Agrippina and Germanicus

Rubens had spent eight years in Italy filling notebooks with drawings of ancient statues, coins, and carved gems, and when he came home to Antwerp that knowledge kept surfacing. This double profile, painted around 1614, is built like one of those Roman cameos, two heads overlapping in strict profile as if cut into stone. The couple are real historical figures. Germanicus was Rome's most admired young general, and Agrippina, set in front, was the granddaughter of the emperor Augustus. On the ancient gems Rubens studied, the man almost always took the foreground, so it is telling that here he gave the woman that place. There is another surprise beneath the paint. Examination of the panel shows Rubens first painted Agrippina alone, then added a strip of wood to widen it and brought Germanicus in beside her. The result now hangs in Washington, at the National Gallery of Art.