Rubens und Isabella Brant im Geißblattlaubengang

Rubens had just come home. He had spent eight years in Italy soaking up Titian and Veronese, and in October 1609, back in Antwerp, he married Isabella Brant. He was 32, she was 18, and he painted the two of them in the same year the marriage began. They sit together in a garden under a spray of honeysuckle, a plant that stood for lasting devotion. Their right hands are joined, the old gesture of a wedding vow. Rubens shows himself as a gentleman, one hand resting on his sword, a privilege of rank he had earned as court painter. It is an unusually intimate thing for a portrait of this size and period, husband and wife as equals rather than a formal pair. Isabella would die of plague sixteen years later, and Rubens kept the painting.