Rubens, the Grand Inseminator

By * Robert Hughes

"Do we admire? Not always. Can we remain unmoved? Scarcely ever." The 19th century critic Eugene Fromentin's remark is still true of most reactions to Sir Peter Paul Rubens, the unrivaled master of 17th century Baroque painting. The austerities of modern art have taught us to feel queasy in the presence of his immense worldliness, Shakespearean erudition and, above all, his imagery: those nudes, pink bombe-fronted wardrobes of flesh; those heroes and captains and kings, displaying their vigor and assurance like baroque cock-birds of paradise; the fluster of rich fabrics and cloud, the lions and leopards and marble.

Rubens was not an esoteric artist. The world did not veil itself from him in ambiguities. Perhaps no other painter since Titian displayed such an assured possession of his own experience, and beside it, even Picasso's notable lebenslust seems rather cramped. In a sense, Rubens was to the 17th century in Europe (he died in 1640) what Picasso was to the first half of the 20th. But Rubens' influence then went on, which Picasso's shows no sign of doing, for another 200 years. First there were his ex-students, Anthony Van Dyck and Jacob Jordaens. Even more important were the French Rubenistes. "From the moment I received it, I have not had a moment's repose," Antoine Watteau wrote to his patron Julienne after he had been given a picture by Rubens, "and my eyes are never weary of returning toward the easel where I have placed it as if in a shrine."

Shower of Gold. The French court artists of the late 17th century, like Jean Jouvenet and Charles De La Fosse, all worked under Rubens' shadow. So did Franc,ois Boucher in the late 18th century, and a further succession of painters, culminating in the 19th with Eugene Delacroix. "What a magician! I get out of sorts with him at times. I quarrel with him because of his heavy forms, his lack of science and elegance. But how far he is above all those little qualities which make up the whole baggage of others ..." And the view Delacroix expressed of Rubens, as a demonic, fertilizing agent, descending on art as Zeus came down to Danae in a shower of gold, remained until the human figure ceased to be the main subject of art.

An exhibition that would do full justice to Rubens' impact on later art would have to be encyclopedic, and perhaps it will come in 1977 with the 400th anniversary of his birth. But meanwhile, a fascinating exploration of Rubenisme (in Flanders, England and France) is on show in Providence, sponsored by Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Organized by graduate students under Assistant Professor Mary C. Volk of Brown, it is the first systematic effort to show Rubens' posthumous influence on Europe theme by theme. It is hard to see how so much territory could be better indicated on a small exhibition budget. Apart from the (necessarily small) paintings by Rubens himself, there are works by Jouvenet, De La Fosse, Boucher, Fragonard, Gainsborough, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Gericault and Delacroix, and as fine a group of Watteau crayon drawings as one could hope to see in any room in the U.S.

Rubens' influence was so great partly because his output was so huge. A prodigious and systematic vitality enabled him to complete more than 1,000 oils, in which all the chief subjects of Baroque art--from crucifixions to battle and hunting scenes, from political allegory and mythology to grand-style portraiture--were reinvented, passed through a generous and erudite intelligence and mingled with commoner themes to which Rubens gave a new stature: landscape and still life. His idea of a battle piece was a knot of turbulent figures and horses, locked together into one impacted mass by an undulating, centripetal rush of line, as in the magnificent Battle of Constantine and Licinius(1622) (see color).

By the time Rubens had finished amplifying the battle-piece theme in later paintings, the source of hundreds of battle pictures and painted disaster ep ics in the 18th and 19th centuries had been laid, even down to the kind of horses. Rubens' standard horse, a prancing, thick-barrelled animal with nervous fet locks, cascading tail, wild, rolling eyes and distended nostrils, was repeated by Gericault and Delacroix until it became the very symbol of the romantics' sense of organic energy. In portraiture, Rubens' sense of the grand manner and his way of putting figures convincingly within nature would deeply affect both Gainsborough and Reynolds, the leading English art theorist of his time. Reynolds greatly admired Rubens' "airiness and facility."

Pagan Love. Rubens added some thing to the meaning of every subject he touched, but perhaps the deepest transformation of a theme that he set off was the imagery of the terrestrial paradise, which he changed into a thoroughly erotic Eden: the island of Cythera, sacred to Aphrodite. It was from this delectable abode of profane love that the 18th century painters of the fete champetre drew their inspiration. Rubens' outdoor courts of pagan love became Watteau's exquisite assemblies of lovers and Pierrots, at dusk, beside the Mozartian stone statue. This vision of a society of the elect united by love (which is equally the root of the paradise myth) continued through Watteau's colleagues and imitators, Fragonard, Jean-Baptiste Pater -- in The Dance (circa 1730) -- Nicolas Lancret and the rest. Nor was it altogether lost with the French Revolution. Delacroix, whose painfully stiff early imitations of Rubens (like Henri IV Conferring the Regency on Marie de' Medici) are much to the fore in this show, was able in maturity to go back to his great prototype and produce such majestically sensual works as Turkish Women Bathing (1854), an outdoor seraglio, a blend of Venus garden and fete champetre. In the event, it was Rubens who saved classical mythology for the romantics by rescuing it from its scholarly imbrications. By the same token, he rescued historical allegory by giving it the unique straightforwardness, the solidity and dazzle that his followers could only aspire to imitate. Perhaps no painter ever gave the word more flesh, or had more gratitude for it.

* Robert Hughes

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