Guided Pathway

The ways in which the chaotic aftermath of civil war can be controlled if the opportune moment to make peace is seized are the subject of Rubens’ oil sketch, “The Hero Seizes the Occasion of Peace” (#6) (c. 1628 / 1630) and Rembrandt’s “Ship of Fortune” (#8) (etching, 1623, in Joost van den Vondel’s Der Zee-Vaert Lof, but reprinted for the verse history of Dutch commerce and exploration of the same title (1634) by the geographer and explorer, Elias Herckmans, 1596-1644). Rubens’ sketch was commissioned in 1622 by Marie de Medici, the widow of Henry IV, King of France (Henry of Navarre, 1553-1610) for the Palais du Luxembourg in Paris some years after the king’s murder; while it is ostensibly the allegorical male figure on the right to whom our attention ought to be drawn here, it is visually the female figure of peace, holding Occasio’s forelock firmly in her right hand, who anchors and stabilizes the oil sketch, creating harmony out of the opposing sides of France’s ongoing religious wars – or at least so would Marie de Medici have had Rubens create the memory of her slain husband as “hero.” It nevertheless must not escape our attention that, in the lower half of the picture, Rubens has placed the allegorical goddess, Vigilantia, who holds a rough club in her right hand; the image suggests that only violence can guarantee peace. The message is confirmed by the eagle to Vigilantia’s right; it clutches the mythical thunderbolts by which the king of the gods, Zeus, keeps the peace. Rembrandt’s “Ship of Fortune” etching (#8) echoes Rubens’ oil sketch by capturing another example of civil conflict ended by force, namely, the triumph secured by the dominant male figure of the image, Octavian, Augustus Caesar, whose defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at the horrifically destructive Battle of Actium was the necessary prelude to the shutting of Doors of the Temple of Janus (visible above Augustus’ head) after decades of Roman civil war. On the right, “Fortuna” perches on the prow of a ship that signifies both the bounty that the Augustan Golden Age was to bring and the future plentitude of Rembrandt’s Dutch commerce if victory over the Spanish can be secured.