Beguiled by Rubens

Andrew Lambirth

Peter Paul Rubens: A Touch of Brilliance C.:Umlaute-1 Instittite, Somerset House, London WC2, until 8 February 2004

Devonshire's two-year-old son Richard died of whooping cough in 1791, she wrote to her sister the next day: 'The poor little fellow has been opened & the disorder found to be exactly such as Kerr [the physician] had described'. She then goes on, only hours, minutes later, to give details of what the doctor found: 'thick glutinous phlegm adhering to the lower part of the wind pipe so firmly as not to be detached, which occasioned the hooping noise that always attends this fatal complaint'.

Reading Johnson's autopsy report now, with its lack of any connection to the man who wrote Rasselas or compiled the Dictionary, is discomfiting. It provoked me to wonder just how much more rational and scientific are we than the Georgians? When last year Gunther von Hagen staged Body Worlds, his exhibition of dead humans, shot through with dyes to illustrate the internal workings of the body, he aroused a furious debate about the ethics of using human bodies in this way. Flow many of those reading this article will be carrying donororgan cards? How many of us will ever have seen the dead body of a relative or friend?

Other exhibits in The Tyranny of Treatment also suggest this confusion between superstition and rationalism. Johnson wore all his life the gold medallion given to him by Queen Anne when as a child he was brought to London to be 'touched' as a cure for scrofula, a kind of tuberculosis. (Queen Anne was the last of the English monarchs to carry on the practice, based on the superstitious belief in the healing power that resided in monarchy.) But most dramatic of all is the Death Mask. Immediately after the completion of the autopsy, the artist Sir Joshua Reynolds arranged for a plaster-of-Paris cast to be made of his friend's head (another reason why the brain was left untouched?) from which copies were made for other members of Johnson's circle. Eyeless, with none of the spirit or expression of the Reynolds portraits, it yet dominates the Garret Room where Johnson and his assistants compiled the Dictionary.

It's haunting: an image of a dead man, a man stripped bare. Somehow it does bring you closer to what must have been the extraordinary power of Johnson's personality. And yet, would you want to keep such a memorial of your best friend on your sideboard?

Johnson and his friends accepted death as part of life; the ultimate resolution. We, however, in spite of our rational secularism, tend now to hurry away our dead, or else to indulge in outbursts of absurd sentimentalism. Few among us would be able to contemplate our end with such composure as Johnson, both devout and rational.

The subtitle of this splendid show in the Hermitage Rooms of Somerset House is plainly descriptive: 'Oil Sketches and Related Works from the State Hermitage Museum and the Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery'. It is, in fact, the first exhibition to celebrate the formal alliance between the Hermitage and Courtauld that was forged in August. (I wonder what Anthony Blunt, past director of the Courtauld, would have thought.) It consists of some 40 oil sketches, ten related drawings and a finished painting or two.

There are also some copies by other artists, of little interest really. It is the might and majesty of Rubens himself that we have come here to admire. For these oil sketches — unlike the vast commissioned decorative cycles, mostly carried out by assistants at the artist's direction — are by Rubens himself. Their intimacy and spontaneity, as well as their supremely high level of skill, make them utterly beguiling.

Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), artist and diplomat, was the greatest exponent of the Baroque — that grand style of exaggerated scale, given to sweeping diagonals, heightened colour, and flowing and swirling forms — which he can also be said to have pioneered with history paintings rivalling the Italians. He was born in Westphalia, whither his family had removed in exile from Antwerp, but grew up mostly in Cologne. When the boy was ten the family returned to Antwerp and, after a few years of schooling, he began to study painting. In 1600 he left the Netherlands for Italy, where he spent eight years immersing himself in the art of the Antique and Renaissance. Titian was a key influence on him, equipping him to devel

op a highly individual style of modelling in colour, which was particularly effective in depicting flesh with lifelike vibrancy.

The lighting might not always be perfect, but the atmosphere of the Hermitage Rooms is restful and conducive to studying these beautiful pictures at close quarters. The Courtauld and Hermitage collections complement each other extremely well, and enable several of Rubens's great decorative schemes to be examined thoroughly. In the first room there is a superb study for the 'Descent from the Cross', a panel painting which displays a remarkable range of expression among its protagonists, from consternation to shock and sorrow. As part of the surging diagonal from top right to bottom left, about which the picture is constructed, we are also shown — a pose which is emphasised in the beautiful brown ink drawing from the Hermitage hung next to it — the strange gesture of the old man who grips Christ's shroud in his teeth and pulls. (This drawing, incidentally, was one of the many pictures by Rubens acquired by Catherine the Great, a fervent admirer of the artist.) In the same room is the compelling coupling of a 'Head of a Man', a highly finished study on panel, and a painting entitled 'Christ with the Crown of Thorns', which has never been shown before outside Russia. The attendant to the left and behind Christ in this picture is undoubtedly based on the slightly earlier 'Head of a Man'.

Going through into Room II, we encounter two of the more ambitious of Rubens's decorative schemes. In 1620 he was commissioned to provide 39 ceiling paintings for the new Jesuit church in Antwerp; this was his first great scheme. He acquitted himself of the task with extraordinary verve. Look, for instance, at the daring freedom of brush-stroke in 'The Virgin and Child Appearing to St Gregory', all loose but telling marks and speedy highlights. Then there are the gorgeous little grisaille studies: 'David Slaying Goliath' and 'St Barbara Pursued By Her Father', here shown beside the slightly more finished sketch of the same subject from Dulwich. It remains extraordinary how much information Rubens could convey with so few strokes.

Across the room hang five images relating to the Medici cycle, painted for Marie de'Medici, Dowager Queen of France, and commissioned in an act of gross autobiographical aggrandisement. The most beautiful of these is undoubtedly the panel depicting her coronation. With its soft, succulent pinks and scribbles of light, this is the most atmospheric of pictures, made with a startling economy of means.

In Room III are hung studies for Rubens's famous ceiling for Inigo Jones's Banqueting House in Whitehall. (The curious visitor might wish to experience the finished thing, which is unique in being still in its original setting, just a short bus-ride away. However it does cost £4 to get in, and it's not always open. Advisable to check first.) Four hundred years ago, in 1603, James I of England and VI of Scotland united the crowns of the two countries. His son, Charles I, commissioned the Banqueting House ceiling to be a celebration of the fact, and of his father generally. In Room III, there is a marvellous airy panel of centripetal design (borrowed from the National Gallery where it is on loan from a private collection) which actually includes ideas for seven different Banqueting House paintings, The whole construction of this panel moves dizzyingly but satisfyingly into a central light source — as any good apotheosis should.

In this same room are some real Baroque extravagances in the shape of designs for the 'Triumphal Entry of Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand into Antwerp'. But however overwrought these might seem to be, they are exquisitely drawn in colour. The last room contains various versions of the 'Conversion of St Paul', the studies being so much more full of zest and sparkle than the finished painting. And there's rather a brilliant 'Lion Hunt', with purposeful touches of pink and blue amid a monochrome maelstrom of strokes. One drawing, in black and red chalk, supposedly depicting 'A Battle of Horsemen', is very 'modern'-looking, all signs and vectors, like an abstract diagram of energies, hardly descriptive at all. By contrast, a black chalk drawing of a classical figure, known as 'Seneca', hanging in the corridor, has a riveting delicacy and naturalism to it.

If you want some more examples of Rubens's genius, for the sake of context and comparison, there's a special display of his work in Room 29 of the National Gallery, until 7 December. Its centrepiece is The Massacre of the Innocents', bought last year by Lord Thomson of Fleet for £49.5 million. It's on long-term loan to the NG, and is surrounded and supported by a fine selection of loans from around the world, both works on paper and oils. I strongly recommend that you visit these shows. Every generation can discover something new in the generous spirit of such an artist. And we all need a touch of brilliance in our lives.