The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Peter Paul Rubens · the single canvas, also known as The Horrors of War · oil on canvas, one broad horizontal read from left to right · Venus failing to hold Mars as the Fury drags him from the open temple of Janus, with Europe mourning at the left and the goods of peace trodden underfoot · painted in Antwerp for Ferdinando II de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, 1637 to 1638 · in the Medici collection from 1638, now in the Galleria Palatina of the Palazzo Pitti, Florence
Mode
Political allegory on one canvas, read from left to right: gods, a Fury and personified goods in a single movement from peace into war
Mythos
Mars and Venus, love and strife as the two forces of the world; the doors of Janus opened; Europe as a mourning mother of peoples
Phase
One passage, from peace to war, read as time across the surface; painted 1637 to 1638, in the Thirty Years’ War, and sent to Florence in 1638
Presentation
Oil on a broad horizontal canvas, made for the Grand Duke of Tuscany; in the Medici collection and the Pitti since it arrived, in the Galleria Palatina now
Register
Dread and lament in the late manner: the warmest flesh at the centre, cooling into the dark of the Fury, black for the mourner
Scale
A continent and its civil goods, love, art, birth, building, learning, concord and trade, on one canvas; about a dozen principal figures with Cupids and attributes
Governing Proposition
Painted in Antwerp at the end of Rubens’s career, during the Thirty Years’ War, for a prince in Florence, the canvas takes the allegory he had made a public language of praise and turns it to lament: the doors of Janus are open, Venus cannot hold Mars, and the Fury drags him over the goods of peace. The wager of the picture is that one current running from left to right can carry the undoing of every civil good at once, and that the god of war, looking back at love as he is carried past it, can say what no emblem says.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
In 1637 and 1638, in Antwerp, Peter Paul Rubens painted a large allegory of war for Ferdinando II de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and sent it to Florence. It was the end of a career in which Rubens had served the cause of peace as a diplomat as well as a painter, and Europe was in the war now called the Thirty Years’ War. The canvas entered the Medici collection in 1638. It has never left the city: it is in the Pitti, and hangs now in the Galleria Palatina. It is also known as The Horrors of War.
On 12 March 1638 Rubens wrote to Justus Sustermans, the Medici court painter, explaining the allegory figure by figure. The letter names the woman in black at the left as Europe, the monsters beside the Fury as Plague and Famine, and the fallen goods of peace one by one. It is the key to the picture, and it cuts two ways. It fixes the meaning, so that most of what the canvas says can be read off without doubt; and it shows how much of what the canvas says can be carried without the canvas.
The work scored here is the single painting, a broad horizontal, as it hangs in Florence. The letter stands outside it, and so does the earlier Minerva Protects Pax from Mars, also called Peace and War (1629 to 1630, National Gallery, London), the victorious counterpart of this picture: both are context, and neither is credited on an axis. The occasion was a war, and the canvas is fixed to that war by its date and its first viewers. Its argument is fixed to nothing.
Movement II
The picture reads from left to right, as its movement runs. At the far left the doors of the temple of Janus stand open, which in Roman custom meant war. Before them stands a woman in black, her mourning clothes torn, her arms raised, attended by a child. The letter names her Europe, who has suffered plunder and misery for many years. She is small against the movement that rises past her, and she is the most grievous figure on the canvas.
She is also its one figure of history. Everything else in the picture is a god, a Fury, a monster or a personified good; Europe is a continent in mourning, and through her the old contest of love and strife is made to bear on the present. She stands where the current begins. At the far right, in the shadow, are its ends: the monsters of Plague and Famine beside the Fury. Between the mourner and the destroyers, every figure stands where it falls in one movement from peace into war.
That movement is a single diagonal surge, from upper left to lower right, from the open temple and the mourner to the Fury and her monsters, with Venus and Mars at its hinge. The broad horizontal is its instrument, and the viewer reads it as time: the doors opened, the march begun, the ruin left behind. A description can list the figures. Only the canvas makes them a current, and carries the eye to the right as Mars is carried.
Movement III
In the centre Venus, nude, with Cupids about her, throws her weight against Mars to hold him back with caresses. Mars, armoured, with shield and bloodied sword, strides to the right. He is dragged on by the Fury Alecto, who holds up a torch, her hair streaming, the monsters beside her. The whole composition is the contest of two pulls, the goddess’s and the Fury’s, with Mars as the body they fight over. Mars and Venus, love and strife, are among the oldest figures the West has for the forces of the world, and here the myth bears the load of the picture.
Mars looks back at Venus as he goes. He is not deaf to love; he is carried past it. This is the one claim the canvas makes that the commonplace about war does not, and it is a claim about people, not a mood: the will to war can see what it leaves and still go. The force of it exists only in paint, in the counterweight of the goddess’s lean against the god’s stride on one surface, a body dragged against its own backward look.
Venus is the warmest flesh in the picture, built in warm, translucent layers over a light ground and turning in the light at the centre. Rubens set her at the hinge of the catastrophe, so that beauty is what is being lost in the act of being seen. Around her the late manner runs at full stretch: armour and drapery in broken, rapid strokes, the Fury’s torch, a dark sky. The colour cools from her body into the dark of the Fury and the monsters, and the storm moves right.
Movement IV
Under the feet of Mars and the Fury lies what peace had made. A woman with a broken lute is Harmony, which war undoes. A mother holds her infant: fecundity and charity. An architect is thrown down with his instruments: building. Books and a drawing on paper are trodden underfoot. A bundle of arrows lies with its binding loosened, the sign of Concord, and the caduceus and the olive branch of peace are cast aside. Each fallen figure takes a distinct good, art, birth, building, learning, concord, trade, and the picture’s argument is their sum.
Run the test of subtraction and most of the canvas holds. Europe, Venus and Alecto cannot go, and the lute, the mother and the architect are the inventory of civil life, none of them repeating another. What yields is at the margins. The monsters crowd the shadow at the right and barely read as separate ideas; the Cupids multiply a figure one would carry; the trodden books and drawing repeat what the lute already says. The right side is crowded, its figures less distinct than the left, and some of the lower figures are summary.
The lower register is where the picture is most a code. The loosened arrows and the caduceus are attributes to be decoded, placed to be read rather than swept; they obey the key, not the current. The architect is a sign for building, not a man at work, and no consciousness on the canvas goes beyond grief and fury. The orders the picture holds are many for one canvas, the state and the family, labour and the city, art and learning, love, and the natural order as plague and famine, and most of them are held as emblems, not as worlds.
Movement V
Eight years before, Rubens had painted Minerva Protects Pax from Mars, in which wisdom drives war away and peace feeds her children. He had made political allegory a public language in the Medici cycle and the Whitehall ceiling, a form for celebration and the praise of princes. In The Consequences of War the same painter, in the same vocabulary, leaves Minerva out. No wisdom intervenes; peace has already lost; the form of praise is turned to lament. The turn is real in meaning and modest in means: the composition is a variant of his own battle and abduction pictures, and it was made in a private commission for a sympathetic prince.
In the same decade Callot’s prints, The Miseries of War (1633), took the realist road. Rubens took the high one, and this canvas is the fullest statement of war as catastrophe in the allegorical mode, by its master. The centuries that followed abandoned the mode, and the line of war images a viewer now sets the canvas in was redirected by other works. On this desk Goya’s The Disasters of War stands at 8.9 and his The Third of May 1808 at 9.0, Picasso’s Guernica at 9.1, Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa at 8.7 and Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People at 8.6. Each discloses what allegory leaves covered, the act and the particular victim, and each turns its field harder; this canvas answers with its making and its survival.
The maker’s Antwerp triptych, The Descent from the Cross, stands at 8.5, level with this picture: it founded the Flemish Baroque altarpiece, where this is a late summit of a mode Rubens had already made. Rembrandt van Rijn’s The Night Watch, a group portrait led by its swerve, stands level too. Euripides’ The Trojan Women and Britten’s War Requiem, laments for what war takes, stand above at 8.8, and Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children at 8.9. In the Pitti the current still runs from the open doors and the mourner at the left to the Fury at the right, and at its hinge the god of war still looks back.
Act III · The Twelve
Run the subtractive test figure by figure. Most of the programme resists it, because each figure is one of the goods that war destroys and the argument is their sum. Europe cannot go: she is the loss named. Venus cannot go: without her pull there is no struggle, only a march. Alecto cannot go: she supplies the force that Venus fails against. The fallen at Mars’s feet, the lute, the mother, the architect, are the inventory of civil life, each a distinct good. What yields lies at the margins: Plague and Famine crowd the shadow at the right and barely read as separate ideas, the Cupids multiply a figure one would carry, and the trodden books and drawing repeat the lute.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Something can be stated, and it holds outside the Thirty Years’ War: war is not one evil among others but the undoing of all the civil goods at once, love, art, birth, building, learning, concord and trade, and the will to it is pulled forward by fury against everything that holds it back. The central pair discloses a quieter and harder truth. Mars looks back at Venus as he goes; he is not deaf to love, he is carried past it. That is a claim about people, not a mood. But most of the disclosure is statement through a code the painter wrote out himself, a condition the age knew and said; Goya’s war images disclose what allegory leaves covered, the act and the particular victim.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The elevation is of the dreadful kind, and it rises more than once. The whole canvas is a storm moving right, felt as weather: Mars surging against the restraining weight of Venus, the Fury’s torch and streaming hair, the dark sky above. The second height is Venus herself, the warmest flesh in the picture, set at the hinge of the catastrophe, so that beauty is what is being lost in the act of being seen. The third is Europe at the left, arms raised before the open temple, small against the movement and the most grievous figure in it. Held below the top because the fallen register is more an inventory than a height, and the monsters at the right are less terrible than dark.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Myth built, not evoked, at the centre. Mars and Venus is among the oldest structures the West has, love and strife as the two forces of the world, and here it bears the load: the composition is the contest between the pull of Venus and the pull of the Fury, with Mars as the body they fight over. The open doors of Janus are not allusion but the threshold of the event, the moment the world passes from peace to war. The new figure of Europe as a mourning mother of peoples makes the myth bear on history. Held at the gate rather than above it because much of the lower register is emblem, attributes to be decoded, and decoded meaning is myth listed, not built.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The inheritance is Rubens’s own: the political allegory he had made a public language in the Medici cycle and the Whitehall ceiling, and above all in Minerva Protects Pax from Mars, where wisdom drives war away and peace feeds her children. The departure is its reversal: no wisdom intervenes, peace has already lost, and a form made for celebration and the praise of princes is turned to lament. That is a real turn in the meaning of the form. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the form itself is unchanged: the vocabulary is the one he had perfected, the composition a variant of his own battle and abduction pictures, and the turn was made in a private commission to a sympathetic prince, at small cost.
Score: 7.8 / 10
What the painting knows that a description cannot is the force: a body dragged against its own backward look, which exists only in the counterweight of Venus’s lean and Mars’s stride on one surface, and the movement from left to right in which the viewer reads time, the temple opening, the march, the ruin left behind. The broad horizontal is the instrument of that sweep, and only painting lets the flesh of Venus, the most beautiful thing on the canvas, sit exactly where the loss happens. The cost is documented: Rubens wrote out the content figure by figure in a letter, and the letter conveys most of what the picture says. What it cannot carry, the pull and the light, is why the figure stands where it does.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Evidence over promise: nearly four centuries of presence in Florence, and a steady line of study, chiefly of the programme, the letter, the picture’s place in the Thirty Years’ War and in Rubens’s work as a diplomat for peace, and more recently of the canvas as an early image of war’s cost to civilians and of Europe personified as victim. The formal yield on return is high, in the late handling and in the colour cooling from Venus to the Fury. But the painter’s own key closes most of the questions of meaning. Those that stay open are real and narrower: how far the backward glance of Mars qualifies the allegory, whether the picture accuses princes or consoles one, whether its pessimism is the old man’s or the age’s.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The field is European painting of the 1630s, the Baroque allegory and the image of war. The intrinsic force is high: this is the fullest statement of the allegory of war as catastrophe by the master of the allegorical mode, and it moves the subject from the triumph of a prince to the suffering of a continent. In the same decade Callot’s prints, The Miseries of War (1633), took the realist road; Rubens took the high one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the late manner, of which this is a central example, passed to van Dyck and Jordaens and later to Watteau and Delacroix. But the line of war images that runs to Goya and Picasso was redirected by their works, not this one, and named descendants of the canvas are few.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about 388 years. Form: the composition and its figures stand as painted, and no loss is known at the centre of the image. Presence: in the Medici collection from 1638 and in the Pitti since, in one city throughout and, since the Pitti became a public gallery, continuously on view; known across Europe through the letter and through reproduction, though not of the widest fame, which in any case lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: the ordinary history of an oil of its age, lining, varnish and cleaning. The occasion fixes the canvas to the Thirty Years’ War; the argument does not. It sits in the lower middle of the band for centuries, below the widest presences.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Judged as command of oil on a large canvas. The making carries the meaning: the force the picture argues is made by the brush. The late manner is at full stretch: flesh built in warm, translucent layers over a light ground, the body of Venus turning in the light at the centre; armour and drapery in broken, rapid strokes; a dozen interlocked figures held in one diagonal, so that the eye is carried right as Mars is carried. Colour carries the narrative, warm at the hinge, cooling into the dark of the Fury and the monsters, black for Europe. Few painters have commanded the moving body at this scale with this ease. The costs: the right side is crowded, some lower figures are summary, and the extent of studio hands cannot be verified.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Europe mourning at the far left before the open temple, and Plague and Famine at the far right in the shadow. One law holds them: everything is drawn along a single current from peace into war, and each figure is placed by where it stands in that current, the mourner where it begins, the destroyers where it leads, Venus and Mars at the hinge as its resistance and its object. Light and colour obey the same law, warm where the good things are, dark where the current runs. The range is wide in kind, from a nude goddess to a monster, from a mother and child to a fallen architect, and it holds. Held below the top because the attributes at the bottom obey the code rather than the current.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The figure describes the form. The orders held are many, and the current integrates them: the state and history, in Europe, the war and the temple of public life; the family, in the mother and child; labour and the city, in the architect and his instruments; art and learning, in the lute, the books and the drawing; love and the erotic, in Venus and the Cupids; the natural order, as plague and famine. That is unusually wide for one canvas, and it is the point of the programme. What holds the axis below the top band is that most of these orders are present as emblems, not as worlds: the architect is a sign for building, not a man at work, there is no consciousness but grief and fury, and the inventory is closer to listed than lived.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable and The Made at 9.3, The Inner Law at 8.7, The Sublime at 8.6. A canvas that stands as painted and has been in one collection, in one city, since it arrived in 1638; the late manner at full stretch, a dozen interlocked figures carried on one diagonal and the flesh of Venus turning in the light at the hinge; one current from peace into war that places every figure, from the mourner at the left to the monsters at the right; and a dread that rises three times, in the storm, in Venus and in Europe.
Limiting Dimension
The Swerve at 7.8: the allegory of praise is turned to lament, but in the vocabulary Rubens had perfected and at small cost. Beside it The Encompassed at 7.9: many orders held for one canvas, most of them as emblems rather than worlds. Above them Pressure on Tradition at 8.1 and The Unconcealment at 8.3: the summit of a mode the next centuries abandoned, stating through a code what the war images after it disclose. The four are one fact: an allegory that speaks the language of its age at its fullest and leaves that language as it found it.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 9.3, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.3 clears the bar of 8.5 and The Archetypal Deep meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.3, Pressure on Tradition at 8.1 and The Swerve at 7.8 fall short, an allegory that states where it might disclose and turns the tone of a form rather than the form. The Universal Minimum is met (the lowest of the eleven axes it covers is 7.8, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.9. The twelve sum to 101.4, an average of 8.45 that displays 8.5; the aggregate stands below 9.0 in any case, and the canvas is placed in the Canonical tier on its standing.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the canvas as it hangs in the Galleria Palatina of the Palazzo Pitti, Florence, and of its commission, its programme and its history; no image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the single painting, oil on canvas, 1637 to 1638, by Peter Paul Rubens, painted in Antwerp for Ferdinando II de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and sent to Florence: in the Medici collection from 1638 and in the Pitti since. It is also known as The Horrors of War. Not in the unit, and credited on no axis: Rubens’s letter of 12 March 1638 to Justus Sustermans, the Medici court painter, which explains the allegory figure by figure and is paraphrased here, never quoted; and Minerva Protects Pax from Mars (Peace and War, 1629 to 1630, National Gallery, London), the earlier and victorious counterpart, which enters only as inheritance. The lining, varnish and cleaning of an oil of its age are credited and charged to no axis but The Imperishable. Nothing on this page is quoted. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the dimensions of the canvas, the attributes carried by the child beside Europe, the existence and whereabouts of an oil sketch for the composition, how far assistants worked on the canvas, and the details of its condition and treatment.