Who painted it? When and where?
This work is the central panel of an altarpiece painted by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) in Antwerp, the city where he grew up. This painting was commissioned in 1618 by the guild of stonemasons for their chapel in the Saint-Gommaire collegiate church in Lier, Belgium. The painting was seized by the French army in 1794 and sent to the Louvre. In 1809 it was transferred to the Dijon museum of Fine arts. The two shutters, seized at the same time, remained in the Louvre and were returned to Lier in 1815.
What can we see?
The iconography of the painting is linked to Saint Francis who, in a vision, receives the Child Jesus from the hands of the Virgin. She is easily identifiable because of the traditional garment colours, the red dress and the blue coat. Saint Francis wears the brown hooded robe attached by a cord, the traditional belt of Capuchin monks, a branch of the Franciscan order. The protagonists, seen slightly from a low angle, are placed in front of a panoramic landscape and a tormented sky.
Rubens and the Baroque movement
This painting testifies to the colourist genius of Rubens: the hair of the Baby Jesus is painted with yellow, pink, blue and green, this mixture comes together in a harmonious way to give a very natural look. If Rubens excels in the mastery of the chromatic scale, where warm tones dominate, he also testifies to an ease in constructing a composition imbued with sobriety, where the movements, postures and looks of the characters are cleverly studied to convey the whole intensity of the subject. The treatment of drapes and skin tones is particularly successful.
Much admired in France, Rubens is one of the greatest Flemish painters of the seventeenth century. The Museum of Fine Arts of Dijon has three other religious works by Rubens, which show that the artist marked the Nordic Baroque movement and imposed the supremacy of color on drawing.
Pierre-Paul Rubens was considered one of the emblematic figures of the Baroque movement. Baroque art, that developed from the middle of the XVIth century until the end of the XVIIIth century, was one of the most important European artistic movements. It was present in architecture, dancing, literature, music, sculpture and painting. The word “barroco” was pejorative and referred to the “irregularity” of a pearl. This word was representative of the features of baroque painting, which emphasises emotions, movement and vitality by the use of intense light and shadows, dramatic perspectives, and sometimes exuberant colours.
In 1671, a debate broke out at the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris, to find out if drawing or colour was more important in painting. Poussinnists (Poussinistes), named after the classic painter Nicolas Poussin, prioritized drawing, and “Rubenists” (Rubénistes) argued that colour was the most essential element.
As we can guess in Rubens’ paintings, baroc artists used vivid colours in their compositions such as red, green, blue. They developed strong contrasts between cold and warm colours, lights and shadows, creating intense and dynamical compositions flooded by colours and movements. That is why, giving priority to rich and contrasting colours, with vaporous contours and dynamic touch, they were opposed to classical painters. That is why Rubens represented the superiority of colours to drawing.
This strong debate about the importance of colours and drawings highlights the prominence of colours, their use and their meanings in occidental modern art.
Pierre-Paul Rubens, La Vierge présente l’Enfant Jésus à saint François d’Assise, huile sur toile, 1618, Transfert de l'Etat à la Ville de Dijon, à titre gratuit : Musée du Louvre, Paris –Dépôt de l'État de 1809, transfert définitif de propriété à la Ville de Dijon, arrêté du Ministre de la Culture du 15 septembre 2010. © Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon/Hugo Martens, inv. CA 163
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