By JAMES MONTI
On October 26, 1608, the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), living and working in Rome, received the deeply troubling news that his mother in Antwerp was gravely ill and close to death. Two days later, he was on horseback rushing north in the hope of reaching Antwerp on time. Upon his arrival on December 11, he learned that his mother had already died. This tragic loss for the young painter led to a decisive change in his life plans.
He never returned to Rome, but instead settled in Antwerp, married and entered into the service of Archduke Albert of Austria and his wife Isabella Clara Eugenia, daughter of King Philip II of Spain, becoming a trusted friend to the couple.
Albert and Isabella jointly ruled over the Spanish Netherlands until Albert’s death in 1621, after which Isabella was appointed Governor General of the Southern Netherlands by King Philip IV of Spain. Immediately following Albert’s passing, Isabelle took the habit of a Franciscan Tertiary of the Madrid convent known as “El Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales.” It had been her aspiration to enter this convent after her husband’s death, but in compliance with his deathbed request she remained in the Netherlands to do what she could to preserve the Catholic and Spanish allegiance of the southern Netherlands.
Originally named “El Monasterio de Nuestra Senora de Consolacion,” the Monastery of Descalzas Reales had been founded in 1557 by the Infanta Juana of Austria (1535-1573), the twenty-two-year-old daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (+1558) and the widow of King Joao Manuel of Portugal (+1554). It was a descendant of the convent of Santa Clara in Gandia, originally founded in 1428 but re-founded in 1457 as a community of “discalced” Colettine nuns (Poor Clares), part of a Franciscan reform movement instituted by the French nun St. Colette (1381-1447).
In the summer of 1625, Isabella made the risky decision to authorize her general to undertake a siege of Breda, a city conquered by Dutch Calvinist forces in 1590 and used by them to launch raids upon the Spanish Netherlands. The siege dragged on for ten months. Pleading for divine intervention, Isabella spent hour upon hour each day in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, also arranging for and participating in the rite of public solemn Eucharistic adoration known as the Forty Hours’ Prayer. On the Feast of Corpus Christi, June 5, 1625, the Dutch forces in Breda surrendered. There was no doubt in Isabella’s mind as to how the victory had come about.
On July 10, 1625, just a month after the surrender of Breda, Isabella stopped by the art studio of Rubens. It was almost certainly on this occasion that she asked Rubens to undertake the grand project that would express her gratitude for the Breda victory in liturgical splendor — the creation of a series of tapestries, sixteen in all (or possibly twenty), to glorify the Blessed Sacrament, a series that would come to be known as “The Triumph of the Holy Eucharist,” for the chapel of the convent of Descalzas Reales. Over the years that followed, Rubens sketched the designs that the tapestry-weavers were to follow.
The tapestries address five interrelated themes: the Old Testament prefigurations of the Holy Eucharist (Melchizedek, the Manna in the desert, Elijah fed by an angel, the sacrifice of the Old Covenant), the champions of the Holy Eucharist (the Four Evangelists, Eucharistic saints), the triumphs of the Holy Eucharist (the triumph of the Church, the triumph of divine love, the triumph of faith), the victory of the Holy Eucharist over falsehood (the Eucharist vanquishing idolatry, the “Victory of Eucharistic Truth over Heresy”), and adoration (two tapestries of the angels adoring the Holy Eucharist, one of the hierarchy adoring the Holy Eucharist, one of temporal rulers adoring the Holy Eucharist, plus a tapestry depicting the Blessed Sacrament Itself in a monstrance held by two angels).
The tapestries, many of which are over fifteen feet tall, have survived to the present day at the Descalzas Reales. The viewing perspectives, lighting, and other details of the tapestries make it quite clear that Rubens had worked out a specific plan for precisely where in the chapel each tapestry was to be hung, creating a unified schema. Eleven of the tapestries are cast as a “tapestry within a tapestry” with a surrounding architectural frame depicted on the tapestry, to create an architectural illusion, as it were (a trompe l’oeil), evoking and representing the eleven goat-hair curtains of the Temple of Solomon (Exodus 26:7), as indicated by Rubens’ portrayal of “Solomonic columns,” corkscrewed pillars intended to replicate what was believed to be the type of column used in Solomon’s Temple.
Deeply imbued with the symbolism of the Temple of Solomon, the tapestries of Rubens would have imparted to those entering the Descalzas chapel, when adorned with these hangings, a sense of stepping into “another realm,” as the art historian Charles Scribner III explains: “Ruben’s tapestries conceptually and illusionistically recovered the ancient, long since destroyed Holy of Holies, here transformed into its new Christian Identity wherein the Ark is replaced by God’s Eucharistic Presence” (“Sacred Architecture: Ruben’s Eucharistic Tapestries,” The Art Bulletin, volume 57. n. 4, December 1975, p. 526).
Elsewhere Scribner points out that in none of Rubens’ tapestries can be found any depiction of Christ in His visible human nature, yet our Lord is by no means absent from these scenes. Throughout the tapestries Christ is depicted under the sacramental veils, in the Holy Eucharist, to drive home the “identification of Christ with the Eucharist,” that this Sacrament is Our Lord Himself:
“Christ’s presence throughout the entire cycle is confined to the sacrament…the prefigurations . . . are thematically focused on the unique identity of the Eucharist to the exclusion of any other representation of Christ: that is, He may here be found only in the Eucharist” (Charles Scribner III, The Triumph of the Eucharist: Tapestries designed by Rubens, New York and London, Carolus Editions, 2014, p. 52).
From the beginning, the use of the Rubens tapestries at the Descalzas Reales has been for the most part reserved for just two occasions in the liturgical year — Good Friday and the Octave of Corpus Christi. The suitability of these Eucharistic tapestries for the latter occasion is obvious, but their relation to the rites of Good Friday at the convent requires somewhat more of an explanation.
For over four and a half centuries, the Descalzas Reales monastery has cherished a special privilege, inherited from the Santa Clara convent in Gandia, granted by Pope Alexander VI in a decree issued to the Gandia nuns around 1499, permitting them to reserve continually for solemn adoration the Blessed Sacrament, placed in the repository (the “monumento”) on Holy Thursday, through all of Good Friday and Holy Saturday until the morning of Easter Sunday.
In the Gandia convent, the enactment of this privilege included a solemn procession following the Good Friday liturgy to transfer the Blessed Sacrament in a “custodia” (a type of monstrance) from the large repository erected for Holy Thursday to a smaller repository for the rest of the Easter Triduum. In the Madrid convent, the enactment of this same privilege was to take an utterly unique form, in which the “vessel” for carrying the Holy Eucharist to Its Good Friday place of repose is a larger-than-life effigy of Christ resting in death, a polychrome wood sculpture of Enrico Becerra dating from around 1563, in the side of which, at the very location of the lance wound, there is an opening for the placement of the Host within a diamond-encircled lunette of gold and silver.
In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the Descalzas Reales convent was blessed to have in residence as a chaplain one of the very finest church musicians of all time, Tomas Luis de Victoria (1548-1611). It was his settings of the chants for Good Friday that accompanied the procession of this unique “monstrance” from the church, through the cloister and back, sung by three voices symbolizing the three holy women Mary Magdalene, Mary of Clopas, and Salome.
The introduction of Rubens’ tapestries into the Descalzas Reales’ celebration of Corpus Christi perfected what was already an occasion of overwhelming liturgical splendor at the convent. Writing in 1616, the Franciscan Observant priest and royal confessor Fr. Juan Carrillo recounted how in preparation for the feast the high altar would be adorned from top to bottom with roses and handmade silken flowers, and with twelve silver candlesticks. Four temporary altars would be added to the other altars, each with two candlesticks of gilt silver.
The steps of all the altars were covered with priceless carpets, and between the candlesticks of each altar were placed silver vases filled with handmade perfumed bouquets of carnations. Silver images of the Twelve Apostles were also set in place, and scented holy water was put in the lustral water fonts. The high altar would be covered with a brocaded frontal, and over the altar would be erected a lavish canopy of white brocade. The throne for the custodia (the monstrance) was adorned with gold, silver, pearls, diamonds, and other jewels.
For the music of the Corpus Christi octave, three choirs would be employed, with the accompaniment of the organ, harps, and other instruments. For each day of the octave a different set of altar furnishings would be employed, from vestments to cruets. Daily there were sermons by the finest court preachers, and at seven o’clock each evening, the singing of the Salve Regina would be followed by a “villancico” (a distinctly Spanish type of popular hymn), for which all the candles on the altars plus two hundred other candles throughout the chapel would be lit. Eucharistic adoration by the nuns in their choir stalls would continue through the night before the exposed Blessed Sacrament, with twenty-four candles kept alight.
Pure Gold
On the eighth and final day of the octave, the Blessed Sacrament would be carried in a two-hour procession in a large custodia of pure gold studded with pearls and precious stones, across a floor heavily strew with branches, and beneath a brocaded canopy mounted on six silver poles, stopping at each of the four stational altars. There were candles for all the clergy and laymen in the procession, and on the stational altars innumerable handmade flowers. The nuns would spend all year making these flowers for the Corpus Christi festivities.
Rubens’ tapestries and the special liturgical rites of the Spanish convent for which they were created all point to what — or rather who — should be at the center of our universe as Catholics — that like our medieval and Baroque-era forebears our gaze in life should be continually fixed upon the Sacred Host, Our Lord in the Most Blessed Sacrament, our God and our All.
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