On the “Consequences of War” by Peter Paul Rubens

Jacob Burckhardt called Rubens’ Consequences of War (Palazzo Pitti in Florence) as the defining painting of the whole of the Thirty Years’ War. This famous painting was completed in 1638 for Ferdinand II de Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Rubens carefully explained the content of his allegory in a surviving letter dated 12 March 1638 to Justus Sustermans, the Flemish painter working in the services of the Medici in Florence. This work was repeatedly studied and interpreted. We are also partly aware of the circumstances around its creation as well as later responses to it. The National Gallery in London, for instance, owns a small-scale painting of the same composition on paper attached to canvas. Neither should we forget that a younger copy of the picture (around 1745) was in the Potsdam city palace belonging to Frederick II of Prussia. The relevant literature also mentions a sketch of the painting, today lost, from a private collection exhibited in Brussels in 1937. In this context it has been highly interesting to discover that a Slovak private collection contains a painting on a wooden panel, not yet mentioned in scholarly literature, which apart from a few details corresponds to Rubens’ Consequences of War from 1637–1638. This work is accompanied by a short appraisal by the German Prof. J. Müller Hofstede from 2009. According to him the painting on an oak panel is a sketch of Rubens’ composition made in his own workshop in around 1637–1638. With the new appraisal of this picture in 2012–2013, it became possible for the first time to conduct a number of analytical tests with the view to discover its age and the breadth and character of secondary changes (RTG scanning, UV reflectography, IR microscopic analysis, EDS and SEM analysis and optical microscopy of the pigments and the canvas from the reverse side). Overall it was concluded that the painting, in its technological makeup and pigmentation, corresponds to 17th century works and is therefore in agreement with Hofstede’s appraisal. Unfortunately, we know nothing of the former owners of the Slovak Consequences of War. The current owner bought the painting from a member of an unspecified, important Austro-Hungarian noble family close to the Habsburg court and indeed to Francis Stephen I of Lorraine himself. Purportedly the painting was bought in the 18th century. The small panel painting from Slovakia is an original work, most probably directly from Rubens’ workshop. The carefully executed underdrawing and the sophistication of the Slovak composition could, in terms of the typology of sketches, be compared to a form of modello or sketch ex post – ricordo. But since it is different in several ways from the definitively finished painting in Florence, and contains visible pentimenti, we are dealing with a kind of modello, in contrast to the Consequences of War in the National Gallery in London. The confirmed date of the work as well as its undoubtedly close connection to the Florence work, the Rubens markings in its original layers on one side, and the differences in details with those in Rubens’ originals from the 1630s point to a workshop modello made according to the master’s instructions, and perhaps with his own corrections. On the basis of contemporary sources we know that at this time Rubens employed several artists. A more specific attribution is therefore the task for specialist scholars on the work of Rubens and his circle.