Arts
Rubens: the prodigal father
Ursula Hoff
All over Europe celebrations are held this year in honour of the 400th anniversary of the birth of Peter Paul Rubens; museums in London, Cologhe, Antwerp, Paris, Munich, Leningrad, Vienna and Rome are mounting exhibitions of his work.
These spectacular tributes are dedicated to a painter who, like the phoenix from the ashes, rose among the turmoil of the Thirty Years War, out of a once prosperous, then impoverished country, now Belgium, from a devitalised artistic tradition, Mannerism — and by the sheer magnitude and quality of his art acutely polarised Northern painting into movements for and against Rubens.
Even Rembrandt, his greatest but Younger contemporary, ,pitted himself against Rubens; and French painters of the late seventeenth century divided themselves into `Rubenistes', the supporters of Colour, and 'Poussinistes', the supporters of design, A superbly inventive and imaginative cornposer, Rubens created huge, glowing murals to support his equally huge religious and allegorical themes. He also kept a busy workshop of assistants continually supplied With ideas for paintings, tapestries, book Illustrations and festive decorations. He found time as well, to be a widely informed scholar, linguist, courtier and diplomat who Participated for several years in negotiations between the courts of Brussels, Madrid, Paris and London in the hope of obtaining peace for his small country.
The immense oeuvre of Rubens reflects the idealism which inspired all his activities: his belief in benevolent authority, his stoic acceptance of suffering and his ability to transcend this world in enthusiastic flights of invention. In some ways he failed. The Peace he hoped for did not come until several years after his death. No great Belgian school of painting continued after him. But Rubens became a guiding light to many later painters: Rembrandt, Brouwer, van Dyck, Watteau, Boucher, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Delacroix, Constable, Thomas Lawrence, Ensor, Monet, 'Manet, RenOir, to record only the most eminent of !hese later artists. They all gained Immeasurably in fresh aesthetic instruction, and drew confidence and delight from the rieW use of high-keyed colour and free brushwork which is the hallmark of Rubens's style. The popular image of Rubens is curiously at variance with what I have sketched a..bove. Jaundiced references to bulging iemale flesh and goitrous necks seem, among the uninformed, the most frequent response to even the mention of his name and reactions or this kind are most pecul
iarly and distinctively irrelevant. Exactly as the way in which, in opera, the rhythms and sounds of music are more important, we trust, than the shape of the primadonna, thus in Rubens paintings noble sensuousness, harmony of colour and rhythmic coherence of forms play to the eye and set the mood in which the whole is to be both optically and imaginatively received.
When we look at the centre of the only ceiling decoration by Rubens still in its original position, the `Apotheosis of James I' in the Banqueting House in Whitehall, the baroque configurations of soaring and floating forms make credible the personification of Justice assisting James I in his ascent into the heavens, while the figures gain a certain heroic majesty from their generous proportions.
To me, the signal feature of Rubens's art is the creation and release of a new order of .beauty, born from his mastery of past traditions and expressed in a painterly vision of absolute profundity. Motifs from the antique as well as from Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Titian, are transformed into an original style which is handled with the apparently effortless, fluent ease of a great virtuoso. How did Rubens achieve this?
The British Museum Print Room exhibition of drawings and sketches is an ideal introduction to the workshop of his mind because the show both implies, in its range, and offers, in its clarity, an intimate understanding of the genius that Rubens celebrated. In this fascinating display of 224 items we see images come to life under his pen. In catalogue no. 2 for example a dryas-bone horse from a woodcut by Burgkmair recurs as an animated, endearing creature in Rubens's copy. No. 34, Diana's Nymphs Undressing, based on a bronze relief by `Coppe Fiamingo' borrowed from the Victoria and Albert Museum, belies the assumption that Rubens nudes are these of fat Flemish housewives — in this drawing he finds his ideal in elegant Italian nudes of the sixteenth century.
As you study the exhibition in greater depth, it becomes perfectly obvious that the poses and proportions .— the attitudes — of both his men and his women are due to the disciplined absorption of classical antique and Renaissance examples, enlivened and endowed with a new, exuberant vitality. The refinement and grace of Rubens's personal manner, often praised by his contemporaries, is reflected in his transformation of the traditional theme of 'The Garden of Love', in earlier renderings often didacticand not infrequently crude, into what his most famous biographer, Jacob Burckhardt, has called 'a noble social jest'. In Nos, 172(a) and (b), people in elegant if amplified contemporary costumes, surrounded by winged putti are shown in idyllic decorous pursuit of love; one of the oil paintings to which these drawings are related is at Waddesden Manor. Nearly a hundred years later, it inspired the Flemish-born French master Watteau to such tender pictures as 'Les Champs Elysee' and 'Fete in a Park', both in the Wallace Collection, in which Rubens's rich colours have been transmuted into an evanescent iridescence.
In Rubens's delicate chalk drawings, the light glides over the rise and fall of the forms, btit few of them are in such pristine condition as to show their original brilliance; the hardier oil sketches, however, amply convey the aesthetic appeal of Rubens's technique. Nos. 87 and 88, depicting lion hunts, demonstrate both Rubens's love of animal ferocity at violent pitch, and the complex rhythms which entwine horse and rider, or separate form and interval, and the range of tone and colour matched against a medium ground reach a subtlety which never fails to excite painters.
In no other branch of art is Rubens greater than in landscape,' wrote John Constable; 'the freshness and dewy light, the joyous and animated character which he has imparted, to it... the departing shower... the exhilaration of the returning sun. . . impressing on the level monotonous scenery of Flanders all the richness which belongs to its noblest features.' Rubens painted landscapes for his own pleasure rather than for commissions, and particularly so in his last years when he lived in the Château de Steen, the country house he had acquired. A drawing, No. 199, introduces us to the close interest in a modest motif of unpruned growth which resembles the overgrown roots in the foreground of Rubens's 'Château de Steen' painting in the National Gallery. Close observation inspired not only the foreground of this picture, but also the spectacle of the plane, which, gently undulating, seen through a haze of atmosphere in tones of light green, blue and yellow, recedes serenely towards the distant horizon. Two centuries later Rubens's vision would blossom into the great art of Constable, Turner and the Impressionists. This absorbing exhibition is copiously annotated, and there is a also a detailed text in the fully illustrated catalogue.
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