The extent of Rubens’s influence on 17th-century Antwerp is difficult to grasp without the visual representation at Rubenshuis. After a tour of the master’s home, I realized that much of the city looks like it! Rubens did design and collaborate on architecture, but his home, mostly designed by him to reflect his love of everything Roman, must have generated much interest in Italian Renaissance style. The residence on Wapper is where Rubens, as diplomat and mentor of artists, received important people.
The painter was rich and a man of his times, and so surrounded himself with artistic treasures attesting to the triumph of the human mind and spirit: busts of Seneca and other real persons, inscribed citations of the poet Juvenal, a collection of books, and others’ paintings of Flemish personages. But these testimonials to human greatness share spaces with gods and satyrs, revealing that 17th-century humanism was incomplete.
A visit is worthwhile even for one collection: statuary. Rubens owned over 90 pieces! Figures top the arched entrance to the courtyard and grace the garden pavilion, where Bacchus, Venus, and other gods of plenty oversee the harvest of fruit trees and grapevines. Inside, the statuary museum is a rotunda room Rubens patterned after the Roman Pantheon. Outside, insets in stone walls provide more displays. Information on many individual pieces are numbered on the audio tour, which is free with the entrance fee.
Every room is decorated with oils on canvas: in the dining room, Self-portrait of Rubens as diplomat; in the painter’s studio, the larger masterpieces, The Annunciation and Adam and Eve. The Gallery and rooms display works by others: Jan Brueghel’s Archdukes Albrecht in the park, van Leyden’s Christmas Night, and Jacob Jordaens’s Presentation in the Temple. We stopped a while in front of these and still finished the house in 1.5 hours.
Aside from the collections, the furniture is notable, though nothing but one chair belonged to Rubens. We were assured by guides (present to answer questions) that the furniture was similar to what Rubens owned, but were still struck by how much of history becomes uncertain so quickly. Antwerp in the painter’s day was famous for producing fine cabinetry, and many samples here are exquisite baroque presentations with inlaid ivory and gilt trimmings. Satisfied that the reconstructed scene was true to the master’s original surroundings, we envisioned him on the balcony over his studio, perhaps calling out some instruction to an understudy. If this were not true enough, we saw proof of his influence--balustraded balconies, rotunda roofs, inset statuary, and columned porticos--repeated throughout the old city center.