Van Dyck between Master and Model

Abstract

Anthony van Dyck's early paintings of Saint Sebastian allowed the painter to propose an analogy between the martyrdom of the saint and the practice of posing models in the studio. He used disguised self-portraiture to identify not with the artist but, rather, with the model. On the one hand, Van Dyck's Sebastian paintings declare the young painter's commitment to life study. On the other, his self-depiction as both martyr and model allowed him to allegorize his specific position within the studio of Peter Paul Rubens.

Notes

1. On the Sebastian series, see especially Gustav Glück, “Van Dycks Anfänge: Der heilige Sebastian im Louvre zu Paris,” in Rubens, Van Dyck, und ihr Kreis (Vienna: Anton Schroll, 1933), 275–88; Colin Thompson, Van Dyck: Variations on the Theme of St. Sebastian (Edinburgh: National Gallery of Scotland, 1975); and John Rupert Martin, “Van Dyck's Early Paintings of St. Sebastian,” in Art, the Ape of Nature: Studies in Honor of H. W. Janson, ed. Moshe Barasch and Lucy Freeman Sandler (New York: Harry N. Abrams; Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1981), 393–400.

2. For an overview of Saint Sebastian's cult and iconography, see Karim Ressouni-Demigneaux, “The ‘Imaginary’ Life of Saint Sebastian,” in The Agony and the Ecstasy: Guido Reni's Saint Sebastians, ed. Piero Boccardo and Xavier F. Salomon (London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2008), 17–32.

3. Thompson, Van Dyck: Variations on the Theme of St. Sebastian, 2.

4. Martin, “Van Dyck's Early Paintings,” 399.

5. For excellent overviews of the sources for—and current knowledge of—Rubens's studio, see Arnout Balis, “‘Fatto da un mio discepolo’: Rubens's Studio Practices Reviewed,” in Rubens and His Workshop: The Flight of Lot and His Family from Sodom, ed. Toshiharu Nakamura (Tokyo: National Museum of Western Art, 1994), 97–128; and idem, “Rubens and His Studio: Defining the Problem,” in Rubens: A Genius at Work (Brussels: Royal Museums of Fine Arts, 2008), 30–51.

6. Max Rooses and Charles Ruelens, Correspondance de Rubens et documents épistolaires concernant sa vie et ses oeuvres (Antwerp: Jos. Maes, 1898), vol. 2, 35: “ …  sommighe voor etlycke jaren by ander meesters haer onderhouden om myn commoditeyt te verwachten. . . .  Voorts mach ic segghen met der waerheyt sonder eenich hyperbole dat ic over die hondert hebbe moeten refuseren.” English translation in Ruth Saunders Magurn, ed. and trans., The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), 55 (translation modified).

7. For an overview of the current state of knowledge about Van Dyck's early career, see Friso Lammertse and Alejandro Vergara, “A Portrait of Van Dyck as a Young Artist,” in The Young Van Dyck, ed. Lammertse and Vergara (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2012), 23–74. I am grateful to the curators of this exhibition for including me in a study day at which I was able to present my preliminary research on the painting of the youth in Dublin.

8. The five autograph versions, as well as a number of copies, are listed in Susan J. Barnes et al., Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), cat. nos. I.44, I.47, I.48, II.17, II.18. Martin, “Van Dyck's Early Paintings,” describes the three variations.

9. For the literature on the painting, see Barnes et al., Van Dyck, 62, cat. no. I.46. I am grateful to Adriaan Waiboer and Victor Laing of the National Gallery of Ireland for making it possible for me to examine the painting in person.

10. Giovan Pietro Bellori, The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects: A New Translation and Critical Edition, trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl, ed. Hellmut Wohl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 179: “Moving to Rome, [Caravaggio] lived there without fixed lodgings and without provisions, for models, without which he did not know how to paint, proved too costly for him, and he was not earning enough to cover his expenses.” Ibid., 218 (emphasis added): “[Van Dyck] rivaled the magnificence of Parrhasius, keeping servants, carriages, horses, players, musicians, and jesters, and with these entertainments he played host to all the great personages, knights and ladies, who came daily to have their portraits painted at his house. Moreover, when they stayed on, he would provide the most sumptuous repasts for them at his table, at a cost of thirty scudi a day; this will seem incredible to anyone accustomed to our Italian frugality but not to those familiar with foreign countries, considering how many people he fed. For in addition to those mentioned, he kept men and women to serve as models for the portraits of lords and ladies when, after achieving the likeness of the face, he would then complete the rest from live models.”

11. For Rubens's interest in Caravaggio, see Jeremy Wood, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard XXVI: Copies and Adaptations from Renaissance and Later Artists, vol. 1, Italian Artists: Raphael and His School (London: Harvey Miller, 2010), 113–20.

12. Bellori, The Lives, 205.

13. Anne-Marie Logan, “Peter Paul Rubens as a Draftsman,” in Peter Paul Rubens: The Drawings, ed. Logan and Michiel C. Plomp (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004), 3–36.

14. On the workings of Floris's studio, see Carl van de Velde, Frans Floris (1519/20–1570): Leven en werken (Brussels: Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, 1975), 99–119.

15. Karel van Mander: The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters. . . . , ed. and trans. Hessel Miedema (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1994), vol. 1, 242v: “Brenght daer te pas sulcke en sulcke tronien: want hy daer een goet deel op Penneelen altÿt by hem hadde.”

16. Van de Velde, Frans Floris, 65–78.

17. On the use of the head study in Rubens's studio, see especially Justus Müller Hofstede, “Zur Kopfstudie im Werk von Rubens,” Wallraf-Richartz Jahrbuch 30 (1968): 223–52; Julius S. Held, “Einige Bemerkungen zum Problem der Kopfstudie in der flämischen Malerei,” Wallraf-Richartz Jahrbuch 32 (1970): 285–90; and idem, The Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens: A Critical Catalogue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), vol. 1, 597–614.

18. J. Denucé, ed., De Antwerpsche “Konstkamers”: Inventarissen van kunstverzamelingen te Antwerpen in de 16e en 17e eeuwen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1932), 70: “Een menigte van tronien of koppen naer t’leven, op doek en pineel, zoo door Mijn heer Rubens als door Mijn heer van Dyck.”

19. Held, The Oil Sketches, 597.

20. Max Rooses and Charles Ruelens, eds., Correspondance de Rubens et documents épistolaires concernant sa vie et ses oeuvres (Antwerp: J.-E. Buschmann, 1909), vol. 6, 22; English translation in Magurn, The Letters, 410.

21. This testimony was first transcribed and published in M. L. Galesloot, Un procès pour une vente de tableaux attribués à Antoine Van Dyck (Brussels: Librairie C. Muquardt, 1868).

22. The crux of the debate regarding the Dom van Ceulen and the apostle portraits is whether the paintings should be dated to the very beginning of Van Dyck's career, about 1615–16, or just before his departure for Italy in 1621, and whether the testimony of the 1660–62 trial is reliable evidence for their dating. Margaret Roland, building on the work of Gustav Glück, made a convincing argument for the later date (Roland, “Van Dyck's Early Workshop, the Apostle Series, and the Drunken Silenus,” Art Bulletin 66, no. 2 [June 1984]: 211–33), but this argument was subsequently undermined by the archival discoveries of Katlijne Van der Stighelen (Van der Stighelen, “Young Anthony: Archival Discoveries Relating to Van Dyck's Early Career,” in Van Dyck 350, ed. Susan J. Barnes and Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. [Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1994], 17–48). I support the view of Nora De Poorter (in Barnes et al., Van Dyck, 67–70) that, “On the evidence of the extant panels and the testimony of 1660–1, it seems an oversimplification to assume that clearly distinguishable series were produced one after the other. My impression is that Van Dyck painted apostle figures from life over a number of years, perhaps 1618 to 1620. These served as models for his history pieces as well as the apostles being prototypes that could be replicated either by himself or his assistants.”

23. Barnes et al., Van Dyck, 67.

24. On the influence of Flemish tronies on the Leiden painters, see Dagmar Hirschfelder, Tronie und Porträt in der niederländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2008), 55–71; and Franziska Gottwald, Das Tronie: Muster, Studie und Meisterwerk (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2011), 93–102.

25. Galesloot, Un procès, 39: “hem gesien hebbende schilderen aen eenen apostel die geschildert was naer Peeter de Jode saliger mynen oom waer oppe hij attestant seyde wie maeckt ghij daer, waerop de voorseyde van Dyck antwoordde ick sal der wel eenen frayen apostel afmaecken.”

26. Caroline Joubert, Alexis Merle du Bourg, and Nico Van Hout, eds., Jacob Jordaens et son modèle Abraham Grapheus (Caen: Musée des Beaux-Arts, 2012); and idem, Abraham Grapheus: Model van Jacob Jordaens (Ghent: Museum voor Schone Kunsten, 2012).

27. Barnes et al., Van Dyck, 72, cat. no. I.55.

28. Ibid., 78, cat. no. I.73

29. Ibid., 47, cat. no. I.31; for the painting's provenance, see Jeffrey M. Muller, Rubens: The Artist as Collector (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 135.

30. Barnes et al., Van Dyck, 44, cat. no. I.28 (Descent of the Holy Spirit); and ibid., 83, cat. no. I.83 (Silenus).

31. Van Dyck: A Loan Exhibition of Pictures and Sketches (London: Thos. Agnew and Sons, 1968), 12.

32. For the birthdates of these three men, see Barnes et al., Van Dyck, 16.

33. Rudie van Leeuwen, “The Portrait Historié in Religious Context and Its Condemnation,” in Pokerfaced: Flemish and Dutch Baroque Faces Unveiled, ed. Katlijne Van der Stighelen, Hannelore Magnus, and Bert Watteeuw (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 109–24; on the tradition of disguised portraits in Antwerp devotional painting, see also Koenraad Jonckheere, Antwerp Art after Iconoclasm: Experiments in Decorum, 1566–1585 (Brussels: Mercator, 2012), 128–67.

34. Anne Summerscale, trans. and ed., Malvasia's Life of the Carracci: Commentary and Translation (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 294.

35. Bellori, The Lives, 180. For a discussion of the social status of Caravaggio's models, see Todd P. Olson, “The Street Has Its Masters: Caravaggio and the Socially Marginal,” in Caravaggio: Realism, Rebellion, Reception, ed. Genevieve Warwick (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 69–81.

36. On Caravaggio's method of working from the model, see Keith Christiansen, “Caravaggio and ‘L’esempio davanti del naturale,’” Art Bulletin 68, no. 3 (September 1986): 421–45.

37. Summerscale, Malvasia's Life of the Carracci, 120.

38. Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 38–39.

39. Catherine Enggass and Robert Enggass, trans. and eds., Malvasia: The Life of Guido Reni (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980), 40.

40. Ibid., 47.

41. Malvasia writes (ibid., 107): “From the very beautiful and majestic head of a woman with a turban, generally called the girl with the eggs, in the painting dealing with the Life of St. Benedict in the famous courtyard [S. Michele in Bosco], we can see what Reni looked like, since as he said many times in that figure he portrayed himself at an early age.”

42. Bellori, The Lives, 171; original in Giovan Pietro Bellori, Le vite de’ pittori, scultori e architetti moderni, ed. Evelina Borea (Turin: Einaudi, 1976), 205.

43. Giovanni Battista Passeri, quoted in Patrizia Cavazzini, Painting as Business in Early Seventeenth-Century Rome (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 185 n. 185: “uno dei modelli migliori per lo spirito che dava all’attitudini nelle quali veniva posto.”

44. Bellori, The Lives, 60; original in Bellori, Le vite, 20.

45. The classic history of these academies is Nikolaus Pevsner, Academies of Art: Past and Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940). As Pevsner notes, the term “academy” had a variety of meanings in the early modern period. In this essay, I use the term “state-sponsored academies” to distinguish those institutions that had the force of the crown or state behind them from the more informal drawing academies formed by such figures as Andrea Sacchi in Rome. See also Anton W. A. Boschloo, ed., Academies of Art: Renaissance to Romanticism (The Hague: SDU, 1989).

46. Pevsner, Academies of Art, 87.

47. Cavazzini, Painting as Business, 77.

48. Quoted in F. J. van den Branden, Geschiedenis der Academie van Antwerpen (Antwerp: J.-E. Buschmann, 1867), 112: “in cas hy het selve quame te swygen, dat deselve model in stantelyck [sic] sal worden gecasseert.”

49. Paul Fréart de Chantelou, Diary of the Cavaliere Bernini's Visit to France, ed. George C. Bauer, trans. Margery Corbett (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 35–36.

50. For earlier examples of the porter trope in Leon Battista Alberti and Lodovico Dolce, see David Young Kim, “The Horror of Mimesis,” Oxford Art Journal 34, no. 3 (October 2011): 349 n. 55.

51. Summerscale, Malvasia's Life of the Carracci, 93.

52. Edward Norgate, Miniatura, or, The Art of Limning: New Critical Edition, ed. Jeffrey M. Muller and Jim Murrell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 108.

53. Seneca the Elder, Controversiae 10.5; for a discussion of the text, see Helen Morales, “The Torturer's Apprentice: Parrhasius and the Limits of Art,” in Art and Text in Roman Culture, ed. Jaś Elsner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 182–209. The anecdote's currency in seventeenth-century art theory is discussed in Elizabeth Cropper, The Ideal of Painting: Pietro Testa's Düsseldorf Notebook (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 163.

54. Jonathan Richardson, Two Discourses: I. An Essay on the Whole Art of Criticism, as It Relates to Painting. . . . II. An Argument in Behalf of the Science of a Connoisseur. . . . (London: W. Churchill, 1719), 89.

55. Kim, “The Horror of Mimesis.”

56. Ibid., 347–48.

57. Barnes et al., Van Dyck, 63–65, cat. nos. I.47, I.48.

58. Julius S. Held, “Van Dyck's Relationship to Rubens,” in Barnes and Wheelock, Van Dyck 350, 73.

59. On the centrality of the wax or clay model to the creation of Mannerist forms, see Michael Cole, “The Figura Sforzata: Modelling, Power and the Mannerist Body,” Art History 24, no. 4 (September 2001): 520–51.

60. Elizabeth Cropper, “Michelangelo Cerquozzi's Self-Portrait: The Real Studio and the Suffering Model,” in Ars naturam adiuvans: Festschrift für Matthias Winner, ed. Victoria von Fleming and Sebastian Schütze (Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1996), 407.

61. Ibid., 403.

62. Christopher S. Wood, “Indoor-Outdoor: The Studio around 1500,” in Inventions of the Studio: Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Mary Pardo and Michael Cole (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 36–72.

63. Ibid., 56, 58.

64. Gail Feigenbaum, “Practice in the Carracci Academy,” in The Artist's Workshop, ed. Peter M. Lukehart, Studies in the History of Art, vol. 38 (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1993), 68.

65. Jeanne Foster, quoted in Cecily Langdale and David F. Jenkins, Gwen John (1876–1939): An Interior Life (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 41.

66. Barnes et al., Van Dyck, 61, cat. no. I.44; the resemblance was first noted by Glück, “Van Dycks Anfänge,” 280.

67. Gustav Glück, for example, declared the resemblance “nicht überzeugend” (not convincing); Glück, Van Dyck: Des Meisters Gemälde, 2nd ed. (New York: F. Kleinberger, 1931), 534.

68. Barnes et al., Van Dyck, 38, cat. no. I.159.

69. Frank Zöllner, “Ogni Pittore Dipinge Sé,” in Der Künstler über sich in seinem Werk, ed. Matthias Winner (Weinheim: VCH, 1992), 137–60.

70. Marianne Koos, “Das Martyrium der Liebe: Ambiguität in Dosso Dossis ‘Heiligem Sebastian,’” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 38 (2011): 43–74.

71. On Van Dyck's relationship to Venetian tradition, see Jeffrey M. Muller, “The Quality of Grace in the Art of Anthony van Dyck,” in Anthony Van Dyck, ed. Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. et al. (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1990), 27–36.

72. Barnes et al., Van Dyck, 92–93, cat. no I.99.

73. For Van Dyck's drawing after the Raphael portrait, see Anton van Dyck: Italienisches Skizzenbuch, ed. Gert Adriani (Vienna: Anton Schroll, 1940), fol. 109v. For Van Dyck's self-portrait, see Barnes et al., Van Dyck, 169–71, cat. no. II.26. Bellori, The Lives, 216, provides an extensive description of Van Dyck's appearance and sumptuous clothing while in Rome.

74. Bellori, The Lives, 217. The significance of this disguised portrait is discussed in Sarah Joan Moran, “‘A cui ne fece dono’: Art, Exchange, and Sensory Engagement in Anthony van Dyck's Lamentation for the Antwerp Beguines,” in Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe, ed. Wietse de Boer and Christine Göttler (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 219–56.

75. For the Scaglia Virgin and Child, see Barnes et al., Van Dyck, 258, cat. III.17.

76. For the paintings’ provenances, see ibid., 61, cat. no. I.44, 63, cat. no. I.47, 65, cat. no. I.48, 163, cat. no. II.17, and 163, cat. no. II.18.

77. Erik Duverger, Antwerpse Kunstinventarissen uit de Zeventiende Eeuw (Brussels: Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, 1992), vol. 6, 46, no. 61: “Eenen grooten Sint-Sebastiaen van A. van Dyck.”

78. Ibid., 47, nos. 74, 84: “Een fraey Apostelstrogne van A. van Dyck”; “Het Contrefeytsel van Ruebens in syn jonckheyt van hem selven gedaen.”

79. Elizabeth Honig, “The Beholder as Work of Art: A Study in the Location of Value in Seventeenth-Century Flemish Painting,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 46 (1995): 253–97.

80. Quoted in Nico Van Hout, “Tronies: Over het gebruik van karakterkoppen in de Vlaamse historieschilderkunst,” in Joubert et al. Abraham Grapheus: Model van Jacob Jordaens, 63: “Een Vrouwentronie geweest hebbende soo geseght wirt de Wasgersse van den schilder Rubbens”; “een lachende tronie den Vrijver van Rubbens van Van Dijck.”

81. Representative and influential studies include H. Perry Chapman, Rembrandt's Self-Portraits: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Joanna Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); and Michael Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

82. Barnes et al., Van Dyck, 163, cat. no. II.18.

83. Bellori, The Lives, 215–16; original in Bellori, Le vite, 272.

84. For a summary of the traditional views and evidence, see Held, “Van Dyck's Relationship to Rubens,” 63–78.

85. For contrasting accounts of the Carracci's practice of life drawing, see Carl Goldstein, Visual Fact over Verbal Fiction: A Study of the Carracci and the Criticism, Theory, and Practice of Art in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and Feigenbaum, “Practice in the Carracci Academy.”

86. For images from one such modeling session in Rembrandt's studio, see Erik Hinterding, Ger Luijten, and Martin Royalton-Kisch, eds., Rembrandt: The Printmaker (Zwolle: Waanders, 2000), 213–17.

87. Norgate, Miniatura, 108.

88. On the drawing and its afterlife in Rubens's art and that of his followers, see A. W. F. M. Meij, Rubens, Jordaens, Van Dyck, and Their Circle: Flemish Master Drawings from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2001), 86–91, cat. no. 11.

89. On the drawings, see Hans Vlieghe, “Rubens’ beginnende invloed: Arnout Vinckenborch en het probleem van Jordaens’ vroegste tekeningen,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 38 (1987): 383–96; and Nico Van Hout, “Jordaens/Not Jordaens: On the Use of Model Studies in the 17th Century,” in Jordaens and the Antique, ed. Joost Vander Auwera and Irene Schaudies (Brussels: Royal Museum of Fine Art of Belgium, 2012), 55–59. I am grateful to Prof. Vlieghe and Dr. Van Hout for discussing these drawings with me.

90. A drawing sold at Christie's, New York (Old Master & 19th Century Paintings, Drawings & Watercolors, Part II, January 26, 2011, lot 282), and attributed by Hans Vlieghe to Jordaens appears to depict the same model as in the Düsseldorf drawing, who is perhaps also identical with the model from Van Dyck's Rotterdam drawing. It is thus possible to conceive of a session, held sometime about 1618, in which Van Dyck, Vinckenborch, and Jordaens all worked from the same model. I am grateful to Stijn Alsteens for bringing this drawing to my attention and proposing this interpretation to me.

91. On this drawing, see Meij, Rubens, Jordaens, Van Dyck, 209–12, cat. no. 56.

92. The kneeling tormentor in the final painting combines elements of both Van Dyck's and Rubens's studies; Lammertse and Vergara, The Young Van Dyck, 218.

93. One notable example is Van Dyck's drawing of a horse, now in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, which Rubens incorporated into his entirely autograph Prodigal Son of about 1618 (Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp); Lammertse and Vergara, The Young Van Dyck, 254–55.

94. On the Cantoor, see Jan Garff and Eva de la Fuente Pedersen, Rubens Cantoor: The Drawings of Willem Panneels; A Critical Catalogue (Copenhagen: Statens Museum for Kunst, 1988); Iris Kockelbergh and Paul Huvenne, eds., Rubens Cantoor: Een verzameling tekeningen ontstaan in Rubens’ atelier (Antwerp: Rubenshuis, 1993); and Jesper Svenningsen, “The Classification of Drawings in the So-Called Rubens’ Cantoor,” Master Drawings 51, no. 3 (Autumn 2013): 349–59. In his review of Garff and de la Fuente Pedersen's catalog, Julius Held first identified Van Dyck's Dublin youth as the source for the Copenhagen drawing (Master Drawings 29, no. 4 [Winter 1991]: 416–30).

95. Francesco Vercellini, quoted in Mary Hervey, The Life, Correspondence & Collections of Thomas Horward, Earl of Arundel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), 176 n. 2 (translation slightly modified). The letter is unsigned, but Vercellini's authorship has been generally accepted.

96. Wood, “Indoor-Outdoor,” 38.

97. For Rubens's refusal of one particular portrait commission, see Max Rooses and Charles Ruelens, eds., Correspondance de Rubens et documents épistolaires concernant sa vie et ses oeuvres (Antwerp: Veuve de Backer, 1887), vol. 1, 225–26; English translation in Magurn, The Letters, 37–38. On Rubens's self-portraits, see Michael Jaffé, “Rubens to Himself: The Portraits Sent to Charles I and to N-C. Fabri de Peiresc,” in Rubens e Firenze, ed. Mina Gregori (Florence: La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1983), 19–32.

98. According to Malvasia (Enggass and Enggass, Malvasia: The Life of Guido Reni, 113–14), when “summoned to France to paint the portrait of that king with the offer of a thousand doubloons and another thousand for provisions for the journey, [Guido Reni] replied that he was not a painter of portraits.” For Poussin, see Elizabeth Cropper, “Painting and Possession: Poussin's Portrait for Chantelou and the Essais of Montaigne,” in Winner, Der Künstler über sich in seinem Werk, 485–509.

99. Joanna Woodall, Anthonis Mor: Art and Authority (Zwolle: Waanders, 2007), 38.

100. Bellori, The Lives, 216.

101. Manuscript letter of William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle, to Anthony Van Dyck, quoted in Richard W. Goulding, Catalogue of the Pictures Belonging to His Grace the Duke of Portland, K.G. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 485.

102. Bellori, quoted in Barnes et al., Van Dyck, 427 n. 12.

103. Roger de Piles, quoted in ibid., 427 n. 10.

104. Ibid.

105. Bellori, The Lives, 218.

106. For an introduction to the legacy of Van Dyck's portraits, see Karen Hearn, ed., Van Dyck & Britain (London: Tate Publishing, 2009), 204–35.

107. My thinking about Van Dyck's studio is indebted to Svetlana Alpers's description of Rembrandt's practice in Rembrandt's Enterprise, 84–87. However, I depart from her account in that I regard Rembrandt's approach to the sitting as part of the larger emulation of Van Dyck in the second half of the seventeenth century.

108. Bellori, The Lives, 220.

109. Barnes et al., Van Dyck, 18.

110. Van Dyck, quoted in Giovanni Mendola, “Van Dyck in Sicily,” in Van Dyck: 1599–1641, ed. Christopher Brown and Hans Vlieghe (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1999), 61.

111. Julius S. Held, “The Four Heads of a Negro in Brussels and Malibu,” in Rubens and His Circle: Studies by Julius S. Held, ed. Anne W. Lowenthal, David Rosand, and John Walsh Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 149.

112. See, among others, April Masten, “Model into Artist: The Changing Face of Art Historical Biography,” Women's Studies 21, no. 1 (1992): 17–41; Marie Lathers, Bodies of Art: French Literary Realism and the Artist's Model (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001); and Susan J. Waller, The Invention of the Model: Artists and Models in Paris, 1830–1870 (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2006). See also the useful overview of British material in Martin Postle and William Vaughan, The Artist's Model from Etty to Spenser (London: Merrell Holberton, 1999).

113. Two exemplary studies are Nancy J. Vickers, “The Mistress in the Masterpiece,” in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 19–41; and Sarah McPhee, Bernini's Beloved: A Portrait of Costanza Piccolomini (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). Ivan Gaskell has also made a stirring argument, in the context of Vermeer studies, that to neglect the model “and to assume through lack of evidence that she had no counterpart in actuality, would be to risk acquiescing in the annihilation of a person. . . . Her relationship to reality is impossible to gauge, yet to dismiss her as no more than a figment would be to risk consigning her to the abyss of the past.” Gaskell, Vermeer's Wager: Speculations on Art History, Theory, and Art Museums (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 231–32.

114. For one exception within the literature on Dutch art, see Alison M. Kettering, “Rembrandt and the Male Nude,” in Aemulatio: Imitation, Emulation, and Invention in Netherlandish Art from 1500 to 1800; Essays in Honor of Eric Jan Sluijter, ed. Anton W. A. Boschloo et al. (Zwolle: Waanders, 2011), 248–62. A recent exhibition has provided a wealth of information about the lives and careers of the models at the Paris academy, in addition to identifying the specific models for a number of surviving drawings; Emmanuelle Brugerolles, Georges Brunel, and Camille Debrabant, The Male Nude: Eighteenth-Century Drawings from the Paris Academy (London: Wallace Collection, 2013).

115. See, for a recent example with references to earlier literature, Erna Kok, “The Female Nude from Life: On Studio Practice and Beholder Fantasy,” in The Nude and the Norm in the Early Modern Low Countries, ed. Karolien De Clippel, Katharina Van Cauteren, and Katlijne Van der Stighelen (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 35–50.

116. See, for example, Albert Schug, “‘Helenen in jedem Weibe’: Helene Fourment und ein besonderer Porträttypus im Spätwerk von Peter Paul Rubens,” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 46 (1985): 119–64; Margit Thøfner, “Helena Fourment's Het Pelsken,” Art History 27, no. 1 (February 2004): 1–33; and Kristin Lohse Belkin, “‘La belle Hélène’ and Her Beauty Aids: A New Look at Het Pelsken,” in Munuscula Amicorum: Contributions on Rubens and His Colleagues in Honour of Hans Vlieghe, ed. Katlijne Van der Stighelen (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 299–310.

117. Susan E. James, “The Model as Catalyst: Nicolas Lanier and Margaret Lemon,” Jaarboek Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerpen, 1999: 71–90.

118. For visual representations of this anecdote, see Georg-W. Költzsch, Der Maler und sein Modell: Geschichte und Deutung eines Bildthemas (Cologne: Dumont, 2000), 87–95.

119. On Duquesnoy, see Katlijne Van der Stighelen and Jonas Roelens, “Made in Heaven, Burned in Hell: The Trial of the Sculptor-Sodomite Hieronymus Duquesnoy (1602–1654)” (forthcoming). I am grateful to Prof. Van der Stighelen for sharing this article with me in advance of its publication.

120. For overviews of Van Dyck's historiography in this regard, see Held, “Van Dyck's Relationship to Rubens”; Katlijne Van der Stighelen, “Van Dyck's Character Revisited: Valentiner versus de zeventiende-eeuwse historiografische traditie,” in Van Dyck 1599–1999: Conjectures and Refutations, ed. Hans Vlieghe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), 229–52; and Jeffrey Muller, “Anthony van Dyck and Flemish National Identity: A Clash of Images between the Two World Wars,” in ibid., 305–12.

121. Mariët Westermann, “After Iconography and Iconoclasm: Current Research in Netherlandish Art, 1566–1700,” Art Bulletin 84, no. 2 (June 2002): 354–55.

122. For a cautionary example of such a retrospective reading of early modern images of Saint Sebastian, see Richard E. Spear, The “Divine” Guido: Religion, Sex, Money and Art in the World of Guido Reni (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 67–76.

123. For Vorsterman, see “Rubens and Vorsterman,” in Lowenthal et al., Rubens and His Circle: Studies by Julius S. Held, 114–26.

124. Rooses and Ruelens, Correspondance de Rubens, vol. 2, 135–37; English translation in Magurn, The Letters, 59–61.

125. Rooses and Ruelens, Correspondance de Rubens, vol. 2, 137: “Un S. Sebastiano ignudo da mia mano. . . .”

126. Hans Vlieghe, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard: Part VIII; Saints (London: Phaidon, 1973), vol. 2, 148–50, cat. no. 145.

127. Ibid., 149.

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Adam Eaker

Adam Eaker is the Anne L. Poulet Curatorial Fellow at the Frick Collection, where he is currently organizing an exhibition of Anthony van Dyck's portraits. A doctoral candidate at Columbia University, he is completing a dissertation entitled “Lore of the Studio: Van Dyck, Rubens, and the Status of Portraiture” [The Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, New York, N.Y. 10021, [email protected]].