Borderless science and borderless arts: past and present.

Today, a successful career in science makes one international or global. People move laboratories and change countries. Researchers collaborate and interact around the globe. The notion of the international nature of science was prominent in the recent BBC program “Desert Island Discs,” in which the guest was Sir Andre Geim, a physicist and the winner, with Konstantin Novoselov, of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on graphene (1, 2 ). Geim was born in Sochi, Russia (then part of the Soviet Union), and his career led him to Moscow, then to the Netherlands, and finally to Manchester University, where his laboratory is presently located. He commented in his earlier biographical note on personal identity in the context of contemporary science. He said, “Having lived and worked in several European countries, I consider myself European and do not believe that any further taxonomy is necessary, especially in such a fluid world as the world of science” (3 ). Is such an international scientist (or artist for that matter) a contemporary construct? It is fascinating to find this is not the case. Here I tell the story of another person who would quite easily fit the contemporary international image, although he was born in the 16th century. He was a painter, and his name was Peter Paul Rubens (4 – 6 ). Rubens was born in Siegen, close to Cologne, where his family was temporarily exiled from Antwerp, then one of the largest cities in northern Europe. They returned there when he was 10 years old. Peter Paul received a good classical education, which he cultivated for the rest of his life. He studied art with Italiantrained teachers and mentors, and spent 8 years travelling in Europe. He familiarized himself with the art of the Italian Renaissance and was particularly impressed by the Venetians: Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. He stayed for a period in Mantua, where his patron was Duke Vincenzo I Gonzaga. He also visited Florence and Rome, the latter being extensively renovated in the new Baroque style. In 1606, he returned to Antwerp, where he built an impressive Genoese style house with a large studio, which remained his base for the rest of his life. Soon after he was appointed a court painter to the Archduke Albert and Isabella, the then regents in the southern (Spanish) Netherlands, to which Antwerp belonged. His main painterly interests were the creation of large altarpieces and classical allegories, but he was also a sought-after portraitist of royalty and nobility. Soon he became one of the leading painters in Europe. He got his first commission in Rome. Subsequently, he created a large number of works in many countries. Among other places, he painted in Mantua, made portraits of aristocrats in Genoa, and created altarpieces for Count Palatine in Neuburg, Bavaria. He painted several altarpieces for Antwerp’s churches and in 1615– 1621 was involved in the comprehensive design and decoration of a new Jesuit church there. Later he was commissioned to paint the ceiling of the Banqueting House in Whitehall, London, and a large series of works based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses for Torre de la Parada, Philip IV’s hunting lodge outside Madrid. He also designed several series of tapestries, and was interested in book illustration, collaborating with Balthasar Moretus, the owner of Plantin Press in Antwerp. In his art Rubens combined the knowledge of classical sculpture with renaissance emphasis on the human body. He famously said that in painting “One must avoid the effect of stone” (7 ). In his works he created a particular body image—far more realistic than anything painted before. He did all this in spite of living in a politically highly turbulent period. In the 16th century, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V established the Seventeen Provinces (also called the Spanish Netherlands, roughly the area of today’s Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg) as a separate political entity. On his abdication in 1555–1556, he ceded them to his son Philip II of Spain, whose uncompromising Catholicism clashed with the now partly Protestant provinces. The seven northern provinces (subsequently known as the northern Netherlands) rebelled against the Spanish rule, and in 1581 declared independence. The resulting College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK. * Address correspondence to the author at: Department of Biochemistry, Gartnavel General Hospital, 1053 Great Western Road, Glasgow G12 0YN, UK. Fax 44141-211-3452; e-mail [email protected]. Received April 14, 2014; accepted April 16, 2014. © 2014 American Association for Clinical Chemistry Science in the Arts