Healthy, Wealthy & Wise

After three centuries, the doors of Peter Paul Rubens' plush art factory reopened in Antwerp last week. It had been completely restored and made into a museum. Reopened too was the question of who painted Rubens' pictures.

Rubens, one of the 17th Century's astute businessmen, used to jump out of bed at 4 a.m., always had a full day of it. Along with his art, he occupied himself in learning seven languages, riding his Spanish horses every afternoon, and discovering everything there was to know about ancient sculpture, cameos, and Italian architecture. He crowned a career of half-secret diplomacy (interlarded with profitable royal portrait commissions) by temporarily reconciling Philip IV of Spain and Charles I of England. The master seemed to have all the minor gifts too--equanimity, charm, industry and good looks.

A Little Help. His home was a palace, visited by royalty. But for his gigantic art business, which was as beautiful as it was big, Rubens needed a little help. One Manhattan art scholar currently spends most of his hours trying to prove that one of Rubens' assistants deserves most of the credit for Rubens' best stuff. The scholar, Rogers Bordley (Foreign Editor of Art Digest), contends that Rubens was more a fast-talking agent than he was a fast-working artist. He kept a crackerjack stable of less renowned painters in his Antwerp mansion, "finished" and signed their efforts as well as his own.

Bordley thinks the real genius was not even Rubens' "best pupil" Anthony Van Dyck, but a fellow who was supposed to be especially adept at painting the animals in Rubens' hunting scenes. His name: Frans Snyders.

But when Rubens died in 1640, the business died with him. Nine years later his house was leased to an Englishman in exile who turned it into a riding stable. In 1672 Antwerp's Burgomaster tried to buy it for the town, but the price was too high and the palace remained private property until 1931, when Antwerp got royal permission to expropriate it. Since then, Antwerp's crack architects had thumbed 17th Century documents to rediscover the original plans, masons cut through walls in search of the original foundations, and 23 stonecarvers--using Renaissance techniques--worked seven years to restore the first friezes and fac,ades. The war was no interruption: they worked right through the occupation, and when Hitler's rocket bombs were blanketing the port they used bricks from blasted buildings to make the restored parts look less new. No bomb ever hit it.

Peacocks & Collectors. Last week the citizens of Antwerp gossiped in Rubens' private apartments, gawked at a gold necklace which Rubens' sexy-looking second wife, Helena Fourment, once wore, mused on some of the Master's slickest portraits and best and butteriest painted goddesses, scanned the formal gardens where ruffed collectors and peacocks once displayed their slow, glistening struts, and dawdled in the 35 ft. by 46 ft. studio where Rubens' assistants had labored to produce some 3,000 paintings signed by Peter Paul Rubens.

Whether or not they were really his, most of the paintings looked worthy of the great man's signature.

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