for the flower pot. He needed to be bedded out, so
that his exuberant natural genius might have the proper opportunities
for expanding under suitable conditions. It was in Venice and Mantua, in
Florence and Rome that he found himself, and took his measure from the
giants.

Rubens was born in 1577 at Cologne, where his father, a jurist of
considerable attainments, had taken refuge from the disturbances at
Antwerp in 1566. He was christened Peter Paul in honour of the saints on
whose festival his birthday fell--29th June. At the age of sixteen he
was placed as a page in the household of the widowed Countess of
Lalaing, but as he showed a remarkable love for drawing he was
apprenticed first to Tobias Verhaegt, a landscape painter, and then to
Adam Van Oort. The latter was so unsuitable a master, however, that
Rubens was soon committed to the care of Otto Vennius, at that time
Court painter to the Infanta Isabella and the Archduke Albert, her
husband; he prospered so well that in 1600 Vennius advised him to go to
Italy to finish his education as a painter.

Rubens was now in his twenty-third year, and besides being proficient in
painting he was so well grounded in the classics and in general
education and manners that he was recommended by the Archduke to
Vincenzio, Duke of Gonzaga, whose palace at Mantua was famous for
containing an immense collection of art treasures, a great part of which
within the next quarter of a century were purchased by King Charles, the
Duke of Buckingham, and the Earl of Arundel. The influence exerted on
the young painter by surroundings like these is exemplified in a note by
Waagen:--

"Rubens during his residence at Mantua was so pleased with the _Triumph
of Julius Caesar_ by Mantegna (the large cartoons now at Hampton Court
Palace), that he made a free copy of one of them. His love for the
fantastic and pompous led him to choose that with the elephants carrying
the candelabra; but his ardent imagination, ever directed to the
dramatic, could not be contented with this. Instead of a harmless sheep,
which, in Mantegna, is walking by the side of the foremost elephant,
Rubens has introduced a lion and a lioness, which growl angrily at the
elephant. The latter is looking furiously round, and is on the point of
striking the lion a blow with his trunk."

That Rubens should have been so specially attracted by Mantegna may seem
a little surprising, until we remember that both were lovers and
studen