Spectacular Rubens

Spectacular Rubens: The Triumph of the Eucharist edited by Alejandro Vergara and Anne T Woollett, 81 pages

This is not, as some might think, a cookbook about constructing the most spectacular Ruben sandwiches, but rather an analysis of a series of tapestries designed by Peter Paul Rubens for the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales, the Poor Clare "Convent of the Barefoot Royals" in Madrid.  It was to this convent that Rubens' patroness, the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia, half-sister of Phillip III of Spain and ruler of the Spanish Netherlands, intended to retire after the death of her husband, although political necessity required that she remain in the Low Countries.

The exhibition which occasioned this book reunited six of Rubens' painted models with four of the finished tapestries.  The tapestries were primarily designed for use as hangings in the convent chapel on the feast of Corpus Christi, the annual celebration of the mystery of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, a feast with great political and devotional significance to the Habsburgs particularly and to the Church in general during the Reformation.  Rubens crafted a masterwork of baroque illusion, integrating a sense of movement mirroring that of the Corpus Christi procession, framing his scenes with exotic pillars suggesting a fantastic architecture within the real chapel walls, and creating fictive tapestries within the real tapestries. implying multiple layers of reality like those of substance and accident.

As with any art book, it is the illustrations that matter most, and these are spectacular.  The text is neither overly dull nor uninformative, detailing the commission, preparation, construction, and arrangement of the tapestries, and it does not sneer at the religious beliefs of the artists and their patron.