Rubens: 'Fed upon Roses'

Sir Peter Paul Rubens, one of the five grand masters of 17th century painting--the others, by general consent, being Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Velasquez and Poussin--was born 400 years ago this summer, on June 28, 1577. This birthday has raised memorial exhibitions all over Europe. No anniversary of a comparably great figure could launch so many shows, because Rubens was so prolific. A thousand or so paintings, more than 2,000 drawings, sown from Leningrad to Washington: Rubens was the grand inseminator of the Baroque, a monster of controlled fecundity, erudition and discipline. The biggest Rubens show, the text to which all the others are necessarily footnotes, is now on view in his home city of Antwerp. At the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, over 100 paintings and 60 drawings have been assembled from the world's collections. Some things, of course, one cannot hope for: the Louvre would never lend any of the giant canvases from Rubens' Marie de Medicis cycle, any more than his landscape The Chateau de Steen in Autumn could be expected to travel from London or the Helene Fourment in a Fur Cloak from Vienna. Still, this is the most concentrated view of Rubens, set in one place, that will ever be seen.

Painter-Diplomat. Fame, money and beautiful lovers--such, Freud tells us, are the chief goals of an artist's life. No painter ever achieved them more fully than Rubens. In a Europe riven by religious and political conflicts, he was one of the first true cosmopolitans: he was both painter and diplomat, and on delicate negotiations (as with his efforts to make a treaty between Spain and England, for which Charles I duly knighted him), Rubens the court portraitist served as splendid cover for Rubens the agent. He spoke five languages fluently, knew almost everyone of significance in the worlds of politics, scholarship and art, and was the proper heir to Titian's role as "prince of painters and painter of princes." (By a slightly eerie coincidence, Rubens was conceived in the provincial Westphalian town of Siegen in 1576--the year Titian died in Venice.) He was born poor and in exile from Antwerp; he would die with immense wealth, with kings demanding daily bulletins on his health. By modern standards, of course, Rubens' public was quite small. The number of people who had heard of Rubens' work when he was alive would probably not make up a week's attendance at the Metropolitan Museum. But they were the people who owned and ran Europe. Few of Rubens' paintings, except the altarpieces--the cherub-borne Madonnas rising into the infinite blue gauze of heaven, the squirming cascades of rosy, tormented flesh in hell, the marmoreal dead Christs and grandly virile Apostles--were meant to be seen by a plebeian eye. They hung on palace walls, firmly reminding the autocrats of Catholic Europe--Habsburg and Gonzaga, Stuart and Medici--that absolute power is absolutely delightful. Rubens was one of the greatest political artists who ever lived, but he had nothing to do with our modern idea of the engage painter: he was no Courbet, but utterly a man of the right. There is no trace of speculative thought in his elaborate allegories. He believed in monarchy, Catholic dogma and the divine right of kings. Fatherless after the age of nine, he reveled in serving strong, authoritarian men. Vitality burgeoning in the midst of a peace guaranteed by authority--such was Rubens' master image. And although he was capable of excruciating flatteries when painting the great (notably his greedy, capricious patroness in France, Marie de Medicis), he seems never, granted his convictions, to have painted an insincere brush stroke in his life.

Such ambitions presupposed a very grand rhetoric, which Rubens based squarely on his study of classical art. As a young man in Rome, he made a sketch of every antique marble he could lay eyes on. His vast correspondence shows that he had read and memorized work by almost every known Latin writer, from Cicero to Plautus. He recommended "a complete absorption in statues," but "one must avoid the effect of stone." Rubens' large altarpiece, still in Antwerp Cathedral, of the Descent from the Cross, 1611-14, demonstrates exactly what he meant. The figure of Christ, the pale, dead God sliding down the cross into the arms of the living, is a visual quotation from Michelangelo--the kind of thing artists had been doing for 70 years. But Rubens did it in an entirely new way. Michelangelo had invented a tragic structure for the human body; Rubens invented a tragic surface. Nothing in earlier European art prepares one for that white, drained skin with its subtle undercasts of color. Rubens quoted anyone he wanted to, without the slightest embarrassment, in a spirit of reasoned homage: the great Entombment of Christ, 1613-15, for instance, is taken almost directly from Caravaggio. The modern cult of originality would have meant nothing to Rubens; he would have regarded it as a form of self-emasculation. The point was to add while taking, and that Rubens did superbly. No painter in previous European art was so capable of rendering the fullness of sentient life.

Rubens never forgot the lesson of Venetian art: with every object, from a wineglass to a woman's belly, brought to its fullest luster as substance, "luxury" meant completeness of being. There is something quite transcendental about Rubens' incessant delight in the material world. Every dimple or blush on the skin of Helene Fourment, the child wife of his old age (she was 16, he 53, when they were married in 1630), is both the record of desire and a proclamation of God's generosity. Rubens' world was tumescent; even the eyes in his portraits, large, white, engorged with visual appetite, look like erogenous zones. All his women--those grandly callipygian wardrobes of radiant flesh, whose bodies we feebly classify as "fat"--seem, as Sir Joshua Reynolds once remarked, to have "fed upon roses." The late landscapes he painted around Chateau de Steen, his country seat out side Brussels, are an extraordinary blend of the God's-eye-view landscape of mannerist art with the dense enumeration of Rubens' own material possessions.

Rubens continued to influence European art, especially in France, for 250 years after his death, supplying prototypes to generations of painters from Van Dyck to Fragonard, from Watteau to Delacroix, and even to Cezanne. But there is no way he can seem a "modern" painter now--as Caravaggio may.

That colossal yet fine-grained self-confidence, the sense of sharing and building on an inviolable tradition of pictorial language, the assurance that history is seamless--all that is gone. The paintings remain; their author seems a cultural impossibility.

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