Rubens in London, by Huntley Dent

Titian, Rembrandt, and who? Several years ago I read an assessment of Peter Paul Rubens in the New Yorker which called him "history’s chief painter’s painter," while snatching back the compliment in the next breath, dubbing him "the leading pictorial decorator, propagandist, and entertainer for a Catholic Europe."  Since depreciation is more fun than appreciation, the magazine's art critic says, of Rubens' female nudes, "all that smothering flesh, vibrantly alive but with the erotic appeal of a mud slide." As zingers go, here's another goodie: "Nor do Rubens’s characters appear significantly more intelligent than his farm animals."

The final impression one got was that a simple drawing of an ox – the most highly praised work in the article – surpasses Rubens' vast output of oil paintings, which is like dissing Alain Ducasse except for his appetizers. Unassailable reputations are waiting to be assailed, I suppose. Like a master chef, Rubens was guaranteed to serve up a feast for the eye, and he worked rapidly, as if the customer was impatiently tapping his wine glass. He died in 1640 at the age of sixty-two, and it's startling to consider that when he was around thirty, Rubens could have come to London to see the first performances of Hamletand King Lear.  His style seems at least a century ahead. So prolific was he that London abounds in Rubens, major and minor.  The works were well worth pausing over this summer, when the big museums seemed empty of important, intriguing shows.

It takes a conscious effort to recover Rubens as you walk past acres of his Biblical and historical scenes. He has the disdvantage shared with Tiepolo and Watteau, for example,  that a single style, sweeping through multiple canvases, sums him up too quickly. A typical Rubens is crammed with figures in billowy, fleshy abundance, as witness The Conversion of Saint Paul at the Courtauld Institute on the Strand. Here we have the risen Christ illuminating the apex of a tumultuous scene, while  the blinded Saul, lying flat on his back in the foreground, is almost lost in the welter of confused and amazed figures.  A crowd is sharing his epiphany, or at least its repercussions. The event isn't seen with mystic awe; rather, it affords a reason for Rubens' familiar way of tangling a host of characters into a Baroque pile-up of passion and posturing.

Read more on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts.