In autumn 2022, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp reopened its doors after an 11-year-long renovation. Yet even after the top-to-bottom refurbishment, which added considerable gallery space at a price tag of $105 million, there was still work to do.
The beating heart of the Royal Museum — the premier collection of Flemish art in Belgium known by its Dutch acronym, KMSKA, which originally opened in 1890 — is the room commonly referred to as the Rubens Gallery, positioned at the top of the museum’s imposing inner staircase.
Under its nearly 50-foot-tall ceiling, the gallery houses monumental altarpieces painted by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), the master of the Flemish baroque. “It’s the largest room of the old museum and was actually conceived especially to show Rubens’s works,” explained Koen Bulckens, curator of 16th- and 17th-century art at the museum.
Because of both their size and their age, the altarpieces could not be taken out of the museum during the building’s recent overhaul. Instead, they were stowed underneath the Rubens Gallery in an internal art depot that was built on the site of a Cold War-era bomb shelter between 2011 and 2013 as part of the first phase of the museum’s full-scale renovation.
Last autumn, restorers began work on the largest altarpiece by Rubens housed at the museum, “Enthroned Madonna Adored by Saints” (circa 1628), a dynamic composition that shows the Virgin Mary, with the Christ child on her lap, and her husband Joseph behind her, surrounded by 14 additional saints; it was commissioned to decorate the high altar of Antwerp’s Augustinian church. In its frame, the painting measures nearly 20 feet tall and 15 feet wide; it weighs close to 800 pounds. Because the mammoth work cannot leave the gallery, the restoration — projected to last until September 2025 — is being carried out in full view of the museum’s visitors in a makeshift studio that takes up roughly a quarter of the space in the Rubens Gallery.
In early February, restorers were painstakingly removing varnish to reveal the original brilliance of Rubens’s colors. Kayla Metelenis, a 30-year-old graduate of the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, currently in Antwerp on a Fulbright scholarship, was working square inch by square inch to strip the canvas, hung on its side, of the thick, yellowish varnish with the aid of a cloth tissue soaked in solvent.
“There was a restoration intervention in the 1960s — the first documented restoration — and we know that a lot of varnish was applied at that time. Prior to that, it’s a little more hazy,” Ms. Metelenis explained. “So it’s probably a buildup of quite a bit of varnish, and that’s why it’s so thick. And there’s also a significant amount of dirt on the surface,” she said, adding that they hoped to make it to the midway point in the painting by the end of February.
The difference between the glossy, varnished portion of the canvas and the matte areas where the varnish had been stripped away was striking. A billowing fabric on the Madonna’s lap turned from a murky green to a vibrant blue. The background also cleared up. It was still overcast, more Flemish than Mediterranean, but the sky underneath the clouds was now azure rather than gray. After the canvas is thoroughly cleaned and damaged areas are discreetly filled in, a new varnish will be applied to re-saturate and protect the surface. “The colors, they are beautiful now, but a varnish will actually make them deeper and richer,” Mr. Bulckens said.
When the restoration is finished on the “Enthroned Madonna,” the museum’s team will move on to “The Adoration of the Magi” (circa 1624), a nearly 15-foot-tall altarpiece famous for the pair of camels smiling in the background. “The Adoration” is also a fully autographed work, meaning that Rubens painted it entirely himself. Admiring the wooden panel painting, Mr. Bulckens said it took the artist about two weeks to execute.
A fascinating contrast to these gargantuan paintings is “Black on White,” the museum’s intimate show of Rubens’s prints that is on view until May 12. The more than 60 engravings, etchings and woodcuts that make up the presentation in the intimate and dimly-lit print room represent less than a tenth of the Royal Museum’s holdings of prints by the Flemish master.
Not only was Rubens an artistic genius, he was also a shrewd businessman and self-promoter. During his lifetime, he commissioned numerous prints based on his paintings. These works on paper circulated with greater ease than his canvases could (especially the large altarpieces) and played a crucial role in spreading Rubens’s reputation as one of the leading artists of his age. Etchings, engravings, and woodcuts were among the reproducible media of the 17th century. But nothing could have been farther from the artist’s mind than using printmaking technology to make cheap black-and-white copies of his work.
As “Black on White” reveals, Rubens was exacting about the prints that circulated during his lifetime and exerted tremendous artistic control over them to ensure the highest quality reproductions. He chose his engravers, etchers, and woodcutters with great care, collaborated closely with them and occasionally drove them crazy.
Unusually, the exhibition is ordered not chronologically or thematically, but by printmaker.
Lucas Vorsterman, one of Rubens’s first engravers, is represented by a series of prints of religious and biblical figures, including “Susanna and the Elders” and “The Stigmatization of St. Francis of Assisi,” engravings from 1620 that show a remarkable range of tone and shading. Two years later, Rubens’s relationship with Vorsterman ended abruptly. Lizet Klaassen, a research curator at the Royal Museum who helped put the show together, said no one knew exactly what happened; there were rumors, however, that Vorsterman was so fed up with Rubens’s orders that he attacked the artist with a burin, a needlelike engraver’s tool.
“He was a terrible boss,” Ms. Klaassen said of Rubens. “But in another way, the craftsmanship of the engraver together with the artistic directions of Rubens made both of them grow,” she said.
In addition to Vorsterman, who eventually reconciled with Rubens, the Royal Museum’s exhibition highlights Vorsterman’s disciple, the master engraver Paulus Pontius.
Rubens also had a particular affinity for woodcuts, a technique that was considered outdated by the early 17th century, according to Ms. Klaassen. Part of his attraction to woodcuts was the respect Rubens felt for the Venetian Renaissance master Titian, who had used the medium to reproduce his paintings. Pointing to the stylistic similarities between the woodcuts of Titian’s paintings and those that Rubens commissioned from the woodcutter Christoffel Jegher, Ms. Klaassen suggested that it shows “Rubens competing with Titian,” even though the Italian artist died a year before Rubens was born.
A series of three states, or proofs, of “The Rest on the Flight into Egypt” (circa 1633-36) contain numerous small changes and corrections that illustrate how closely Rubens and Jegher collaborated. Walking around the exhibition, these prints strike a contemporary viewer as artistic masterpieces on their own, not merely old-fashioned copies of Rubens’s grander, full-color compositions. However, Ms. Klaassen warned that Rubens, although personally invested in these prints, would likely not have considered them as works of art.
“We mainly think about these prints in terms of money, because they were expensive,” she said, adding that artistic considerations would have likely been secondary to financial ones for Rubens.
“It was perfect P.R.,” she added.
