Alcibiades Interrupting the Symposium; verso: Sketches of the Baptism of Christ and of a Man

Recto: In this chalk and pen drawing, likely completed during a sojourn to Padua or Verona in 1602, Rubens depicts an episode from Plato’s Symposium in which the orator Alcibiades interrupts Socrates’s speech on the nature of love. Rubens’s sinuous pen strokes capture the fluid motion of Alcibiades’s tunic as he bursts onto the scene from the left, trailed by two revelers, his drooping eyelids showing his drunken stupor. Agathon, the host of the symposium (a social gathering replete with wine and philosophical conversation), rises from the table to greet Alcibiades with outstretched arms, perhaps both to embrace and steady him. Under the table, the tangle of legs formed by sketchy, overlapping lines in black chalk further contribute to the sense of commotion in the scene.

In Plato’s story, Alcibiades first crowns Agathon and then notices Socrates, subsequently giving the latter a wreath as well; Rubens’s action-packed composition combines these moments, showing Alcibiades reaching to crown Socrates (third from right) with his proper left hand while holding a second wreath in his right hand to crown Agathon next. Although Plato did not actually attend the symposium he would write about years later, Rubens depicts him here as a cheerful youth reaching for the wreath meant for Socrates. His other arm is around Socrates, who grips the table and stares intently at Alcibiades with a furrowed brow. Socrates’s intense expression perhaps anticipates the upbraiding he will give Alcibiades, his young lover, later in the narrative. Alcibiades, Plato, and Socrates are all identified by inscriptions, no longer visible to the naked eye, made in Rubens’s hand. At the far right of the sheet, two participants in the symposium, perhaps the playwright Aristophanes and the physician Erixymachus, remain engaged in deep conversation, apparently oblivious to Alcibiades’s arrival.

The drawing reveals Rubens’s fascination with Greco-Roman antiquity and his interest in depicting emotion through gesture and facial expression. While no painting of this subject by Rubens has been found, compositionally, the drawing shares affinities with his sketches for a Last Supper scene found on two sheets (one now in the Getty Museum, and the other in the Devonshire collection, Chatsworth). The arrangement and poses of the figures here also evoke Caravaggio’s Calling of Saint Matthew in the Contarelli chapel at San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, a painting with which Rubens was familiar.


Verso: The verso of this sheet (which was almost certainly completed before the recto) serves as a prime example of how an artist might use and reuse paper in innovative ways. The first sketch Rubens made was probably the figure of Paris who, from the conventional viewing position, appears upside down at the right side of the page; this figure (who seems to be lunging here) was likely a prima idea for the seated figure of Paris in Rubens’s oil sketch, now in Vienna, of The Judgement of Paris, a subject the artist painted many times in his career. In this pen drawing, Paris’s spread legs, seen from the back, recall the dangling yet tensed legs of the youth sitting on a stool in the foreground of Caravaggio’s Calling of St. Matthew, a painting with which Rubens probably became acquainted after arriving in Rome in 1601.

Turning the paper 180 degrees, Rubens creatively repurposed the profile of Paris to serve as the profile of John the Baptist at the right side of the sheet. Upside down, Paris’s flowing hair appears like water streaming miraculously skywards from John’s fingertips as he raises his hand to bless Christ (who presumably is the figure cut off by the edge of the sheet), while his other arm hangs down. Rubens probably made the two rough sketches of the baptism of Christ at the left side of the sheet, working out the position of John’s arms, before the more finished one in the corner. These two rough sketches, done in long, angular pen strokes, were probably Rubens’s earliest ideas for the Baptism of Christ panel that accompanied his Gonzaga Family Adoring the Trinity painting originally made for the Jesuit church of the Santissima Trinità in Mantua in 1604-1605. In the center of the sheet, directly above the hand of John, are a few marks that are hard to make out. They resemble a pair of bent legs, sharing similarities with both the strident pose of Paris and the kneeling position of John the Baptist in the lower right-hand corner.


Isabella Gold, 3/23/23