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Around 1625, Rubens received
one of the most important commissions of his career
at a time when he was probably the most famous painter in Europe.
This project consisted in designing
in designing twenty large tapestries, to be made in wool,
for the convent of the Descalzas Reales
in Madrid, next to the Plaza de San Martín.
The commission came from Isabel Clara Eugenia,
Governor of the Southern Low Countries or Spanish Netherlands
(modern-day Belgium). She was the daughter of Philip II,
the sister of Philip III and in 1622, the aunt of the monarch
who occupied the Spanish throne at that date, Philip IV.
Of the twenty tapestries designed by Rubens
and sent to the Descalzas Reales in Madrid,
four are now included in this exhibition.
It is the first time that they have been shown together with some of the paintings
that Rubens produced as part of the design process for that series.
Designing a series of tapestries is a complex process.
The painter first had to design small scenes that he termed "bozzetti",
which would probably have functioned to show
the person who commissioned the tapestries how they would look when finished.
This initial phase was followed by a second stage
in which the artist produced the so-called "modelli",
which were larger and more highly finished preliminary studies
with a large amount of detail.
The third step was the realisation of large “cartoons”,
as they were termed, which are the scenes, in life size,
to be reproduced on the tapestries.
These were generally painted in the artist’s studio by his assistants
and not by his own hand and it was these cartoons
that the weavers used to make the tapestries.
The Prado has six of the "modelli" (the second phase),
which are relatively large sketches painted
in considerable detail and with a lot of colour,
showing the moment when the artist was making the final decisions.
In the late 17th century, six of what must have originally been
at least twenty "modelli" entered the Spanish royal collections,
and these six are the ones now on display in the Museo del Prado.
The "modelli" for the Eucharist series
are considered particularly important.
They have recently been restored in a long
and complex process lasting around three years.
This has basically consisted
in removing old additions to each side the panels
and in undertaking the necessary restoration after they were removed.
The exhibition pays considerable attention
to the restoration process of the paintings
but we should bear in mind that ultimately
we are here in the service of the paintings, to enjoy them,
learn about them and understand them.
So what we see here is that the exhibition brings together
a number of the issues that makes Rubens a great painter.
When we see the Eucharist series, the "modelli" from the series
alongside the tapestries, we are seeing Rubens’s
enormous skills in various fields.
Firstly, as a painter: his manual skill,
the lightness and freedom of his technique and his ability
to make us feel the immediacy of what he is painting.
In addition, the sensation we have
when looking at Rubens is that we are
in the presence of a learned, highly educated,
well-read and intellectual painter with a great knowledge of Renaissance culture,
and that what he is doing is using the knowledge he acquired
during his years in Italy and from his sizeable library
in order to weave a type of vision of what he wants to recount,
the figures that he selects, how he paints them, and so on.
Rubens was nourished by an enormous intellectual culture;
a culture that involves a profound knowledge of Christianity
and also of the pagan and classical worlds,
which was a fundamental part of the Renaissance and early Baroque.
We thus see how in these scenes he recounts Christian doctrine,
for example, through scenes derived from the Roman triumphs
which decorated the reliefs of Trajan’s column in the Forum in Rome.
Rubens paints with the feeling that there is a lot involved,
that what he paints is extremely morally important,
and therefore the art of painting, the idea of representing,
is something in which we are all deeply involved
and which is done with great faith.
We get the feeling that we are
in front of a very tenacious painter and that this tenacity,
this idea of guiding painting has consequences for the history of art.