I quattro filosofi

Rubens painted this group around 1611, and the year matters, because his brother Philip had just died. The two brothers sit together at the centre. Standing at the left, looking out at us, is Rubens himself, one of the few times he set his own face inside a picture like this. Between the brothers sits their old teacher, the scholar Justus Lipsius, who had revived the calm Stoic philosophy of ancient Rome, and a bust of the Roman Stoic Seneca watches from a niche. On the ledge stands a glass of four tulips, two open and two closed. The closed pair stand for Lipsius and Philip, both dead by the time the paint dried, the open pair for Rubens and the fourth man, Lipsius's pupil Jan Woverius, still living. It is a portrait of friendship and philosophy held in a vase of flowers.