ts of classical antiquities--a fact that is often forgotten in
recalling only the principal achievements of either. But it is important
to know what sort of foundations underlie the most splendid erections if
we wish to understand how they came into existence and what their place
is in the history of the arts. A glance through Lempriere's _Dictionary_
may furnish a modern Academician with a subject for a popular
picture,--but that is stucco rather than foundation. The roots of tall
trees go deep. Rubens when he was in Rome studied the antiquities of the
place with the utmost diligence and zeal, as is evidenced by a book
published by his brother Philip in 1608.

It was in the autumn of this year that he received the news, when at
Genoa, of his mother's illness, which induced him to return to Antwerp
forthwith. On his arrival he found she had died before the messenger
had reached Genoa.

After four months of mourning he was ready to return to Flanders; his
sojourn of eight years in Italy had so far influenced him that he might
have remained there indefinitely had it not been for the Archduke and
the Infanta pressing him to remain at Brussels and attach himself to
their Court. Another circumstance may possibly have weighed with him;
for within a year we find him married to Elizabeth Brant, the daughter
of a magistrate of Antwerp, and it was not at Brussels, but at Antwerp,
that he took up his quarters. Here he proceeded to build a wonderful
house--said to have cost him 60,000 florins--after designs of his own in
the Italian style, which he filled with the treasures he had collected
in Italy.

Rubens's first pictures were nearly all of them religious subjects.
Before he went to Italy he had painted an _Adoration of the Kings_, a
_Holy Trinity_, and the _Dead Christ in the Arms of God the Father_,
which was engraved by Bolswert. When Vincenzio sent him to Rome to copy
pictures there for him, he found time to execute a commission which he
received from the Archduke Albert to paint three pictures for the Church
of Santa Croce di Gerusalamme, namely, the _Crowning with Thorns_, the
_Crucifixion_, and the _Finding of the Cross_. A year later--after
returning from a journey to Madrid--he painted the altar-piece for the
Church of Santa Maria in Vallicella, in which the influence of Paul
Veronese is conspicuous. At Genoa, he painted the Circumcision and S.
Ignatius for the church of the Jesuits.

One of the first pictures which