Waagen listed a small collection of choice paintings—mainly Dutch and Flemish works, as well as two paintings by Greuze—and observed, “the pictures are most favourably hung upon a rich red and gold paper.” The second son of Baron Nathan Mayer de Rothschild, Sir Anthony had no male heirs, so upon his death in 1876, the baronetcy passed to his nephew, also named Nathan Mayer de Rothschild. However, Sir Anthony’s collection of paintings, including Rubens’s Portrait of a Man as Mars, was inherited by his younger daughter, Annie Henriette (fig. 19), who in 1873 had married the Honourable Eliot Constantine Yorke, fourth son of the Fourth Earl of Hardwicke. While some of her collection was housed at Hamble Cliff, Netley, in Hampshire, the Rubens was among the paintings hanging at her London residence at 17 Curzon Street, Mayfair. Upon Annie’s death as a widow in 1926, the present painting passed to her eldest sister, Constance, Lady Battersea, who along with Lady Mallet and the Countess of Hardwicke, were designated as the co-consignors of thirty-eight paintings and drawings in Annie’s collection to the Christie’s sale on 6 May 1927.

There, the work was acquired by the London dealer Ayerst Hooker Buttery for £1995. By 1929, Portrait of a Man as Mars had been purchased (very likely directly from Buttery) by Count Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, most probably acting on behalf of Samuel H. Kress (fig. 20).33
In 1929, Rubens’s Portrait of a Man as Mars crossed the Atlantic and entered the collection of Samuel H. Kress. The founder of the S.H. Kress five-and-dime chain, Kress amassed an extraordinary collection of Old Master paintings. As a Founding Benefactor of the National Gallery of Art, Kress donated almost 500 works to the nascent museum, including Giotto’s Madonna and Child (fig. 21), Raphael’s Portrait of Bindo Altoviti (fig. 22), and Giorgione’s Adoration of the Shepherds (fig. 23).34 And during “The Great Kress Giveaway,” ninety institutions, located from New York to Honolulu, received gifts of art.35 Unusually, the present painting remained in the family’s possession for almost sixty years, hanging in the Library of their palatial apartment at 1020 Fifth Avenue.
Thereafter, Portrait of a Man as Mars has remained almost entirely in American private collections, for most of the time in New York City. In 1988, it was acquired by David Paul, Florida, who sold the work the next year. The painting was subsequently sold at Sotheby’s, New York, in January 2000, when it was acquired by a private collector in California, who in turn sold it at Sotheby’s, London, in July 2002. Later that year Portrait of a Man as Mars entered the Fisch Davidson collection. With an illustrious provenance that can be traced virtually unbroken for nearly two centuries, Portrait of a Man as Mars almost certainly represents one of the last works by Rubens of this caliber to remain in private hands. Moreover, as the only standalone allegorical portrait Rubens produced, the painting occupies a singular and unique place in the art historical canon.
We are most grateful to Professors Nils Büttner and Elizabeth McGrath for generously sharing their insights on this painting. We would also like to thank David A. Jaffe, Dr. Bert Watteeuw, and Ben van Beneden for their invaluable assistance.
1 While in Italy, Rubens received important early commissions from Vincenzo I Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua, members of the Genoese nobility and Roman patriciate, and the Catholic Church’s major orders. In Spain, the artist worked for Philip III’s minister, the Duke of Lerma.
2 The paintings had been commissioned by Federico II, Duke of Mantua, the grandfather of Rubens’s own patron. Rubens clearly knew the works intimately, and it was perhaps at his urging that Charles I purchased them in 1628, before their acquisition in 1651 by Philip IV, King of Spain. The series was destroyed in a December 1734 fire at the Royal Alcazar, Madrid.
3 Rome, Vatican, Museo Pio-Clementino, inv. no. MV.1192.0.0; Rome, Vatican, Museo Pio-Clementino, inv. no. MV.1059.0.0; Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, inv. no. 6001.
4 Salome Presented with the Head of Saint John the Baptist sold at Sotheby’s, New York, on 26 January 2023 for $26,926,000.
5 Peter Paul Rubens to Francis Junius, 1 August 1637. “Genio…quos ego veneratione summa prosequor.”
6 Though not open to the public in the modern sense of a museum, Rubens would frequently entertain visiting dignitaries in this space, which was designed to house his art collection. It is now open to the public as the Rubenshuis (although currently closed for renovation).
7 In 1626, Rubens sold most of his antique sculptures to the Duke of Buckingham.
8 Peter Paul Rubens to Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, 16 March 1636. “vanno qui annessi gli disegni della celata antica di pari grandezza al originale.” For a discussion of both the helmet and the drawing, see Wood 2011, vol. I, p. 400, under cat. no. 247.
9 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Dupuy 667, fol. 159r. “Il disegno e caelatura di questa Galea sono bellissimi et di singolar arteficio de maniera che deve esser fatto admodum florente Imperio Romano.”
10 Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc to Pierre Dupuy, 19 December 1628. “un heaulme antique tout entire qui avoit esté autres foys doré, qui estoit l’une des plus belles pieces qui soient demeurés de l’antiquité et des mieux élabourées. Bien est elle grandement rare, car en tous mes voyages, je ne’en ay jamais veu aulcun.”
11 J. Spon, Miscellanea eruditae antiquitates (Lyon 1685), p. 254. “Ecce duas Cassides antiquas, quarum priorem ferream deauratam possidebat olim in Museo suo Petrus Paulus Rubens Antiquarius & Pictor celeberrimus, & ipsemet à se delineatam ad Perieskium misit, ex cujus schedis nunc depromimus.”
12 While Rubens depicts the helmet with great accuracy, the breastplate is a hybrid of armorial types and likely an imagined creation on the part of the artist.
13 Saint Petersburg, The State Hermitage Museum, inv. no. 3.O-6159.
14 Brussels, Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts, inv. no. 374 ; Nantes, Musée d’Arts, inv. no. D.804.1.1.P.
15 Pieter Lastman includes the plumed helmet before the kneeling figure of Uriah in David Gives Uriah a Letter for Joab (New York, The Leiden Collection, inv. no. PL-100), dated 1619. The helmet also appears in the foreground of Bartholomeus Breenbergh’s Resurrection (Chicago, Art Institute, inv. no. 1967.596), from circa 1635. And the object appears in two works from the mid-1560s: Ferdinand Bol’s oil sketch for The Intrepidity of Gaius Fabritius in the Camp of King Pyrrhus (Amsterdam, Historisch Museum, inv. no. SA35807) and Govaert Flinck’s Incorruptible Consul Marcus Curius Dentatus (Amsterdam, Royal Palace) dated 1656, in both of which it is worn by fully armored soldiers. A different grotesque helmet is depicted by Frans Floris in Feast of Sea Gods (Stockholm, Nationalmuseum, inv. no. NMGrh 2922).
16 Berlin, Jagdschloss Grunewald, inv. no. GK I 3073.
17 Ludwig Burchard’s suggestion that “the sitter—who is not known, but may have been a fellow artist” does not seem likely.
18 Julius S. Held considered the present painting a “disguised portrait.”
19 We are grateful to Professors Elizabeth McGrath and Nils Büttner for this explanation.
20 Ludwig Burchard, 23 May 1934, Kress Collection Digital Archive. “halte ich für eine bedentende, besonders-sorgfältige und völlig eigenhändige Arbeit von Peter Paul Rubens….Die Erhaltung iest badellos und die Malerie von einer Erische, wie sie um 17. Jahrhundert nur bei Rubens anszutreffen ist.” Burchard also explicitly refuted a spurious attribution to Gaspar de Crayer proposed in 1928 by Alan Burroughs, the only person to question Rubens’s authorship. “Es einem anderen Meister als Rubens zuschrieben zu wollen, ist ein Ding der Unmöglichkeit, die Attribution an Gaspar de Crayer indiscutabel.” (“To ascribe it to any other master than Rubens, is an impossible thing, the attribution to Gaspar de Crayer is not worthy of discussion.”) When Julius S. Held included Portrait of a Man as Mars in his 1947 exhibition, he similarly refuted Burroughs, writing an attribution to de Crayer “is not convincing.”
21 Peiresc relays the contents of a letter Rubens wrote him on 24 August 1628, which, unfortunately is lost.
22 We are grateful to Nils Büttner for endorsing this dating.
23 “Un Guerrier vêtu à la Romaine, coiffé d’un casque orné d’un plumet blanc, tenant une pique de la main gauche, ses épaules sont couvertes d’un peau de lion que tombe par dessus sa cuirasse. Ce tableau porte le cachet du Meilleur temps de cet habile coloriste.”
24 The dimensions are listed in French “pouce,” which are slightly larger than American inches. And, indeed, the work’s unframed dimensions are 33 5/8 by 26 ¾ inches.
25 “Een Romeinisch Krijgsman, in het harnas gekleed, met een leeuwenhuid omhangen en met een helm gedekt, een speer in de linker hand houdende. Uitmuntend van kleur en krachtig van schildering, en van den besten tijd van den meester.”
26 Works once owned by Muller are now in the collections of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; the Mauritshuis, The Hague; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; among other public institutions.
27 Called variously Chrétien-Jean, Christianus Johannes, and Christian Johannes Nieuwenhuys.
28 “Charles J. Nieuwenhuys,” National Gallery of Art.
29 W. Buchanan, Memoirs of Painting, London 1824, vol. I, p. 114.
30 Gray sued a disreputable Bond Street dealer called Gwenapp in 1817 and won the then vast sum of £10,000 in damages.
31 Subsequent to the purchase of the Gray collection, James Morrison kept the Rembrandt at Basildon Park, Berkshire.
32 Neither work is today considered to be by Rembrandt. What was then considered a self-portrait is now understood to be a portrait of Rembrandt painted circa 1650 by a member of Rembrandt’s workshop (Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art, inv. no. 1942.9.70). The painting of several children, one of whom rides a goat, chaperoned by a nurse (probably acquired by Sir Anthony at C.J. Nieuwenhuys’s 1833 London sale) is now recognized as a work of circa 1653 by Rembrandt’s pupil, Nicolaes Maes (private collection).
33 Buttery supplied the Italian dealer with at least one other painting in these years that entered Kress’s collection: Benvenuto Tisi, called Garofalo, Madonna and Child in Glory (Coral Gables, Florida, University of Miami, Lowe Art Museum, inv. no. 61.007.000).
34 Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art, inv. nos. 1939.1.256, 1943.4.33, 1939.1.289.
35 Life Magazine, November 1953, p. 148.