George Cooke after Rubens. Mars going to War

After completing the Marie de Medici cycle in Paris in 1625, Rubens moved on to Madrid and London after accepting commissions from King Philip IV of Spain and King Charles I of England while also engaging in diplomatic negotiations between the two nations. In 1629-30, upon returning to Antwerp from London, Rubens painted his Allegory of War and Peace, an ambitious oil painting in which peace, maternity, and fecundity triumph. In that painting (fig. 1), Venus revels in domesticity as Minerva, wisdom, escorts Mars, war, off the premises.

Rubens’s painting is spatially expansive but imaginatively taut, qualities that render it powerful even in a mere outline engraving measuring 4 ½ x 7 inches. In Melville’s print, no less than in the painting itself, you can see each of the elements that Rubens had himself described in the 1638 letter quoted by the editors of the Historic Gallery in 1819: “The principal personage is Mars, who is seen leaving the temple of Janus. The god of war, armed with his sword and shield, threatens the people with the most fatal disasters; he resists the entreaties of Venus, who, accompanied by the Loves, endeavours to retain him by the tenderest caresses. The fury Alecto, holding her torch, conducts Mars to battle. She is preceded by two monsters, indicative of plague and famine, the inseparable companions of war. A female is extended upon the earth; beside her is a broken lute; this is Harmony, incompatible with the disorders which war produces. Not far from this figure is a woman holding her infant in her arms, signifying that war stifles the warmest sentiments, and restrains the expressions of maternal tendernesses. The genius of architecture, bearing her attributes, is overthrown. This announces that the monuments erected in peace, for the ornament of cities and the utility of mankind, are ruined and destroyed by the devastation of war. Mars, the enemy of letters and the arts, tramples under foot a book and some drawings. Some arrows are thrown on the ground near to the caduceus, the symbol of peace: united, they presented an emblem of concord, but the cord by which they were joined together is broken. The female following Venus, absorbed in grief, is Europe, exposed unfortunately, during a long series of years, to outrage, rapine, and misery. She is characterized by the globe, surmounted by a cross, designating the christian world, which is borne by a little angel” (HG 7, n.p.)

When Melville visited Florence in April 1857, he would have seen the original painting of  The Horrors of War during his two visits to the Pitti Palace, where it had been one of the gems of the collection for two centuries. Melville’s first visit to the Pitti Palace prompted his journal entry about “the excess of pleasure in these galleries” (NN J 114). But Melville had seen a smaller version of the same painting during his two visits to the private gallery of Samuel Rogers on December 20 and 23, 1849 (NN J 30, 35). Samuel Rogers’s copy of Rubens’s The Horrors of War (fig. 3 below) was then thought to be a study by Rubens himself for the larger painting at Pitti Palace. As we saw in our introduction to Peter Paul Rubens, Gustav Waagen considered this to be “one of the most admirable of Rubens’ small paintings” and Anna Jameson had declared it to be “a combination, on a small scale, of every quality for which Rubens is remarkable,--his sumptuous fancy, his turn for allegory, his potent luxuriance of color, his ardent life and movement, his facility of touch,--are all here.”  

When Melville visited the Pitti Palace in 1857, Europe was trying to regain its bearings after the Crimean War and America was edging ever more tragically toward the Civil War that was to be the subject of Melville’s first book of poetry, Battle-Pieces, published in 1866. Melville’s own final word on the price to be paid for Mars going to War came, of course, in Billy Budd—in the absolute triumph, on the plot level at least, of the legalistic spirit of the Articles of War over any influence of “the feminine in man,” which “must here be ruled out.” In the psychological and spiritual warfare of that story, even the chaplain can have no bearing on the essential action. “Bluntly put,” he is but “the minister of the Prince of Peace serving in the host of the God of War—Mars” (NN BBO 55, 63). Mars rolls over the chaplain as easily in Melville’s story as he does over the upended architect and the woman with the broken lute in Rubens’s painting (and Cooke’s engraving).

Much is obviously lost when a magnificent painting of the size and richness of The Horrors of War is reduced to such a small engraving in outline only. But something is gained too. Melville in the privacy of his own study could compare the spiritual and emotional power of this line engraving that George Cooke made after Rubens’s The Horrors of War with the spiritual and emotional power of the line engravings that Étienne Reveil made after Flaxman’s images of the horrors of war from Aeschylus’s The Persians. These outline engravings have much in common in spite of the stark differences in the centuries, nationalities, and artistic media of their original inspiration(s) and place(s) of origin. If the medium of the line engraving robs Rubens’s Horrors of War of its massive scale and coloristic panache relative to the austere drawings of Flaxman, it also brings out the universality of heart, mind, and line that those two artists have in common. That commonality is deepened by the fact that those very engravers who were translating Rubens’s huge, coloristic paintings into colorless line engravings for the Historic Gallery between 1807 and 1819 were themselves strongly influenced by the aesthetic of the line drawings that Flaxman had made in response to Aeschylus, Homer, and Dante—and that Longman had published in outline engravings by Piroli in 1803 and 1807 (see CAT 2-5 and the headnote to CAT 80-102).

When Rubens was creating The Horrors of War in 1637 or 1638 he was spending much of his time at the Château de Steen, the rural retreat outside Antwerp he had purchased in 1635. White notes that “for the first time he consistently studied the countryside in all its variety, mood and seasons.” The result was a series of late landscapes for which he developed “a new language of art” (283-85). We saw two of those landscapes in our introduction to this section on Peter Paul Rubens. One was the Landscape with a Rainbow from 1836 (now at the Wallace Collection in London); this is the painting whose “miraculous” rainbow had been one of the first “pleasures in painting” that Melville had marked in his copy of Hazlitt’s Table Talk. A second such work was Landscape by Moonlight, c. 1637 (now at the Courtauld Institute); this painting was in the dining room of Samuel Rogers when Melville twice breakfasted there in 1849. As White notes, that painting “offers a most poetic rendering of a gleaming night landscape, devoid of inhabitants apart from a horse grazing by the riverside. . . . For once Rubens must have concluded that humanity disturbed the mood of nature so precisely observed” (p. 286, fig. 303).

The Waggon Landscape (fig. 4) was a second landscape in the private collection of Samuel Rogers when Melville visited in 1849. The coloring of this small painting (19 x 21 inches) is not as striking as that in the more famous Landscape by Moonlight. The commonplace subject is far from the heroic history paintings, elevated religious paintings, and fleshy mythological paintings by which Rubens had become widely known. Jameson in her 1844 commentary on the Rogers collection had described this painting simply as "a woody scene, with a man and a cart in front, and a stream of water” (no. 53, p. 408). The Rogers sale catalog in 1856 had given slightly more detail: “the wagon landscape; a scene among Flemish meadows, interspersed with groups of trees; a man in a red jacket is driving a wagon down a steep road to a ford” (no. 717, p. 73). Here Rubens is coming much closer to the generic landscape scenes being painted by such seventeenth-century Flemish and Dutch artists as Berghem, Cuyp, Ruisdael, Van der Heyden, Hobbema, and Neyts, all of whom are represented in Melville’s print collection (CAT 213, 215, 216, 217 222, 223).