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The tradition of artists using nude models goes back to antiquity. As a rule, women practicing the world's oldest profession were invited to pose. Thus, the Athenian sculptor Praxiteles modeled his famous Aphrodite on the courtesan Phryne. The beautiful Simonetta Vespucci, mistress of the Medici brothers Giuliano and Lorenzo, served as the model for Botticelli's The Birth of Venus. And the fickle daughter of a Roman baker, known as La Fornarina, drove the great Raphael mad. He bought the girl from her family for 3,000 gold coins, and she remained his lover and model until the artist's death. Yet she was hardly faithful to Raphael.
Medieval artists, too, paid tribute to the omnipotence of Venus, despite the Catholic Church's strict control over public morality. Fear of religious persecution forced them to conceal their true thoughts behind a mask of piety. That was why eroticism in sculpture and painting was combined with religious and historical subjects.
The fact that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the creative process ended in intimacy between the artist and his model is a classic example of an open secret. Unfortunately, cases of artists dying from venereal diseases, possibly contracted in such circumstances, were not uncommon either. Well, every profession has its risks.
But there were happy exceptions. Rembrandt's model, for instance, was his wife Saskia. They were almost the same age when they joined their lives. The artist adored his wife and frequently portrayed her in his paintings. Yet his only nude depiction of Saskia, the famous Danaë, was painted not for sale but for his own home. The painting remained with him after her death, until his bankruptcy and the inventory of his possessions in 1656. Only then did the precious canvas leave his studio. Rembrandt could never have imagined that strangers would one day gaze upon the image of his naked wife. Incidentally, he rarely painted nudes at all; the inner world of human beings interested him far more.
Rubens was quite another matter. The artist himself explained his passion for depicting the nude by saying that 'the human body is just as much a creation of God as the life of any saint.' But when studying his biography, one cannot fail to notice that his paintings of naked female bodies ended up in the possession of Europe's most powerful aristocrats. Among the passionate admirers of Rubens's eroticism and his regular patrons were the notorious womanizers of the age: Louis XIII, the Duke of Buckingham, King Charles I of England, King Philip IV of Spain, members of the Medici clan, and many other European aristocrats. Even His Eminence Cardinal Richelieu, himself a great admirer of the pleasures of Venus in his spare time, acquired Rubens's erotic works. So, most likely, painting nudes was simply how the artist earned his living. Early in his career, during the so-called Italian period, Rubens employed professional models. Back home in Antwerp, however, the master used his young wife, Helena Fourment, as his model.
Art historians studying the great Flemish painter's biography and legacy have somehow given little thought to this woman. Yet she remained a standard of beauty for centuries. Surely her personality and fate deserve attention? One need not be an art historian or historian to discover strange details in the relationship between Rubens and Helena.
Several dozen paintings by Rubens are known from the years of their marriage, including The Judgment of Paris, The Three Graces, Venus in a Fur Coat (also called Helena in a Fur Coat), The Garden of Love, Venus and Adonis, The Consequences of War, Perseus and Andromeda, and Angelica and the Hermit. In all these canvases, the nude female figure was modeled on Helena. Did she pose naked in the studio, or did the artist paint his wife from memory? The answer is crucial to understanding the situation. Rubens had about a hundred pupils. He was extremely popular, and painters came from all over Europe to study his art. Here is an extract from a letter to a friend in which Rubens complained that he could not accept everyone who wished to study with him: 'I am so besieged by requests from every side that some pupils have been waiting for several years under other masters until I can receive them... I can say with complete truthfulness and without the slightest exaggeration that I have been obliged to reject more than a hundred candidates, including relatives of mine and of my wife, thereby causing deep displeasure among some of my best friends.'
Receiving commissions from the royal houses of Europe, Rubens was a wealthy man who could afford to build himself a villa in central Antwerp, with an entire floor devoted to his studio. There was always at least one pupil in the room, including during the hours when Helena posed. Does it not seem strange that a husband would undress his wife in the presence of other men? What did each participant in this scene feel? What did Helena herself feel? She was known to be the daughter of a respectable citizen, brought up strictly to respect bourgeois morality, family values, and, of course, religion. After all, this was Antwerp, a city belonging to the Spanish Crown, where the Reformation was not tolerated and Catholicism was practiced in its harshest and most hypocritical forms. And suddenly this? Undressing before her husband was something a strict Catholic might perhaps accept, but in front of strange men? And what would happen afterward, when the finished painting took its place in a patron's house and he proudly showed it to his guests? What would they think of the artist's wife, and of the artist himself? Perhaps she tried not to think about it.
Interestingly, Rubens himself saw no great problem. Consider these lines from a letter written by an intermediary to King Philip IV, an ardent admirer and regular patron of Rubens, concerning the shipment of The Judgment of Paris, commissioned by the king: 'Rubens's paintings are being sent with this courier. The Judgment of Paris is finished. Because of its very large size, it cannot be sent by the government courier, but we shall send it by ordinary post. In the opinion of all the painters, it is Rubens's finest work. There is only one fault, which it has proved impossible to persuade Rubens to correct: the excessive nudity of the three goddesses. He says it must be so, otherwise the power of painting would not be apparent. Venus, the middle goddess, is a very faithful portrait of his own wife, and she is undoubtedly the best thing in the picture.'
So the artist was not in the least embarrassed that strangers—the courtiers and guests of the Spanish king—would admire his naked wife. The intermediary's attempts to persuade him to cover up the nudity achieved nothing.
Here is another curious detail. Rubens's productivity was enormous: he created more than a thousand paintings. He could not possibly have done all that alone. Some of his pupils must have assisted him, completing details. After all, every fold of luxurious female flesh in Rubens's paintings is meticulously rendered. Does that mean his pupils were intimately familiar with his wife's body, knowing every curve of her magnificent thighs and every dimple in her buttocks? What must Helena have felt when, looking after the household or playing with her children, she heard young painters on the other side of the wall discussing intimate parts of her figure?
We shall never know what really happened in house number 9 on Wapper Street in Antwerp. Biographers prefer not to touch upon Rubens's relationship with his wife, treating it as an entirely private matter. I have allowed myself to examine the problem from a sexual and psychological perspective. I began with the biography of Rubens the elder, the artist's father. It is known that the lawyer Jan Rubens was expelled from his native Antwerp for his adherence to the ideas of the Reformation. Digging deeper, I discovered that his ideological convictions were merely the formal pretext for exile. In reality, Rubens the elder had seriously offended the city's influential husbands through his affairs with their wives. But punishment taught the womanizer nothing. While living in exile in Cologne, he began an intimate relationship with Anna of Saxony, the wife of William of Orange. The princess became pregnant, the affair became public knowledge, and Rubens the elder ended up behind bars. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, does it?
Next. Reading Rubens's private letters gives us an idea of his moral character. Here, for example, is a passage from a letter to a friend in which he explains why he decided to marry again: 'I did not yet feel mature enough for abstinence and celibacy; our life is too short! Is it right, then, to put mortification of the flesh first? I took a young wife, the daughter of honest citizens... And to tell the truth, it would have been hard to surrender the precious treasure of freedom in exchange for the kisses of an old woman.'
So he chose Helena because she was beautiful and young: the girl had barely turned sixteen when the fifty-three-year-old master asked for her hand. Or did he also choose her because her simplicity and innocence made her unlikely to resist his wishes?
Another fact requires explanation. For some reason, the artist never depicted his first wife, the high-foreheaded professor's daughter Isabella Brant, naked—only fully dressed. She bore him three children and died of the plague at the age of thirty-four. After her death, Rubens wrote: 'I have lost a truly good wife, whom one had every right, indeed every reason, to love, because she possessed none of the negative qualities usually attributed to the female sex. She was neither quarrelsome nor given to the usual feminine whims, always well behaved and cheerful. For these qualities she was loved by everyone and mourned after her death.' There is little sense of passionate love in these lines, only dry respect! And one would hardly display a woman one respects so deeply naked before a crowd of men, would one? Does that mean the painter felt no such respect for his second wife, Helena, 'the daughter of honest citizens'?
And finally, the last and perhaps most important detail of this story: after her husband's death, Helena tried to burn all the paintings depicting her, but friends managed to stop her at the last moment. Was this a belated outburst of prudish modesty? Fear for her future and that of her children? Under Rubens's will, she was to inherit his entire art collection, sell it, and live on the proceeds. But one must remember that in the seventeenth century, even a woman with enough money to live on had virtually no social rights and needed male protection. Helena must have understood that she would inevitably have to marry again, and that the burden of her nude portraits would make that difficult. Perhaps that is why she tried to destroy them. An impulsive but pointless act, considering that only a few paintings remained in the studio. Most of her husband's works had already been sold, and Europe's enlightened aristocracy had been able to admire her buttocks on the walls of their palaces for years.
Or was it an act of revenge by innocence humiliated for years? Was she a frivolous coquette who willingly took part in men's sexual games, or an embodiment of purity who had fallen into the clutches of an old libertine? A voiceless, naive victim of her famous, dissolute husband? His sex slave? Could this be the tragic reality of her fate, the secret concealed behind the luxury of those precious canvases?
Despite her dubious fame—or perhaps because of it—Helena Fourment did not remain a widow for long. She married again, bore five children, and lived to the age of sixty. She left no memoirs, and no letters in her own hand have survived. We shall therefore never know her secret.
Nor would she ever know:
that her name would enter the history of humanity forever;
that she would become the ideal of beauty known as the 'Rubenesque woman';
that the paintings she tried to burn would one day be worth vast sums of money, although they cannot be bought because they have long belonged to museums and are unlikely ever to change hands.
But if we consider that Rubens's recently discovered, previously unattributed painting The Massacre of the Innocents sold for a record $76 million—the highest price ever paid for an Old Master—we can imagine that paintings depicting the naked Helena would fetch several hundred million each if they were put up for sale.
Only in the twentieth century did skinny models with a strictly prescribed waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7 replace the hundred-kilogram Flemish beauty. But the course of history is unpredictable, and who knows? Perhaps Helena Fourment, who served as the ideal of female beauty for three centuries, will one day return to her pedestal.