Guardian, 22 October 2005
The thing about entitling your show Master in the Making is that it assumes a public already sold on just what it was that got made. But that couldn’t be less true in the case of Rubens. In any given museum on any given Sunday, the empty gallery is invariably ‘Flemish, 17th Century’, where gatherings of massively upholstered nudes shift their dimpled weight opposite a collision of horses and carnivores, while by the door an obscure and pallid saint embraces his martyrdom with rolled-up eyes. Punters enter, take a quick gander, assume the proper expression of the glazed, the cowed, the awed and the baffled, and then accelerate towards the door marked ‘Rembrandt’.
Which is a shame, since there are peculiar exhilarations to be found in Rubens that are reproduced nowhere else in baroque art: the strenuous manipulation of sensation, even profound emotion, through purely pictorial muscle; incomparable draughtsmanship; eye-popping colour. Not for Rubens the darkling palette and the stripped-down casting of Caravaggio (though he took much else from the master whose scandalously naturalistic Death of the Virgin he tried to buy for the Duke of Mantua), nor the introspective psycho-probes of Rembrandt. Rubens is all about meaty animal energy and high-voltage design, the play of what one seventeenth-century biographer called his furia del pennello – the fury of the brush.
But Rubens’s surging line was never simply a virtuoso flourish. It was always put at the service of the controlled orchestration of bodies in motion. And as a colourist, no one since Titian and Giorgione came close. Whether he was confecting the most delicate flesh tones or throwing screaming vermilion at the canvas, it was with an eye to modelling forms rather than just filling them, thus making the ancient and tedious battle between disegno and colore moot.
Put all these gifts together and you get what contemporaries came to recognise as an incomparable marvel – the ‘god of painting’, as one of those recommending him for an Antwerp altarpiece in 1609 wrote. When he is operating at the height of his powers – as in the Courtauld oil sketch for the Descent from the Cross, or the adorably nipple-guzzling Roman Charity from the Hermitage – Rubens knocks the stuffing out of you, altering your breathing pattern.
So will this show at the National Gallery be that kind of conversion experience? If it turns out that way – and anyone who loves Rubens and wants to make the enthusiasm infectious must dearly hope so – it will be a triumph of art over concept. For the exhibition is very high-minded: it is so relentlessly bent on tracking each and every influence that went into the evolving artist’s manner (though it omits some of those that meant most to him in his earliest days, such as the woodcuts of Holbein and Tobias Stimmer) that at times it seems in danger of disappearing up its own erudition. There are great and good things to be learned here about Rubens’s compositional technique, but the overwhelming emphasis on process has tilted the choice of works towards those that can be unpacked as a cluster of compositional drawings, sketches and alternative versions. So we get two versions of Susanna and the Elders, neither sensational, rather than Rubens’s self-portrait with his first wife, Isabella Brant – a hymn to conjugal fertility – which certainly is.
There’s something airless about a show conceived and executed from a place so deeply internal to the academy of connoisseurs that you can practically smell the Chardonnay. In short supply (for the most part) is what, far more than this bit of Raphael or that bit of Michelangelo, actually made Rubens Rubens: what the painter would have called wellust and we – because English doesn’t have a name for it (goodness, I wonder why?) – would call joie de vivre, a hungry instinct for the flesh.
I suppose you have to admire the unfashionable courage of an exhibition so single-mindedly cool to history or biography. I’m among the ranks of those who think the pendulum has swung a little too far away from formal analysis and towards historical context in recent years, so that the pure visual charge of art has sometimes been suffocated beneath data-bloated compendia of prices and patrons. No danger here, though, of stooping to vulgar context. No danger of letting the visitor know, for instance, that Rubens grew up in the most bloody theatre of religious war in Europe; that his father – a Protestant convert! – was imprisoned and nearly executed for an affair with the Princess of Orange; that his most important Antwerp teacher, Otto van Veen, criss-crossed confessional lines between Calvinist Leiden and militantly Counter-Reformation Antwerp, or that the painter’s early life was a succession of personal, as well as painterly, dramas. Granted that the early Battles of the Amazons aren’t despatches from the front; granted that they owe much to Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari. But isn’t it interesting, nonetheless, to wonder whether the bristling cavalry that appears incongruously behind the classical figures don’t owe something to Rubens’s response to contemporary history?
This isn’t just a quibble about wall captions. It’s hard to think of a painterly career more tightly entwined with the great events of his time, as well as with the classical pedigree of his craft. And many of those events go straight to the heart of his ‘making’. Rubens, after all, first became an artist in Antwerp – a city in which the legitimacy or illegitimacy of sacred image-making had driven men to violence. Nine years before Rubens was born, Calvinist iconoclasts had smashed statues, ripped paintings from the walls of the cathedral. There was a Catholic restoration, but before Rubens was apprenticed there had been another return of Protestant whitewash before it was finally and permanently restored to the Catholic Counter-Reformation. So the intense fervour of Rubens’s religious painting is not just art, but spiritual weaponry. And his early career is as much a journey through a war zone as a prolonged exercise in the absorption of classicism.
In fact, the formative period in Italy from 1600 to 1608 is problematic in ways more fascinating than a genealogy of influences can possibly suggest. Like all aspiring artists in Rome, Rubens devoted himself to studying the sculptured riches of antiquity and duly drew the usual suspects: the Farnese Hercules, the Laocoön, the Apollo Belvedere. But the curators are right to insist on his brilliantly expressive amendments, all designed with a view to animating the sculpture. According to his eighteenth-century admirer Roger de Piles, Rubens warned against ‘the effect of stone’. He undoubtedly agreed with his brother Philip who wrote to him: ‘Away with that apathy which turns men not into human beings but rather into iron, into stone, a stone harder than the Niobic stone of mythology which overflowed with tears.’ Rubens’s work, then, became an articulate dialogue between classicism and naturalism.
It was also a decisive intervention in the stale dispute between what northern and southern painting were supposed to be. Most famously, Michelangelo, in a conversation with Francesco da Olanda, had let it be known that Flemish artists were tremendously good at painting trees and grass and peasants, the implication being that they were mere skilled illusionists rather than true artists possessed by the divinity of an idea. More than any other Flemish artist before him, Rubens would decisively overthrow the stereotype, establishing himself as a supreme history painter. Without ever apologising for his own gift for earthy naturalism (the sublime landscapist is already evident in detail from early works), he cast himself as a palette-toting humanist philosopher: the pictor doctus, the learned painter.
It’s a pity, then, that the person most influential in this vocational reinvention – his brother Philip – is largely missing from the exhibition, notwithstanding the fact there are two group portraits that bring the brothers together, one of which happens to be a knockout masterpiece. For Rubens – unlike the archetypal caricature of the isolated melancholic genius (Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Salvator Rosa) – was the most sociable and fraternal of artists. In Rome he mixed with the likes of Dr Johannes Faber, who treated him for a bout of pleurisy and who was, among other things, a friend of Galileo, and a naturalist who had written works on dragons, serpents and parrots.
Fraternity and friendship for the Rubens brothers was not just a sentiment but a philosophy: a golden chain of connections binding like-minded men to each other, and to their teachers in the recent and remote past. The dazzlingly beautiful and moving Four Philosophers, painted in the year of Philip’s premature death in 1611 and now in the Pitti Palace, anthologises all the deepest thoughts and emotions that made the young Rubens tick. In a classical niche is a vase of four tulips – two open, two shut – not just the northern bloom par excellence imported to the world of the classical south, but emblems of two living and two dead men. The dead are Philip and his teacher, the neo-stoic philosopher and philologist Justus Lipsius. But the chain stretches further, for behind Lipsius and beside the tulips is a bust then thought to be of Seneca, the stoic who counselled men to bend but not break under the worst that fate and history could bring your way: war, tyranny, plague and untimely death. In the end there would be redemption, so images of Roman antiquity and Roman Christianity (a marbled pillar and a view to the church of St Theodore on the Palatine) are paired, while behind the foreground figures stands the no longer quite so young Pieter Paul Rubens, swathed in black.
If the Four Philosophers couldn’t make the journey from Florence to London, the irony is all the more acute because Rubens, as the exhibition makes clear, did a great deal of travelling before returning to fame and fortune in Antwerp in 1608. Hired by Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua, to paint a gallery of ‘beautiful women’, he managed to get leave to go to Rome where he lived, eventually, with Philip in the northern artists’ neighbourhood near the Piazza del Popolo. Every so often he would report back to Mantua, sometimes travelling with the Duke to Genoa. There he painted stunning full-length portraits of Genoese aristocratic women, one of which shines in this exhibition: it is a piece of unapologetic costume glamour, the sumptuously loaded brush creamily caressing its subject. Rubens made studies of the Genoese palazzi and obviously loved the flash opulence of a banking republic in which brassy glitz was made elegant by the trappings of classical grandeur. It was like home, but with pomegranates and parrots rather than cheese and ale.
However, official travel brought trials that would test Rubens’s neo-stoical powers of resilience. Sent by the Duke of Mantua with a gift package for the King of Spain and his favourite, the Duke of Lerma (the usual thing – crystal vases full of rare perfume, horses so glossy and well bred they travelled inside their own carriages, original paintings and copies), Rubens endured the nightmare of unpacking the art to find it half-destroyed by damp. The Mantuan minister, who didn’t much care for this wet-behind-the-ears envoy displacing him, suggested that he rush off a landscape or two the way Flemings did. Instead Rubens painted the Heraclitus and Democritus included in this show, not just to display his philosophical credentials, but – since one scowls and the other laughs at the twists of fate and follies of men – perhaps also as a wry piece of autobiography. The artist who one day would enjoy his reputation as the prince of painters and the painter of princes already knew how to handle power.
None of this would matter were he not also on his way to becoming a great history painter, which is to say the artist of spellbinding altarpieces. Back in Rome, he was lucky with his timing. The Oratorian order was looking for someone to decorate their church. Annibale Carracci had given up painting, Caravaggio was on the run and Guido Reni was too untested. Rubens had his chance: he took several cracks at it and, when it failed because of the intense reflectiveness of the light, took out his neo-stoic manual of adaptability and did them something on slate instead.
Then he returned to Antwerp, breathing a little freer after the conclusion of a truce with the Dutch. In two years he knocked off two transcendent masterpieces – the Raising of the Cross and the Descent from the Cross – which, if all other Rubens paintings were to go up in flames, would still ensure his claim on the adulation of posterity. Of course, those altarpieces, which are triptychs in the old Flemish style, can’t travel. But the National Gallery exhibition provides a rich insight into the ways in which Rubens worked towards what became the grand spiritual machines of the big altarpieces, by means of preliminary studies, drawings, sketches and the ‘pocketbook’ in which he encyclopaedically gathered images, organised by subject.
What is so striking about those multiple try-outs is the way in which the improvisatory freedom – the rushing force of the pen and brush – manage to be translated so completely to the large-scale works. Rubens’s hand flies, but the works are in the best sense weighty, whether conveying the agonising upward heave of the cross – all sweat and raw sinew – or the burden of the crucified Christ dropping onto the blood-red caped figure of John the Evangelist.
The best passages are classicism fleshed out by naturalism: a barking hound, a winding cloth gripped in the teeth of someone at the head of the cross; brutality and pathos, momentum and stillness held in perfect equipoise. For these moments alone it’s worth trekking through the mediocre apprentice pieces, and hacking aside the underbrush of scholarly interventions, to get to those stupendous instants when, in front of his Massacre of the Innocents or The Death of Hippolytus, your eyes widen, your pulse races and you agree that the master has indeed been made.