BLOOD AS PAINT: RUBENS, GUIDO RENI, AND PARRHASIUSAuthor(s): Norman E. LandSource: Source: Notes in the History of Art, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Winter 2012), pp. 22-23Published by: Ars Brevis Foundation, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23208932 .

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BLOOD AS PAINT: RUBENS, GUIDO RENI, AND PARRHASIUS

Norman E. Land

In his book on Peter Paul Rubens (1577— 1640), Gustav Friedrich Waagen (1797— 1868), an art historian and director of the Berlin Museum of Art, refers to the manner in which the Flemish painter depicted human figures. Waagen writes that Rubens's

depicted flesh has "a vivid transparency of tone" and "a glow of life." He then says, without citing a source, that he is not sur

prised that the Bolognese painter Guido Reni (1575-1642) "should have been struck with wonder upon beholding a picture of Rubens for the first time." Indeed, Waagen continues, Guido's wonder was so intense

that he exclaimed, "Does this painter mix blood with his colours?"1 There is no proof that Guido ever actually asked the question; the anecdote is probably a fiction. In any case, his exclamation echoes all those Re naissance and Baroque authors and connois seurs who praise "the living flesh" of countless figures by various artists.

Giorgio Vasan, in his Lives of the

Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (Flor ence: 1568), provides an unusual example of the association of blood, flesh, and paint. In his vita of the Florentine painter Mariotto Albertinelli (1474-1515), Vasari says that the artist, who was a lover and a gourmand, at one point in his career grew to hate the art of painting and the constant censure of critics. He, therefore, abandoned that pro fession to open an osteria, or restaurant, out side the Porta San Gallo and an osteria and tavern on the Ponte Vecchio. As Albertinelli

explained, "The art he had given up was

quite the contrary of his new one, since the former imitated flesh and blood, and the lat ter made both blood and flesh."2 According to Albertinelli, the artist creates or imitates flesh and blood with his colors, while the

innkeeper, in so far as he provides food and drink to his customers, makes flesh and blood.

Waagen s anecdote about Rem more

pointedly recalls a remark made about the

fourth-century-b.c.e. Greek painter Parrha sius in the elder Seneca's (ca. 54 b.c.e ca. 39 c.e.) Controversies, a collection of

declamations, or rhetorical exercises. One of the controversies (10.5) begins with the tale of Parrhasius and an Olynthian slave, which tale the author proposes as a hypo thetical scenario for rhetorical consideration:

The Athenian painter Parrhasius purchased

an old man from among the captives from

Olynthus put up for sale by Philip, and took him to Athens. He tortured him, and using him as a model painted a [picture of] Prometheus. The Olynthian died under the torture. Parrhasius put the picture in the tem

ple of Minerva; he is accused of harming the state.3

The tale refers to King Philip II of Mace donia (382-336 b.c.e.) and his siege of Olyn thus in 349 b.c.e. Philip soon captured the

city, razed it, and sold its citizens into slav

ery. The subject of Parrhasius's painting is Zeus's punishment of the mythical god

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23

Prometheus, who fashioned human beings out of earth and so favored mortals that he stole fire from Zeus and gave it to them.

Angered by the gift, the supreme god had Prometheus bound with chains to a rock in the Caucasus Mountains. Zeus also ordered an eagle to eat Prometheus's liver each day. At night, the organ would regenerate, only to be eaten again the next day. Parrhasius tortured and eventually killed his slave to find the correct pose and expression for his

figure of the tormented Prometheus.

According to Seneca, who summarizes the various arguments for and against Par

rhasius, one of the declaimers, Fulvius Spar sus, offered this epigram for the artist's pic ture: "And wherever he [i.e., Parrhasius] needs blood, he uses human blood." Sparsus

seems to refer to a probably vermilion hue used by artists—cinnabaris—which Pliny calls "dragon's blood."4 Thus, according to

Sparsus, when Parrhasius needed a particular color for his picture, he used the blood of his slave instead. The implication is that the

painter used human blood to depict Prometheus's blood. As Seneca adds, Spar sus speaks the impossible.

Guido s question about Rubens's colors echoes Sparsus's epigram for Parrhasius's

painting of Prometheus. Guido, however, extols the lifelike flesh of Rubens's volup tuous figures, whereas Sparsus sarcastically condemns Parrhasius—who was also known for his lively imitation of humans—for his

psychopathic cruelty.

NOTES

1. Gustav Friedrich Waagen, Peter Paul Rubens:

His Life and Genius, ed. Anna Jameson, trans. Robert

R. Noel (London: Saunder and Otley, 1840), p. 52.

This is Waagen's revised and expanded version of the

German edition of 1833.

2. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere, 2 vols.

(New York: Knopf, 1996), I, pp. 683-684. Albertinelli

returned to painting after only a few months.

3. Seneca the Elder, Controversiae, trans. M. Win

terbottom, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni

versity Press, 1974), II, pp. 448-449. Seneca is the

only known source for this tale. For a discussion of

this controversia, see Helen Morales, "The Torturer's

Apprentice: Parrhasius and the Limits of Art," in Art

and Text in Roman Culture, ed. Jas Eisner (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 182-209.

4. For "dragon's blood," see Pliny, Natural History 33.116 and 35.50.

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