Rubens: Master artist and spy

Art history students probably won't be surprised by the subject matter of Mark Lamster's new book, "Master of Shadows: The Secret Diplomatic Career of the Painter Peter Paul Rubens."

But the general population may be startled by the revelation that Rubens, a 17th-century Flemish painter known for his lavish style, heroic vision and well-padded female nudes, spent much of his career in secret diplomatic missions designed to end the Eighty Years' War, which pitted the Spain against Holland and decimated Rubens' native city of Antwerp.

"Rubens was this pragmatic, moderate person trying to solve this political problem in a world that was polarized and was really damaging to the public by no fault of their own," said Lamster, an arts and culture writer based in New York City.

Lamster, who will discuss Rubens and his diplomatic career at a lecture Nov. 13 at the Historic Asolo Theater, has long been interested in the intersection between art and politics.

"I write a lot about architecture, which is really very much about this place," he said. "Architecture is the physical embodiment of politics and art."

While he had known of Rubens' efforts to broker a peace between England and Spain, with the idea that England would then bring about a compromise between its ally, Holland, and Spain, since he was in graduate school, it wasn't until Lamster saw the impact of the Iraq war on its citizens that he felt compelled to write his book.

"Here was this land occupied," he said. "It seemed like an interesting story to tell at that moment."

Like the formerly glorious city of Baghdad, Antwerp in the 17th century, "once a haven of international trade and culture, sat on the front lines of a war of independence waged against that Spanish empire by the nascent Dutch republic to the north," Lamster writes in his book.

Rubens used his reputation as an artist with connections of royalty and statesmen across Europe as a cover for his clandestine diplomatic activities, said Lamster.

Writing the book involved less digging for new material than extracting the relevant material from Rubens' biography.

"Part of the problem with Rubens is there's just such an enormous amount of material to navigate," said Lamster. "There is a ton of material that needs to be digested and assimilated."

Lamster's lecture at the Ringling is especially appropriate, since the museum owns the largest collection of Rubens works in the United States. Its first gallery contains monumental canvases by Rubens, who frequently chose war as his subject matter.

"He grew up in a time of war; much of his work is meditations on war and conflict," said Lamster. "Knowing that and knowing that history makes some of these paintings much more powerful."

Modern audiences may not easily read his canvases.

"His art is very difficult to understand because it trades in biblical subjects and mythical subjects and allegorical ways of painting that modern people aren't used to dealing with," said Lamster. Today, Rubens is often regarded as "the painter of naked ladies, and we kind of leave it at that. We don't understand the implications of what's on the canvas."

Rubens was a prolific artist who had a studio workshop that employed many apprentices.

"The workshop was responsible for something on the order of 3,000 paintings. If you count all the drawings and prints and cartoons that they made, it's something like 30,000 works," said Lamster. "He was kind of a genius as a businessman who ran his studio in an exceptional way."

Lamster hopes his book will shed new light onto Rubens' multifaceted career.

"I felt Rubens was something of a master hidden in plain sight," he said. "If people had a slightly better handle on this complex history, they'd get so much more from his art."

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