Its owner hated it so much that in 1973 she loaned it to a monastery in northern Austria. He wanted to lose sight of that mammoth eyesore (1.42 x 1.82 m) painted by Jan van den Hoecke, an obscure assistant in Rubens’ workshop. The monks did not treat the work with much affection either, which ended up hanging high up in a dark hallway.
At some point at the beginning of this millennium, the almost nonagenarian owner, whose identity was never revealed, expressed her interest in permanently getting rid of the piece. She set in motion one of the biggest snowballs in the history of the art market: a painting that was barely valued at half a million pounds became worth six when it was attributed to Rubens. And it was sold for almost fifty (about eighty million euros at the exchange rate) in July 2002.
The Massacre of the Innocents (1609-11) was until 2017 – with the award of the Salvator Mundi for 430 million euros – the most expensive painting by the Grand Master (pre-19th century artist) ever sold at auction. No public sale had even come close to half its price. Works of this age and quality usually live in museums, and their release to the market was quite an event.
The winner of the bloody bidding match was Kenneth Thomson, Baron Thomson of Fleet, a Canadian media entrepreneur and the richest man in his country at the time of his death in 2006. Before his death, he had bequeathed to the Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto, a treasure of two thousand works of art, including The Massacre and some anatomical drawings by Rubens that, perhaps, evolved into the figures on the canvas.
The chain reaction that ended in such a monetary explosion was set in motion by a Dutch relative of the owner. After learning that she wanted to sell the board, he went to the Austrian monastery of Stift Reichersberg, where she was dozing, took a photograph of her and took it to the Sotheby’s headquarters in Amsterdam. From there they forwarded the image by email to the firm’s London headquarters for George Gordon to take a look at.
This Grand Master specialist had a hunch, which is the mother of all discoveries of abandoned treasures in attics. He traveled to Austria, looked at the work by the light of a flashlight and, although he did not have any signature, he knew that he was looking at a Rubens. Reports from several experts confirmed his suspicions.
Peter Paul Rubens (Siegen, present-day Germany, 1577-Antwerp, 1640) is believed to have executed The Massacre in his early thirties, having recently returned to Antwerp after eight years in Italy, where he had worked for the Duke of Mantua. The influences that he had brought with him are perfectly recognizable in the panel: the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio and the muscular monumentality of Michelangelo. Another Rubens from the same period and similar characteristics, Samson and Delilah, resident in the National Gallery in London, was used to authenticate The Massacre.
The fleshy, thoroughly Rubensian style of The Three Graces had not yet emerged, but The Massacre, with its “complex composition of brilliantly orchestrated and intertwined figures, marked the advent of the Baroque in northern Europe,” as the Art Gallery of Ontario describes .
Such a milestone explains, in part, the hefty price paid for it. Another very important detail that justifies the money is that, at that time, Rubens had not yet opened his workshop, one of the most productive of all time, so The Massacre is his work and his alone.
Rubens’ efficient workshop, where the brushstrokes of master and pupils were seamlessly fused, has been responsible for numerous attribution muddles over the centuries, including this one.
The first documentary trace of The Massacre dates back to the end of the 17th century, when it hung over a fireplace in the home of the Carennas, Milanese financiers living in Antwerp. At that time it was considered a Rubens, and as such it was purchased around 1700 by Prince Johann Adam Andreas I of Liechtenstein.
In the early 19th century, The Massacre graced the princely family’s Gartenpalais (now the Liechtenstein Museum) in Vienna, except it was no longer a Rubens. In the mid-18th century, any unusual Rubens, which differed too much from the painter’s mature style, was foisted on Van den Hoecke, and so did the Liechtensteins. There were no regrets for losing a Rubens: Vienna lived in the latest wave of Rococo, and the baroque of The Massacre could not be more out of fashion.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Liechtensteins’ gigantic art collection was run with a heavy hand by Prince Johann II, a modest scholar with an allergy to nudes. He got rid of The Massacre by selling it to the family of the lady with whom we began this story.
The board spent some time in an office in Salzburg, until, fed up, the owners removed it to a warehouse. So little love, so much rejection, in short, the ignorance that a Rubens was hiding there, saved the life of The Massacre: the office he had decorated ended up turned into a pulp under the Allied bombs.
This text is part of an article published in number 527 of the magazine Historia y Vida. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
