Single portrait of Nicolaas de Respaigne

General information
Original location Antwerp (mentioned in De Respaigne's testament in Antwerp, workshop of Rubens)
Current location Kassel, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister / Staatliche Museen, inv. no. GK 92
Provenance See Vlieghe
Artist Peter Paul Rubens
Date ca.1616-1618 (stylistic features)
Material Oil on canvas
Dimensions 205,5 x 119,5 cm
Visual elements
Short description Portrayed standing, full-length, in Turkish costume. On the viewer's left stands a palm against the wall.
Depicted pilgrim
Personal information
Name Nicolaas de Respaigne
Social status / profession Merchant (based in Venice 1603-1605); Member of the Flemish Nation in Aleppo (1615); Knight of the Holy Sepulchre (1611); Returned to Antwerp before 1619, where he became member of St Luke's guild, the Chamber of Rhetoric 'de Violieren', the Romanists' guild (1629); Owner of the estates Schoten and Horst
Coat of arms Top right: ? (Respaigne, very worn)
Pilgrimages
Year of pilgrimage to Jerusalem ca. 1611-1615, possibly longer or more often
Attributes Jerusalem pilgrimage Palm in decorated handle
Death
Year of death 1647
Additional information
General remarks Nicolaas de Respaigne visited the Levant probably also for commercial reasons, given his appearance in Aleppo in 1615.
The costume of De Respaigne is puzzling, since he was made knight of Jerusalem, which encompassed a promise to defend Christianity against heretics and non-believers. A sympathy for, or even identification with, the muslim rulers of Jerusalem is therefore quite odd. However, it fits in a more general 'orientalist' fashion in seventeenth-century portraits (e.g. by Rembrandt and Van Dyck) which display people who traveled to the Orient in exotic dress. De Respaigne's last will supports this view of the Turkish dress as fascination with, rather than sympathy for, the Ottomans. He left his son het goude cruys van Hierusalem met het goude kettenken daeraen gehecht, ende oock syne turxce rariteyten, i.e. Turkish rarities. This also indicates that De Respaigne was in the possession of a necklace with a golden Jerusalem cross, a sign of his knighthood, but this is not depicted.
Literature
  • Schnackenburg, Bernhard, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister: Gesamtkatalog, 2 vols. (Mainz 1996), vol. I, p. 262
  • Vlieghe, Hans, Rubens portraits of identified sitters painted at Antwerp, (Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard 19, vol. 2) (London and New York 1987), cat. 129, pp. 145-147
Back to top
Disclaimer:
2012: web design by Charlotte Dikken and Bart Holterman (UU). This website was tested and works on Internet Explorer, Opera and Firefox and is best viewed on a fully maximized screen. Some of the features on this site use JavaScript.
This page was last updated on: .