more and more frequently associated with white women.
At the same time in England, a country that arrived relatively late to the transatlantic slave trade, a new trend was taking off among refined men: thinness. In English high society, philosophers had started to rethink the meaning of the fat male body. Voluptuousness in women was all well and good; women were but the objects of men’s fancies. Fatness in men signaled a lack of self-control, or dimness. For elite men, slenderness became bodily proof of rationality and intelligence.
2
Plump Women and Thin, Fine Men
Peter Paul Rubens was a dapper sort. Tall and good-looking, he was known by many women as il fiammingo, or the Fleming. The nickname was less a testament to the figure cut by Flemish men in general than to Rubens’s preeminence among them. He dressed like a gentleman and had a certain grace and ease when he galloped about town, a stallion on his steed. His own good looks aside, Rubens was revered for his ability to turn any woman into a “Venus.” His sumptuous paintings of full-bodied nudes were taken as a celebration of real women’s curves, and they made the name Rubens synonymous with the voluptuous aesthetic of the late Renaissance. Even today a full-figured woman is often described as “Rubenesque.” Yet what scholars have often failed to note is that not just any robust woman could fit this description. Along with Rubens’s attraction to fleshiness was a predilection for whiteness. As the artist was to state in his own treatise on beauty, he preferred women whose skin was, as he put it, as “white as snow.”
Rubens’s story helps us to understand the unfolding preference for full-bodied white women in art and literature from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries, particularly in the Dutch Republic and England. The seventeenth century represented a seminal period for each of these states. Each experienced a Golden Age during the era, which coincided with, and was supported by, their emergence as the world’s most powerful slave-trading countries.
Herein, I show that as the slave trade expanded to areas where Africans had been largely absent, the sudden and proliferating presence of black people sparked a simmering and often vocal discomfort. The germinating anti-black sentiment had ramifications for the way black people were represented in art and literature. That is, in the seventeenth century, a “proto-racist” discourse emerged that marked black women and men as unattractive, hypersexual, and diminutive in both size and social status.1 White women were idealized as pure, chaste, and stately.
Figure 2.1. Peter Paul Rubens, The Honeysuckle Bower, 1609. Image courtesy of Art Resource, New York.
Curiously, at the same time that full-figured white women were ascending to the pinnacle of beauty, a visible cadre of well-to-do Englishmen were starting to openly abhor fleshiness in men. Fatness, for English intellectuals, was progressively linked to irrationality. Thinness was seen as more befitting the intelligent, self-possessed white male.
* * *
Rubens was the sixth of seven children. He was born in Siegen, Germany, in 1577. At that time, his father, Jan Rubens, was under house arrest. An avowed Calvinist, Jan had once been an alderman for the city of Antwerp. But nine years earlier, he had fled Antwerp under the threat of religious persecution, landing in Cologne, Germany, in 1568. There he became the chief counselor for Anna of Saxony, a Lutheran princess and wife of governor William of Orange.2 The close relationship between Jan and Anna first drew suspicion, then later charges of sexual indiscretion. Jan was found guilt of adultery and imprisoned in a fortress under royal watch before being released to live in confinement, and under supervision, with his family in 1573.3 He died in 1587, and his long-suffering Catholic wife returned to Antwerp with her four surviving children.4 By the time they arrived, the once vibrant city was a shell of its former self. Jan Rubens’s fear of persecution was apparently warranted: a year before Peter Paul’s birth, the city had suffered a siege. Soldiers working for the Spanish crown had started a riot, setting homes ablaze and massacring tens of thousands of residents.5 A decree reminiscent of those common during the Spanish Inquisition less than a century earlier demanded that those who remained either renounce Protestantism or pick up and leave.
It was in the midst of this social upheaval that the young Peter Paul Rubens found his calling. In Antwerp he was introduced to the Mannerist style, which still maintained its grip on the art world. In 1600 he took his budding talents to Italy, and upon his arrival in Mantua he was promptly retained by the Duke, Vincenzo Gonzaga (great-grandson of Isabella d’Este), and his wife, Eleanor de Medici, as their court painter. But this was not the Mantua of Isabella d’Este’s day. When she was a young woman in the 1490s looking for a young girl “as black as possible,” black people were a novel sight.6 Now, a hundred more years into the African slave trade, they were much more commonplace.7
Rubens had little time to reflect on the African presence in Italy. Shortly after taking up the post of court painter for the Gonzagas, he was sent on a mission by Vincenzo to deliver copies of Raphael’s masterworks to Philip II, king of Spain.8 The stated aim was to put the Mantuan court in the good graces of the fickle young Spanish king. But there was a furtive little side project that made Vincenzo giddily await the artist’s return.
Before his appointment as court painter for the Gonzagas, Rubens had been largely known for his altarpieces, expansive religious mise-en-scènes that were majestic in their depiction of tragedy. Vincenzo was no doubt pleased to have Rubens’s services to animate biblical allegories or dignify members of the court. But the duke was also interested in having Rubens help him round out what was known as his “Gallery of Beauties.”9 The duke had filled his gallery with portraits of young women who had been anointed the best-looking ladies of the court. Part of Rubens’s mission on his circuitous route through Madrid and Paris was to find and set to canvas additional pretty young ladies for the duke’s private collection.10 Rubens did not disappoint on his primary mission, and it is doubtful that he failed to complete his secret side assignment.
That his considerable talent would be devoted to painting handsome young ladies did not deter Rubens from reveling in his new appointment. Lacking the pedigree of the average court official, the artist was pleased to have been given the position, not to mention its attendant salary. Over time, however, his role as one of the many contributors to the duke’s collection of what some deemed “high-end soft-core pornography” would come to distress him.11 In the end, fatigued by his missions and commissions, and dissatisfied with his life in Mantua, Rubens successfully petitioned the duke to be relocated to Rome. There, disillusioned with Vincenzo’s prurient whims, he returned to painting the altarpieces that were the launching pad for his early career.12
Despite his expressed disdain for the duke’s libidinous interest in painted lovelies, it may have been his time in Mantua that led Pietro Paolo Rubens—for his time in Rome led him to Italianize his name—to become fixated with feminine beauty. After his return to Antwerp in 1608, he became more invested in its articulation and portrayal. Arguably, the performance of his duties at Mantua triggered a latent desire to celebrate (or objectify) women’s bodies. And while Rubens was becoming publicly recognized as a gentleman and a scholar, his side commissions contributed to local speculation that he could turn any dowdy duchess into a “Venus” with just a few strokes of his brush.13
Sometime after 1609, when he officially terminated his service in Mantua and became court painter for the Archduke Albert of Brussels, Rubens returned to painting beautiful women. These portraits, however, had the cultural sanction of being elevated. Instead of painting the young maidens he came across at court, he now, like the masters of the High Renaissance, painted ancient goddesses and biblical queens. This was the sort of high art that inspired an admiration of one’s talent.
One work he painted upon his return to Antwerp was The Four Rivers of Paradise (1615). The portrait
