Anthony Van Dyck by Robin Blake

Author:Robin Blake
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781461718260
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee

CHAPTER TWENTY

Altars and Angels

VAN DYCK’S 1629 pen and wash sketch [3 4] of the scene at Golgotha shows the cross rearing up against a violent, blackened, storm-laden sky. The attenuated, now almost lifeless body hangs from it, the head slumped sideways, the weight seemingly too much for the thin, nailed arms. Mary Magdalene clings pathetically to the base of the cross, kissing the dying Christ’s feet.

It is the moment at which Jesus is suddenly overwhelmed by thirst and summons the strength to say so. His mother, standing left with the apostle John, raises her arm to beg the soldiers to give her son water. But the mounted Roman officer has already heard Christ speak and he turns in the saddle to detail a spear-carrier standing behind him. As the officer’s horse jinks, startled, if not by the terrible pain in the voice of Christ, then by the whole charged atmosphere of the place, the officer orders the fellow to soak a sponge in sour wine and hold it to the condemned man’s lips on a spear’s point. It was a kindness for which the soldier’s name is remembered in mythology as Stephaton.

Of all the hundreds of sketches and drawings to have survived by Van Dyck, this is a personal favourite of mine. It shows Christ within a few pain-racked shudders of his last breath in that dark afternoon – an end both ignominious and momentous. The measure of the drawing’s achievement is that it can bring these two aspects of the event together, just as it can combine a rare intensity of emotion with a line so fluent that it seems preternaturally charged with grace.1

The drawing was done at the summit of Van Dyck’s skill as a religious artist, which he reached during a sustained residence in his home city following the return from Italy. The lure of home may have been more than just that of sorting out family business. The disgrace of having absconded from London seven years earlier had been wiped from the record by the death of James VI & I in 1625. But, more importantly, Rubens was increasingly involved in political work and was too busy to fulfil all the commissions that flooded into his studio. Van Dyck knew there would be commissions going around worthy of his now much-expanded reputation.

Despite this clear opportunity, there is an old story that Van Dyck found it difficult to get commissions in the days immediately after his return home, because he found himself, as legend has never tired of repeating, still overshadowed – or overawed – by his master. ‘Like the full moon among the stars,’ exclaims one of Van Dyck’s popular biographers of the nineteenth century, ‘the renown of Rubens extinguished every lesser light.’2 According to this account, Rubens helped his former pupil get on his feet by buying up all his unsold canvases.

Such an act of charity would not have been out of character for Rubens, but is extremely unlikely in this case. Van Dyck may

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