THROUGHOUT HIS CAREER Rubens painted celebrations of the fruitfulness of nature and frequently peopled this realm with alluring nymphs and lascivious satyrs. One of the most engaging examples is the Nymphs and satyrs in the Museo del Prado, Madrid (Fig.1); in a sun-drenched, luxuriant landscape Rubens assembled a lively company of nymphs and satyrs who pluck apples and grapes to fill a cornucopia that is replenished in perpetuity. The subject of the painting comes from Ovid’s story of the invention of the cornucopia (Metamorphoses, IX, 80–100), which tells how Hercules challenged the river
god Achelous to a contest for Deianeira. As the rivals fought, Achelous assumed first the form of a serpent and then that of a bull. In defeating Achelous, Hercules wrenched off one of the bull’s horns, which was later retrieved by naiads who ‘filled it with fruit and fragrant flowers, and hallowed it’.

IN THE PRODUCTIVE years following his return to Antwerp in 1608, Peter Paul Rubens devised some of his most daring and inventive compositions for hunt subjects. Long thought to have been lost, the Calydonian boar hunt (Fig.8), believed to be his earliest foray into the genre, was until recently known only from an etching formerly attributed to Theodor van Kessel and from later copies. The Calydonian boar hunt remained a tantalising phantom until it appeared on the London art market in early 2005. Removal of later overpaint revealed a dynamic, fluidly executed scene consistent with Rubens’s energetic works of c.1611–12. This masterwork, one of the most exciting additions to Rubens’s œuvre in recent years, was subsequently acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2006.

WHILE MANY SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY paintings of Flemish gallery interiors are known to have been collaborative efforts, documentary evidence concerning the genesis of specific examples is extremely scant. Studies of important gallery interiors, from Willem van Haecht’s Cabinet of Cornelis van der Geest in the Rubenshuis, Antwerp, to the Five senses series by Jan Brueghel and Rubens in the Museo del Prado, Madrid, are often challenged by this lack of documentation. Based on newly discovered documentary and visual evidence, this article demonstrates the crucial role played by the mathematician and architect Mutio Oddi of Urbino in the radical transformation of a relatively conventional drawing of a gallery interior containing a group of conversing connoisseurs into an exquisitely executed and highly unusual painting, with a powerful emphasis on mathematics and astronomy and their relationship to painting and the arts. The genesis of this interior, as we shall show, owes much to the foundation of the Ambrosian Accademia del Disegno in Milan.

THE UNPUBLISHED PAINTING of the Annunciation of the death of the Virgin by Paulus Bor (c.1601–69; Fig.25) is an important discovery for scholars of Dutch art and a significant addition to the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, for which it was acquired in 2003.

PRESENTED AS a diptych in the current exhibition Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych are two panels attributed to the Master of the Lille Adoration: The Trinity and St Jerome (private collection, on loan to the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge). That the two panels belong together is a recent proposal; further evidence that they should indeed be paired is presented in this article.

HIERONYMUS COCK (1510–70) was among the most adventurous print publishers of the sixteenth century, distributing the designs of Pieter Bruegel, commissioning unorthodox subjects such as landscapes and grotesques, and promoting, through a web of contacts in Spain, Italy and France, the idea of Netherlandish prints as objets d’art. His firm in Antwerp, Aux Quatre Vents, issued vast numbers of engravings, but very few of the copperplates used to print these works survive. Copperplates were among the most prized possessions in publishers’ inventories: they were labour intensive to produce, wrought from highly valued metals and, under ideal conditions, they could yield hundreds or even thousands of saleable impressions. However, one of Cock’s elusive plates has now surfaced in the collection of the Centre Canadien d’Architecture in Montréal (Fig.30). Acquired from a private collection in France in 1992, it is published here for the first time. The plate is all the more remarkable because, as we shall see, it can be securely traced to a document of 1601.

ONE ASPECT OF Van Dyck’s activity in England, often remarked but less well understood, is the many replicas, copies and variants of paintings, poses and parts that characterise his work in these years. How these pictures were produced remains obscure, since there is no evidence that he kept a stock of studies from which to work, as Rubens and other painters are known to have done. Oliver Millar has suggested that Van Dyck must have had ‘ready access to an earlier portrait or perhaps . . . some prime record of a “type”’. To explain the ‘almost verbatim’ repetition of patterns of figures and backgrounds’, he speculates that ‘there could have been a cartoon in the studio of the full length posture and fall of drapery’. Another closely related explanation is offered by tracings made from finished paintings which, a growing body of evidence suggests, were a well-known and widespread means of making copies. Although most studies of tracing have focused on Italy, English sources provide circumstantial descriptions of the practice and account for a good part of what we know about how it was done. When combined with the evidence of the paintings themselves, these descriptions argue strongly for the use of tracings both inside and outside Van Dyck’s studio.

THE FIRST PART of the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard was published in 1968, five years after Ludwig Burchard’s material had arrived in Antwerp. It was then hoped that the entire work would approach completion by 1977. A number of important instalments remain to be published, and there have obviously been delays between completion of manuscript and publication. Gregory Martin states that his text of part XV of the Corpus, which is under review here, records how he felt about his subject in the mid-1990s. Nevertheless, his two volumes are among the most important and distinguished to appear so far, dealing, as they do, with the only one of Rubens’s cycles to remain in situ (Fig.35), set into the framework specially constructed for it: ‘a Ceeling divided into a Frett made of great Cornishes’ at which the visitor could gaze after reading a panegyric that praised James I and the building of the Hall, and described the functions it was built to hold. The history of the building, and the use to which the Hall was to be put, are set out by Martin, who draws to some extent on the work of Per Palme and Simon Thurley. The eventual focus of the room, correctly described by Thurley as a ‘Presence Chamber’, was the king’s throne under its ‘state’, probably first seen when the French ambassador was in London in June 1625.

THE PUBLICATION THAT had the greatest impact on the celebration in 2006 of the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt’s birth appeared in the previous year. This was the fourth volume of the Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings by the Rembrandt Research Project (RRP). This stout volume breaks with the chronological arrangement of the three previous volumes (which took the artist’s career up until 1642) and concentrates on one aspect alone of Rembrandt’s activity as a painter: the self-portraits (including a reassessment of those painted before 1642). Its publication also marks a break with the previous ones in that it is the product of the ‘new’ RRP, led by the one member of the original team to remain in harness, Ernst van de Wetering, who has gathered around him a team of colleagues and assistants. This latest addition is characterised by a substantial revision of the RRP’s previous judgments. The re-examining of past opinions and reconsideration not just of individual works but of entire categories of paintings has been the most striking feature of many of the most important exhibitions of the Rembrandt Year. In certain instances this is, naturally, welcome and yet it is hard to stifle the thought that the gradual refinement of Rembrandt’s painted œuvre should progress in a more stately fashion. As it is, this process has veered sharply from the over-rigorous stance of the first three volumes to the generously inclusive one of the fourth.