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duke “asking” that Rubens add two more articles to the manifest: a horse and a marble table to be deposited with one of the grand duke’s own allies at Alicante, on the Iberian coast. What could Rubens do but say yes?
    Back at his room in the aftermath, Rubens sent off a dispatch to Chieppio in which he described the meeting in some detail. “I stood there like a dunce, suspecting some informer, or in truth the excellent system of reporters (not to say spies) in the very palace of our prince,” he wrote. “It could not be otherwise, for I have not specified my baggage, either at the customs or elsewhere. Perhaps it is my simplicity which causes me astonishment at things that are ordinary at court. Pardon me, and read, as a pastime, the report of a novice without experience, considering only his good intention to serve his patrons, and particularly yourself.” If things had not gone according to plan, at least he might try to ingratiate himself with his superiors.
    Rubens’s plea of naive innocence was disingenuous, for at the very least he should have anticipated what was to transpire at that meeting. He had, in fact, already agreed to take on the grand duke’s horse two days earlier, when he was approached by a fellow Antwerp native in Ferdinand’s employ. Had he let slip with one too many details during their conversation? Probably not, but the assertion in his letter to Chieppio that he had not “specified” his baggage was patently false. If Rubens was surprised at all, it might have been that the grand duke was willing to trust him with his horse in the first place, given that his journey from Mantua to Pisa had been something of a fiasco from its very outset, and its tortured progressno great secret in the halls of Tuscan power. This was probably on Ferdinand’s mind as well, but the audience with Rubens had been called less as a test of the painter’s competence than as a message to his Mantuan nephew, Vincenzo. Ferdinand was not prepared to simply cede his role as Italian arbiter of cultural authority to the Spanish crown. Just two years earlier, Ferdinand had sent his own immense gift to Lerma: a marble fountain capped by a statue of Samson slaying a Philistine. This masterpiece was the work of the sculptor Giambologna, himself a Flemish transplant to Italy. Now Vincenzo’s gift would pass, but not without Ferdinand’s tacit approval.
    Rubens’s journey from Mantua to Pisa had in fact been such an amateurish farce that any number of sources could have provided Ferdinand with information on its bungled early stages. At Ferrara, the convoy’s first stop, customs officials had insisted upon opening for inspection each of the seven trunks in the shipment, not counting the plainly visible horses and carriage. (Rubens, who could be obsessive about his reputation, conveniently neglected to mention this when he had asserted that his luggage had not been inspected.) The Ferrarese presented Rubens with a duty so large that it exceeded the entire projected cost of the trip to Spain. Vincenzo might have sent along a formal request that the cargo be exempted from such levies, but he considered it beneath his dignity to do so; that would have looked cheap. Instead, Rubens was provided with a packet of letters of introduction, and forced to scurry about begging the intercession of local figures of influence with ties to the duke. Acting nimbly, he managed to free the cargo, but the scene was rehearsed again at Bologna, the next stop, where authorities were satisfied by what was generously described as a “tip,” and once again in Florence, after an arduous trek over the Apennines.
    The drive over the mountains was particularly expensive andtime-consuming. Rubens was forced to commission oxen to pull the luggage through the muddy Apennine passes, with their narrow switchbacks and steep inclines. The Tuscan vistas were spectacular—when they were visible through the rain and fog—but the cost for hauling the