by Tom Gurney
Tom Gurney BSc (Hons) is an art history expert with over 20 years experience
Published on June 19, 2020 / Updated on October 14, 2026
Email: tomgurney1@gmail.com / Phone: +44 7429 011000
War moves through the picture
An armoured man strides toward the right in Peter Paul Rubens's The Consequences of War. A woman reaches toward him from behind, but he pulls away. Ahead of him, people are scattered and objects lie broken on the ground. At the far left, a dark-clothed woman raises her arms in distress. There is no named battlefield, siege or victorious commander. The force driving through the scene is war itself, made visible through the harm it does to people and to the arts of peaceful life.
The Uffizi Galleries[1] describe the painting as an allegory rather than a report of one historical engagement. Their institutional inventory[2] lists it as 1638, oil on canvas, in the Galleria Palatina of Palazzo Pitti, Florence, under Inv. Pal. 1912, no. 86. Published sizes vary, and the cited Uffizi inventory does not provide dimensions, so this page does not turn one secondary measurement into a supposedly settled museum fact.
At a Glance
- ArtistPeter Paul Rubens [2]
- Date1638 [2]
- MediumOil on canvas [2]
- CollectionGalleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence, Inv. Pal. 1912 no. 86 [2]
- DocumentRubens's 12 March 1638 letter to Justus Sustermans [3]
Where this work sits in Rubens's career
The Elevation of the Cross
1609–10The Descent from the Cross
1611–14The Garden of Love
1630–35The Three Graces
1630–35Contents
- Why Mars and Venus are here
- What is lost when Mars passes?
- Rubens's explanation and its limits
- How did the painting reach Florence?
- Why a painter-diplomat returned to war
- What changed in Rubens's images of peace?
- What an early inventory called the picture
Why Mars and Venus are here
Rubens identified the central figures in a letter sent with the painting to Justus Sustermans on 12 March 1638. In the translated passage reproduced by a Westphalian Peace research exhibition[3], the armed figure is Mars, the Roman god of war. He has rushed from the open Temple of Janus, an ancient sign of warfare. Venus, associated with love and accompanied by small cupids, tries to hold him. Her touch fails to stop his movement. From the other side a Fury, Alecto, draws him onward with a torch.
The painting's diagonals turn that explanation into action. Venus's pale body leans toward Mars, and her arms try to arrest him. His dark armour and red cloth carry the eye away to the right. Alecto's pull adds to his momentum. The people displaced by that movement occupy the lower and outer parts of the canvas. Rubens does not paint war as a stationary emblem with a label. He makes it an event that breaks whatever lies in its path.
The Uffizi places the picture against the devastation of the Thirty Years' War, which had spread across Europe when Rubens painted it. That context matters, but the canvas does not document a specific battle in that conflict. Its figures come from classical mythology and personification. The allegory can address contemporary suffering without reducing each painted figure to a particular ruler, army or state.
What is lost when Mars passes?
Rubens's letter describes the objects at Mars's feet with unusual specificity. A woman lies with a broken lute: she represents Harmony damaged by conflict. An architect falls with his instruments, evoking useful buildings and civic ornament thrown down. Rubens says a book and a drawing under Mars suggest the arts and letters trampled by war. His phrasing is cautious about exactly which small objects are on the ground; the meanings should not be turned into a rigid inventory of tiny details in this 400-pixel image.
The letter also mentions arrows no longer bound together as a sign of lost Concord, and the discarded caduceus and olive branch as attributes of peace. A mother with a child shows how war disrupts family and care. Figures of Pestilence and Famine accompany the god's progress. Rather than making one spectacular violent gesture carry the whole message, Rubens assembles consequences at different scales: harm to a person, interruption of a family, destroyed making and learning, and the collapse of civic agreement.
One painted figure has a more direct historical name. Rubens calls the grieving, dark-clothed woman Europe, stripped and distressed by years of plunder and misery. This is his own explanation, preserved in the letter's later translation, not a modern guess based only on her costume. At the left edge of the painting she raises her arms while Mars moves away. Her position gives the wider continent a human form without making her a portrait of any particular woman.
Rubens's explanation and its limits
The letter is unusually valuable because Rubens gave an account of what he intended several details to mean. Many allegorical paintings invite later viewers to assign symbols freely; here we can first test a reading against the artist's own words. That does not make the letter a complete key to every mark on the canvas. It is a message to another painter accompanying an exchange, and Rubens himself signals uncertainty when recalling some small objects. The most secure reading starts with the figures he clearly names and with the movement visible in the painting.
The letter also makes the title easier to understand. The work has been called The Horrors of War as well as The Consequences of War. The Uffizi uses the latter English title, while the Westphalian Peace essay[3] uses the former. Both refer to this Palazzo Pitti canvas. “Consequences” usefully keeps attention on the broken lute, fallen architect, endangered family and suffering Europe, rather than only on Mars's violence.
How did the painting reach Florence?
The Uffizi account[1] says Sustermans, painter at the Medici court, asked Rubens for the work in 1637. Rubens wrote the explanatory letter the following March, after the canvas had already left his studio. The museum says it was sold to Grand Prince Ferdinando de' Medici in 1691 and is now in the Palatine Gallery. This sequence is more precise than a simple claim that Ferdinando directly commissioned the picture in 1638. The sources reviewed here document the request, the letter and a later sale; the exact original transaction should not be embellished beyond them.
A painting travelling through wartime Europe
The 12 March letter did more than decode the allegory. In Mattia Biffis's study of Rubens's correspondence[4], the canvas had already left the Antwerp studio at least three weeks before Rubens wrote to Sustermans. He reported receiving payment from Andries de Schutter and described a shipment entrusted to the Annoni, a merchant courier network. Stefano Annoni's account put the work on a route through Lille. Biffis proposes that it probably continued through France toward Italy, while stressing that those later legs are a reconstruction, not a surviving step-by-step tracking record. The detour may have reflected disrupted routes farther east. Thus the painting of war's effects itself had to cross a continent in conflict.
Rubens's concern was also material. Biffis reproduces a postscript in which the artist worries that a fresh painting kept rolled and packed for too long might lose brilliance, particularly in its flesh colours and whites. He suggests that Sustermans expose it to sunlight intermittently and permits him to retouch it if necessary. Permission to intervene is not evidence that Sustermans actually did so. Biffis notes that the painting does not show evidence of the particular damage Rubens feared. The letter records an artist trying to protect the appearance of a work he could no longer inspect, as well as explaining its imagery to a colleague who would receive it.
The issue matters to the painted argument. Biffis observes how the bright flesh of Venus stands against the darker armour and bodies around Mars. A change in the light parts could alter the tension through which the viewer sees Venus resisting him. Rubens's practical instructions about transport and colour therefore sit beside his explanation of mythological figures. They show that, for this picture, meaning depended both on a legible allegory and on a canvas arriving in a state that preserved its force.
Rubens had worked in diplomacy and had repeatedly pictured peace and war. That experience gives the allegory a public setting beyond private mythological fantasy. The Westphalian Peace essay[3] places this canvas after his other images in which Venus tries to restrain Mars or Minerva opposes him. Here the attempt to hold Mars fails. The painting's dark force and scattered signs of art, family and concord make clear what the failure costs.
Why a painter-diplomat returned to war
Rubens's political interest was sustained, not an occasional metaphor chosen for one late canvas. Kaulbach's documentary account traces his involvement in negotiations from the 1620s into the mid-1630s. Rubens worked through personal and court connections in attempts to bring the northern and southern Netherlands closer to peace, then helped arrange the 1630 Anglo-Spanish treaty while in London. He was an envoy and negotiator, not the official who signed that treaty. That distinction matters because the painting should be understood against practical diplomacy without turning every allegorical figure into a cipher for a particular meeting.
The essay quotes Rubens writing to Pierre Dupuy in 1627 that he wanted the world at peace rather than in an “age of iron.” In a 1635 letter to Peiresc, he feared a conflict that could spread through Europe. These letters cannot be read as a script for The Consequences of War, which was painted later. They do establish that its concern with European suffering belonged to questions Rubens discussed over many years, not a meaning added by later historians because the canvas happens to look dark.
Kaulbach's account of the 1635 entry of Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand into Antwerp gives the allegory a local civic edge. Rubens's programme included the opened Temple of Janus and scenes pointing to Antwerp's damaged trade and hope for relief. The city's elaborate welcome did not bring the hoped-for commercial and political settlement. In Florence's 1638 canvas the Temple opens again, but there is no victorious ruler in the frame to promise its closure. This comparison is an argument about recurring imagery and changed emphasis; it does not imply that the Pitti painting was literally one of the 1635 entry decorations.
What changed in Rubens's images of peace?
The Westphalian Peace research essay[3] traces several earlier attempts by Rubens to show war resisted. In the Marie de' Medici cycle, Minerva and Apollo drive hostile powers away while Venus tries to hold Mars. In the work Rubens offered to Charles I during his London peace mission, Minerva actively pushes Mars out of a scene filled with the goods of peace. Those works do not form preparatory stages for the Florence canvas, but they supply a useful comparison. There, an opposing power can force the god of war back. In The Consequences of War, no Minerva appears to do so.
That absence is central to Hans-Martin Kaulbach's reading of the late painting. Venus remains, but her embrace cannot counter the Fury drawing Mars forward. The people and objects below do not defend themselves as a united group; they register separate losses after the movement has already reached them. Kaulbach interprets the change as a critique of the political failure to secure peace rather than merely a private admission of despair. The interpretation rests on comparison across works, while Rubens's 1638 letter establishes the identities and meanings within this one.
The Temple of Janus had appeared in Rubens's designs even earlier. Kaulbach discusses a 1623 title page for a history of the revolt in the Netherlands: Discord and Fury throw open the temple gates while a curtain still conceals what lies inside. On a book's frontispiece, that action anticipates the war narrated in the volume. In the Florence canvas, Mars has already emerged and is moving among the victims. The same ancient sign serves a different point in the story. The title page frames the beginning of destructive conflict; the painting asks the viewer to face its human and cultural costs. This comparison does not make the 1623 print a preparatory study for a canvas painted fifteen years later.
The letter's Europe ties that lament to people living under war rather than to a single victorious or defeated state. She is bereft of ornaments and appears at the edge of a scene that also includes broken music, disordered tools and a mother with a child. Each detail describes a different kind of damage; together they explain why Rubens chose to personify a continent. The Uffizi's account calls the painting a concept with relevance beyond one event, while the letter makes that concept historically immediate in 1638. Reading both prevents the image from becoming either an untethered moral emblem or an illustration of one battle.
What an early inventory called the picture
The modern title is not the only way this canvas has been described. A 2026 study by Martín María Morales for the Archives of the Pontifical Gregorian University[5] cites a Palazzo Pitti inventory written between 1697 and 1708. Its description identifies a Rubens painting with figures at life size, in which the artist expressed in poetic concepts the damage war caused Europe and the noble arts. The inventory did not use the familiar short title The Consequences of War. Its fuller wording already joined the continent's suffering to damage to culture. The modern title is a useful handle, but the earlier description is evidence of how a later seventeenth-century collection understood the work.
Morales asks why Rubens needed to explain a picture whose theme he considered clear to Sustermans. His answer is an interpretation, not a newly discovered instruction from Rubens: an allegory may seem obvious to people immersed in a destructive war, while still allowing different positions from which to look. The 1638 letter specifies the figures, but the painting gives an audience room to judge their relationships. The distinction matters because treating the letter as a complete decoder can flatten a picture in which Mars keeps moving despite Venus's effort and in which Europe's grief occupies a different space from the god's destructive momentum.
The article proposes a comparison with Rubens's earlier Four Philosophers, also in the Palatine Gallery, and with the writings of Justus Lipsius on steadiness amid public calamity. It does not claim that The Consequences of War directly illustrates a passage from Lipsius. The possible connection is a way to consider how Rubens's educated circle thought about war and the viewer's judgment. It should remain a modern interpretive proposal, distinct from Rubens's own letter, the inventory's early description and the visible figures in the painting. Those three kinds of evidence let the canvas be read historically without reducing it to one contemporary philosophical text.
Rubens artworks directory
Frequently Asked Questions
No. It is an allegory of war's effects. The Thirty Years' War forms its historical context, but Rubens uses Mars, Venus, Europe and other personifications rather than recording one engagement.
Rubens identified her in his 1638 letter to Sustermans as suffering Europe.
Rubens explained that the woman with a broken lute represents Harmony, damaged by war.
The Uffizi inventory dates it 1638 and lists it as oil on canvas. It is now in the Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence, Inv. Pal. 1912, no. 86.
It is also called The Horrors of War. Both names are used for the same Florence painting.
Discussion
Look closely at how Rubens turns an allegory into an action moving across the canvas.
Share an observation about the painting or a reliable source that adds to its history.
Reader Insights
How do Mars, Venus and Alecto pull the composition in competing directions?
Which broken or displaced figures show the cost of war most clearly?
What does Rubens's 1638 explanation identify, and where must a viewer still interpret?
Join the Conversation
Add your reading below, keeping observations specific and evidence clear.
References
- Uffizi Galleries, The Consequences of War , history and interpretation. View source
- Uffizi Galleries, institutional inventory of fixed-location works, including Inv. Pal. 1912, no. 86. View source
- Hans-Martin Kaulbach, Westphalian Peace research exhibition, with translated excerpts from Rubens's 12 March 1638 letter. View source
- Mattia Biffis, “Itinerant Matters: Rubens and the Itineraries of Painting,” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 90 (2021), pp. 211–230. View source
- Martín María Morales, Pontifical Gregorian University Archives, 2026 study of the early Pitti inventory and Lipsius comparison. View source
