In the years immediately following his return to Antwerp from Italy in 1608, Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) executed the painting, The Death of Seneca (c.1610, oil on oak panel, Alte Pinakothek, Munich). The work demonstrates how Rubens incorporated his studies of two ancient sculptures into his ideal image of the ancient philosopher, Seneca (3 BCE-65 CE). For the central figure, Rubens used the ancient bust of Pseudo-Seneca and a second statue, know today as the African Fisherman, (Louvre, Paris) both of which in the late sixteenth and through the seventh century were believed to represent the Stoic philosopher.1 While in Rome between 1601 and 1602, Rubens drew studies of the African Fisherman, which was in the Borghese collection.2 Rubens used the body of the statue for his Seneca and the head was based on the marble portrait bust, of the Pseudo-Seneca type, which he had purchased while in Italy.3 Fulvio Orsini (1529-1600), the Farnese antiquarian and librarian, identified the bust as Seneca, who based his attribution on a small Roman coin. 4

The Munich painting is riddled with problems. No contemporary documentation of the work survives, and therefore it cannot be precisely ated. In addition, x-ray examination of the painting has revealed that the panel’s left, right, and lower edges have been expanded by seventeen to nineteen centimeters and therefore the sides of the painting reworked.5 It has been generally accepted, based on style, that Rubens had executed the panel’s expansion, as well as the repainting, probably c. 1618-20. Furthermore, a workshop copy of the Munich panel survives in the collection of the Museo del Prado, Madrid.6 This second painting, an oil on canvas, is presumed to represent the original composition of the Munich Seneca, an assessment is strengthened by the x-ray analysis. Also, there is stylistic evidence supporting the notion that Rubens had executed the head of Seneca, while his assistants painted the rest of the work. Additionally, the size of the Madrid canvas is very similar to the original measurements of the Munich panel. The Madrid Seneca, like that of the Munich panel, cannot be dated securely. However, it can be assumed that the Madrid copy was painted before the reworking of the Munich original and therefore it has been accepted that it was painted c. 1615-1616.

Certainly, the Georgia Museum of Art print reflects the composition and style of the Madrid workshop copy. It is the second of two known states. The first state contains the engraver’s name Alexander Voet. Early scholarship concerning the print confused the plate’s engraver, Alexander Voet II (c.1637-after 1689), with his father Alexander Voet I (1613-1690); who did work for Rubens before the master’s death in 1640.7 Since Voet II had published the print by himself, presumably under Rubens’s copyright.8 Voet could not have seen the Munich painting and the head departs considerably from any of Rubens’s extant illustrations, the engraver may have been working from an inexact copy of the Munich painting.9 The date of the print is unknown; but based on the size and degree of skill, could not be earlier than 1662/3 when Voet II became a master in Antwerp.

The second state of the print, which is owned by the Georgian Museum of Art, the engraver’s name is changed to "Corn. Galle." It is generally assumed that Cornelis Galle II (1615-1678) is the engraver whose name appears on this state He, too, worked as an engraver for Rubens. Although, it is not known when the name on the plate was changed, or why, it can be assumed that the change occurred before 1678, the date of Galle’s death.

The subject of the death of Seneca carried a specific resonance in Europe during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In his Annals (109 CE), the ancient Roman Tacitus provided the story and history of Seneca’s life and death. Seneca, the Stoic philosopher and tutor to Emperor Nero (37-68 CE), was wrongfully accused of plotting against Nero10 and ordered to commit suicide as punishment. According to Tacitus, Nero was not present when the sentence was carried out, but the philosopher was surrounded by his friends, servants, a physician, and a scribe. Nero had forbidden Seneca to make a will, but the philosopher urged his friends to model their own lives after his (imago vitae suae), fortifying themselves with philosophy.11 The elderly Seneca slashed his wrists however, due to his age and austere living, it did not produce the desired effect. The philosopher asked for his friend and doctor, Annaeus Statius, to ready a potion of hemlock. After drinking the potion, Seneca was placed into a bath of warm water to speed up the potion’s effect. Seneca then sprinkled a drop of the water on the foreheads of his servants, and stated that this was his libation to Jupiter, and then was suffocated by the water vapor.

The subject of the "Death of Seneca" was not common in the visual arts before the rise of Neo-Stoicism in late sixteenth-century, even though the subject was believed to parallel Christian virtue since as early as the thirteenth century.12 Medieval writers believed Seneca had been converted to the Christian faith by St. Paul.13 This belief was supported by transcriptions of the correspondence between St. Paul and Seneca that were popular during the medieval period, in which Paul urges Seneca to persuade Nero to convert to the new religion.14 However, in the Divine Comedy (1321), Dante places Seneca in the first circle of hell among the virtuous, but unbaptised pagans.15 By the next generation, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) challenged Dante’s judgment of the Roman philosopher. Boccaccio and other early humanists regarded Seneca’s fatal bath as a disguised baptism.16 By interpreting the philosopher’s last words as recorded by Tacitus ("Let this liquid be a libation to Jove the Liberator.") as an invocation of the name of Christ, the bloody bath becomes his baptism.

Although based heavily on Tacitus’s account, Rubens conflated multiple events to create a visual a parallel to Christian saintly martyrdom. The artist includes a soldier that stand in the upper right corner of the panel. In his popular Golden Legend, Jacobus de Voragine (1228/30-1298) believed Seneca performed his self-execution in front of the emperor’s court.17 The figure in armor that accompanies Nero is probably Guvius Silvanus, the tribune of the praetorian cohort who brought the death sentence to Seneca.18 Below Nero, there is a squatting scribe, who records Seneca’s last words. The letters "VIRT" are legible on the scribe’s book referring to virtue, which in Stoic writings virtus was the means to happiness. Seneca’s doctor, on the right, raises the philosopher’s left arm while holding the razor. Instead of portraying Seneca’s suicide, Rubens depicts the doctor performing the execution.

Suicide is a mortal sin according to the Christian faith. In the sixteenth-century, John Calvin (1509-1564) described self-murder as the worst possible crime and suggested that people who committed suicide were guilty of hubris.19 Rubens may have been aware of such an interpretation of suicide, since his father was a Calvinist. Justus Lipsius (1547-1606), the leading Seneca scholar in the seventeenth century, argued in the commentary on Tacitus’s account of Seneca’s life, that the philosopher’s suicide served to vindicate the virtus of his life. Although the self-murder was problematic for Catholics and Protestants alike, Lipsius deemed it excusable because it was not a self-willed act, but a form of judicial execution.20 Within this context, Seneca became an instrument of Christian virtue.

Counter Reformation humanist admired Seneca for the moral fitness of his life and writings.21 This was the basis for Lipsius’s De Constantia (1584), which assimilated Stoic thought with Christian ethics and thereby justifying Seneca’s philosophy into relevant terms for the sixteenth-century reader.22 Lipsius’s book was widely known and perpetuated the Neostoic movement in Northern Europe.23 Consistent with the book’s precepts, groups in the Netherlands that faced execution based on political or religious persecution found inspiration in Lipsius’s representation of Seneca’s death.24

While Rubens was in Italy, Lipsius published L. Annæi Senecæ Philosophi: Opera, qvæ extant omnia (1605), which contained Seneca’s writings with commentary by Lipsius and three engravings by Theodore Galle. Philip Rubens, Rubens’s brother, assisted in the book’s publication since he studied under Lipsius at the University of Leiden.25 The work was widely popular, but Lipsius was greatly unsatisfied with the books illustrations. Unfortunately, Lipsius died before he could oversee a second edition of the book with the improved illustrations.

In 1614, Rubens combined forces with his lifelong friend Balthasar Moretus, the heir to the most famous printing presses in Antwerp, to reprint Lipsius’s 1605 edition.26 The second edition was published in 1615 with an introduction by Moretus and three engravings by Cornelis Galle I (1576-1650) based on Rubens designs.27 In the introduction, Moretus explains that Lipsius was unhappy with the 1605 engravings, so Rubens attempted to honor the deceased scholar by portraying Lipsius’s view within the engravings. 28 Lipsius believed the power of Tacitus’s account of Seneca’s death should be represented in the image. The viewer should feel the dying philosopher’s "lively, energetic, and fiery" (vividum, acre, igneum) words; his gestures should be of a man dictating the precepts of sapienta and constantia; and his withered body should display his physical labor, mental effort, and ascetic living.29 The Hargrett Rare Book and Library at the University of Georgia’s copy of the 1615 edition of L. Annæi Senecæ Philosophi: Opera, qvæ extant omnia includes the print of Seneca in the bath. Again, Rubens used the African Fisherman for the body of Seneca, however he does not include any other figures. Moretus relates that Rubens based his image of Seneca on what he thought to be authentic portraits of the philosopher.30 Seneca, standing in a basin of water, is placed in a niche, which is symbolic of the dead.31 The engraver has emphasized Seneca’s veins, but unlike the Munich panel, there is no indication of the method of execution. The reader is left to deduce the meaning from the text.

The Georgia Museum of Art print, like the other Rubens designs, vindicated Seneca’s suicide as a wrongful juridical persecution. Seneca lived as his writings had suggested, steadfast in his faith. Therefore, Seneca became an exemplary model of virtue by not relinquishing his beliefs in the face of death.

--Mike Kemling