Peter Paul Rubens acted on an international stage of grand proportions. His journeys, together with his massive output and universal interests, reflect a life of exceptional scope. Born in Germany and raised in the Southern Netherlands, Rubens traveled throughout the continent and England as both artist and diplomat. A life so rich in variety and achievement is not easily encompassed in a monograph. A catalogue raisonnée of Rubens’s works has required twenty-seven volumes of the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, categorized by series, subjects, and commissions and written by a small army of scholars. Rubens’s life and work have also been variously cross-sectioned in thematic studies, such as those that focus on his travels, for example, Michael Jaffé’s Rubens and Italy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977) and Alexander Vergara’s Rubens and His Spanish Patrons (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Fiona Donovan’s Rubens and England examines a period in Rubens’s life marked by the creation of the great painted ceiling of the Royal Banqueting House at Whitehall and also by his involvement in complex political negotiations among England, France, and Spain. As Donovan points out in her introduction, the specifics of Rubens’s dealings with English collectors, the Stuart court, and his diplomatic efforts during a nine-month stay in England in 1629–30 had never before been examined in depth nor integrated with other studies of Stuart patronage and collecting. The first comprehensive synthesis of this material, Rubens and England offers an important contribution.

The introduction establishes Rubens’s role as a diplomatic agent, which derived from his position as court painter to the Archduchess Isabella, governor of the Southern Netherlands and aunt of Philip IV of Spain. Anticipating the book’s emphases, Donovan notes the central importance of the Whitehall commission and its development amid the growing cultural refinement of the Stuart court. Chapters 1 and 2, “Painting and Politics: Rubens and England in the 1610s and 1620s” and “Continental Culture at the Early Stuart Court,” concern the prelude to the Whitehall commission. Rubens’s contacts with English patrons, such as Sir Dudley Carleton, were already well developed in the teens, and by 1620 Rubens was well known at court. His diplomatic activities on behalf of the Archduchess Isabella, beginning in 1621, focused on efforts to negotiate a peace treaty between England and Spain that would also benefit both the Northern and Spanish Netherlands. Here we see the artist’s political and artistic activities mesh. The dramatic narrative involves Rubens’s eight-month stay in Madrid (1628–29) at the behest of Philip IV, during which time he copied Titian’s paintings in the royal collection while also undertaking delicate peace negotiations. For a reader possessing some familiarity with the relevant political allegiances and chronology, Donovan successfully details Rubens’s role in this complex international scene.

In fascinating detail, Donovan shows how Henry, Prince of Wales (1594–1612)—James I’s older son—paved the way for a sophisticated court culture in the 1610s and 1620s, one that contrasted with the intellectual but less worldly court of his father. Despite his youth, Henry was a cultural leader who increased awareness of the visual arts in England, thanks in part to easier access to Continental works of art. Henry bought paintings directly from Italy, sometimes through a network of agents and diplomats, which included Carleton, a skilled connoisseur. This model proved to be essential for Henry’s younger brother, Charles. After Henry’s premature death in 1612 at age eighteen, the network remained active on behalf of other Stuart collectors, including Thomas Howard, Second Earl of Arundel, who amassed a collection unique in England for its quality, breadth, and depth.

Matters of artistic theory and style seem peripheral to Donovan’s interest in historical narrative. For example, she documents the growth of Charles I’s extraordinary collection of European paintings with copious information about his purchases, his agents and courtiers, and the gifts that came his way. Charles surrounded himself with such connoisseurs and advisors as Inigo Jones, Arundel, Endymion Porter, and Sir Kenelm Digby. The Stuart court embraced foreign artists like Daniel Mytens, Gerrit van Honthorst, and Orazio Gentileschi, a prelude to the arrival of Rubens and Anthony Van Dyck. Such factual reporting is the strongest feature of the book. When it comes to pictorial style in England in the early seventeenth century, however, the discussion is less satisfying. Donovan considers the new naturalism in English painting and the concomitant abandonment of mannerist conventions of display without pursuing how these developments were an important bridge to the reception of Rubens’s dynamic style.

In chapter 3, “Envoy and Artist 1629–1630: Rubens in England,” Donovan surveys political and artistic events during Rubens’s stay, from June 1629 to March 1630. By September 1629, with negotiations complete for the exchange of English and Spanish ambassadors, Rubens was free to explore contacts with patrons and collectors. Moving in the highest social circles, he pursued his antiquarian interests and visited collections, including that of the Duke of Buckingham. He painted portraits of Arundel and others, but significantly not of Charles I. Most importantly, Rubens realized the commission for the Whitehall ceiling, the dramatic center of Donovan’s narrative.

Chapter 4, “The Banqueting House at Whitehall,” is devoted to the planning, design, and construction of the building itself as well as the commission for the ceiling. In 1621, a year before construction was completed, Rubens had already expressed interest in working in Jones’s “New Palace” (letter to William Trumbull, English resident to the court in Brussels). Donovan describes events of the 1620s that culminated in the choice of Rubens, noting the importance of two documents in the papers of Sir John Coke, secretary of state to Charles I, which provide clues to the ceiling’s commission and program. (It would have been helpful to have these documents available in an appendix.) The first evidence of Rubens’s success in winning the commission is the so-called Glynde sketch (ca. 1630; London, National Gallery), which lays out the design for seven of the ceiling’s nine sections as well as the overall plan. The canvases, completed in 1634, were shipped in two cases to London the following year and installed by 1636.

Donovan focuses on the ceiling itself in chapter 5. Considering each of the nine paintings in turn, she discusses Rubens’s sources, his oil sketches, and other relevant works, in particular their iconographic significance for the Stuart monarchy. In a section headed “Myth, Personification and Contemporary History,” she addresses the interpretive challenge the ceiling presents, given the “relatively non-specific character” (135) of Rubens’s imagery. She concludes that Rubens’s personifications “are primarily open-ended, permitting meanings justified by some evidence, but perhaps never proven” (135). When considering Rubens’s role in developing the overall program, adumbrated in the Coke documents, Donovan suggests an informal, conversational process between Rubens and Charles I, with Jones playing an advisory role and Rubens taking final responsibility. She might well be on the right track. But this logic does not necessarily justify the strategy she calls “interpretive indeterminacy” (8). For example, she finds “The Union of the Crowns” topical but more generalized than do other scholars, who interpret—to my mind persuasively—the figure of the child as the infant Charles I. Rejecting any specific identification for the child, Donovan posits instead a “large range of associations” (111). This solution paradoxically proves more limiting than that of scholars who assess Rubens’s multiple resonances as enriching complexity within an expansive but defined conception.

Indeed, one of the challenges Donovan faced was integrating her views with the weighty scholarship that preceded her. In some cases she might have referenced earlier material more effectively to strengthen and refine her points. For example, in discussing Michelangelo’s prophets as precedents for the figure of James in “The Peaceful Reign of James I,” she writes: “Rubens must have had in mind the similarly posed Delphic sibyl of Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling, also accompanied by a child” (100–1). But as Julius Held noted, agile children appear behind each prophet and sibyl, and in fact there is a close formal analogy between the child in Rubens’s scene and the youth next to Ezekiel in Michelangelo’s fresco (Julius S. Held, The Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980], 1:195). Rubens’s evident dependence on Michelangelo, then, is not a matter of simply adopting a motif but rather of amalgamating several into a new formulation.

The final chapter, “Art and Politics,” is a summary in which Donovan reflects on political motivations for the choice of Rubens and for the thematic emphasis on James I. She concludes that the Whitehall commission served political ends for both Charles I and the lifelong advocate of diplomacy, Rubens. Finally, gauging the effects of the ceiling on seventeenth-century viewers, Donovan surveys changing forms of cultural expression in the English court from the late sixteenth century to 1649, when Charles I was beheaded on scaffolding outside the Banqueting House.

The book is beautifully produced, with a handsome, nearly square format. The wealth of illustrations is particularly valuable. If only editing had received comparable attention. For this reader, the use of commas, so important in shaping ideas, created confusion rather than clarification. Rubens’s friend Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc is accorded his full name only in the index. Some page numbers in the index are out of sequence. Attention to such matters would have produced a more distinguished book. As it is, Donovan has revealed an immensely complex web of characters, political schemes, and artistic endeavor in one of the richest chapters of Rubens’s life.