Decius Mus Addressing the Legions

probably 1616

Sir Peter Paul Rubens

Artist, Flemish, 1577 - 1640

A bearded man with copper-blond hair and flushed, peachy skin stands on a stone-gray pedestal and gestures toward a group of five more men gathered before him in this square painting. Some of the men are light-skinned, others are tan. The man on the platform, Decius Mus, stands with his ruddy face turned to our right in profile, his muscular right arm raised and right foot extended. He wears a knee-length toga, and form-fitting armor covers his torso. A sword hangs from his waist, and a scarlet-red cape flaps behind him. Piled against the pedestal in the lower left are spears, battle axes, a silvery-gray shield covered with gold lightning bolts, and an ornate crested helmet. In the upper left corner, an eagle with one wing extended hovers behind Decius Mus’s head, clutching long peach and straw-colored strands in its talons. The other five men stand clustered together on the ground to our right, facing Decius Mus. They are also bearded and muscular, and each holds a golden staff topped with a different symbol. They wear knee-length tunics and cloaks in brick red, olive green, black, or tan, and three wear armor protecting their upper bodies. Calf-high, brown boots cover their feet but leave their toes exposed. The man closest to us has gray hair and stands with his back to us. A parchment-brown animal skin speckled with brown spots covers the back of his head and wraps around his armor and tunic. The man just beyond him, to our left, faces us and holds a gold staff topped with an eagle set within a round laurel wreath. The rest of the men stand in profile, filling the right side of the composition, and they lean in toward Decius Mus. Two of them wear crested helmets, one olive green, the other charcoal gray, both with gold ornamentation on the front. The man in the gray helmet holds aloft a flag painted with vertical swipes of scarlet red and ginger brown. A sketchily painted landscape beyond the group has trees with dark brown trunks and sage-green leaves along the left edge, leading back to a line of trees in the distance. Rolling, teal-blue land along the horizon could be hazy mountains. The powder-blue sky above is scattered with butter-yellow and light gray clouds. The scene is loosely painted, especially in the costumes and background.

Media Options

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Around 1616 Peter Paul Rubens engaged in a large tapestries series project about the heroic Roman consul Decius Mus. This panel, which is a small sketch or modello for the larger composition, depicted the first episode of that story, which normally consisted of seven or eight scenes. In his History of Rome, Livy describes an episode in the war between the Romans and the Samnites, the inhabitants of the plains of Latium (south-central Italy), against their Roman rulers in 340 BC. The Roman forces led by co-consuls Decius Mus and Titus Manlius were outnumbered and in danger of defeat when an apparition visited them both at night and declared that victory would come to the army whose leader lost his life. Decius Mus, thus, vowed that he would sacrifice himself to ensure Roman victory.

In the Gallery’s painting, Rubens depicts Decius Mus recounting the apparition to his soldiers the following morning. With his right arm raised and left hand holding the commander’s staff, he strikes a powerful pose that conveys the gravitas of the vision as his men listen with rapt attention. The soldiers hold the signa, or legionary standards, of the Roman republic—the Roman eagle, or Aquila; the open palm, a symbol for virtue; and the standard inscribed SPQR, the symbol of the Roman Republic—and lend historical legitimacy to scene.

Rubens maintained an abiding fascination with Greco-Roman antiquity throughout his career. This interest manifested in his fidelity to ancient literary and pictorial sources and in the subject matter he chose. The lion-scalp trim on Decius Mus’s boots, his armor with its torso-molded breastplate ornamented with griffins, and even the lappets on his skirt adorned with alternating lion and human heads were all drawn from historic sources. Rubens was profoundly influenced by the ancient philosopher Justus Lipsius’s writings about the great Stoic philosopher, Seneca, who hailed Decius Mus a model for military and political leadership due to his constancy, virtue, and nobility. Rubens underscored these Stoic ideals by placing Decius Mus on a marble dais whose square shape emblematized fortitude.

On View

West Building Main Floor, Gallery 45

Artwork overview

  • Medium

    oil on hardboard, transferred from wood and canvas

  • Credit Line

    Samuel H. Kress Collection

  • Dimensions

    overall: 80.7 x 84.7 cm (31 3/4 x 33 3/8 in.)
    framed: 105.1 x 109.2 x 12.7 cm (41 3/8 x 43 x 5 in.)

  • Accession

    1957.14.2

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Pierre-Louis-Paul Randon de Boisset [1709-1776], Paris; (his estate sale, Paris, 27 February 1777, no. 31).[1] Destouches, Paris; (his sale, A.J. LeBrun and Ph. Fr. Jueliot, Paris, 21 March 1794, no. 5); John Trumbull [1756-1843], Paris and New York; (his sale, Christie's, London, 17 February 1797, no. 25). Fritz August von Kaulbach [1850-1920], Munich;[2] (his estate sale, Hugo Helbing, Munich, 29-30 October 1929, no. 194);[3] (Galerie Nathan, Munich).[4] (Frederick Mont, Inc., New York);[5] sold 8 February 1955 to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York;[6] gift 1957 to NGA.
[1] Julius S. Held, The Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens. A Critical Catalogue, 2 vols., Princeton, 1980: 1:25, questions whether NGA 1957.14.2 was in this sale because the catalogue describes the work as being on panel whereas an old inscription on the verso of the painting once indicated that it had been transferred from panel to canvas in 1773 (see note 3). Held's reservations, however, seem unwarranted since the description of the scene (even though the subject is wrongly interpreted as "Germanicus à qui on harangue ou donne des orders à cinq officiers...") and the dimensions conform to the Gallery's painting.
[2] Oldenbourg, Rudolf, ed. P.P. Rubens. Des Meisters Gemälde. Berlin and Leipzig, 1921: 460.
[3] An inscription on the verso of the painting was recorded in the 1929 sales catalogue as reading: "relevé de sure bois et remis sure toile par hacquin en 1773."
[4] According to the annotated Hugo Helbing sale catalogue at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich, copy in NGA curatorial files and available online through the Heidelberg University library.
[5] Colin Eisler, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: European Schools Excluding Italian, Oxford, 1977: 105, lists the Newhouse Galleries, New York, at this point in the provenance; Mont was associated with Newhouse.
[6] See The Kress Collection Digital Archive, https://kress.nga.gov/Detail/objects/652.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1992

  • Von Bruegel bis Rubens: Das goldene Jahrhundert der flämischen Malerei, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne; Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp; Kunsthistorischen Museum, Vienna, 1992-1993, no. 44.8rman cat.), no. 38b (Dutch cat.), repros.

2004

  • Drawn by the Brush: Oil Sketches by Peter Paul Rubens, Bruce Museum of Arts and Science, Greenwich, Connecticut; Univ. of California, Berkeley Art Museum; Cincinnati Art Museum, 2004-2005, no. 5, repro. (shown only in Greenwich and Cincinnati).

  • Rubens, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille, 2004, no. 150, repro.

2023

  • Il tocco di Pigmalione: Rubens e la scultura a Roma [The touch of Pygmalion. Rubens and sculpture in Rome], Museo Galleria di Villa Borghese, Rome, 2023 - 2024, II.4, repro.

Bibliography

1921

  • Klassiker der Kunst V (1921): 460.

1956

  • Paintings and Sculpture from the Kress Collection Acquired by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation 1951-56. Introduction by John Walker, text by William E. Suida and Fern Rusk Shapley. National Gallery of Art. Washington, 1956: 152-155, no. 59, repro.

1959

  • Paintings and Sculpture from the Samuel H. Kress Collection. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1959: 292, repro.

1961

  • Walker, John, Guy Emerson, and Charles Seymour. Art Treasures for America: An Anthology of Paintings & Sculpture in the Samuel H. Kress Collection. London, 1961: 147, color repro. pl. 138.

1962

  • Cairns, Huntington, and John Walker, eds. Treasures from the National Gallery of Art. New York, 1962: 78, color repro.

1963

  • Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. New York, 1963 (reprinted 1964 in French, German, and Spanish): 310, repro.

1965

  • Summary Catalogue of European Paintings and Sculpture. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1965: 118.

1966

  • Cairns, Huntington, and John Walker, eds. A Pageant of Painting from the National Gallery of Art. 2 vols. New York, 1966: 2:266, color repro.

1968

  • National Gallery of Art. European Paintings and Sculpture, Illustrations. Washington, 1968: 105, repro.

  • Gandolfo, Giampaolo et al. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Great Museums of the World. New York, 1968: 114-115, color repro.

1975

  • European Paintings: An Illustrated Summary Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1975: 314, repro.

1977

  • Eisler, Colin. Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: European Schools Excluding Italian. Oxford, 1977: 104-106, fig. 101.

1984

  • Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Rev. ed. New York, 1984: 252, no. 320, color repro.

1985

  • European Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1985: 360, repro.

2005

  • Wheelock, Arthur K., Jr. Flemish Paintings of the Seventeenth Century. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 2005: 175-182, color repro.

2020

  • Libby, Alexandra. “From Personal Treasures to Public Gifts: The Flemish Painting Collection at the National Gallery of Art.” In America and the Art of Flanders: Collecting Paintings by Rubens, Van Dyck, and their Circles, edited by Esmée Quodbach. The Frick Collection Studies in the History of Art Collecting in America 5. University Park, 2020: 138.

Wikidata ID

Q20176955

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