Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Peter Paul Rubens
Flemish; 17th-century
Antwerp, Belgium: Royal Museum of Fine Arts
91%
Epitaph of Nicolaas Rockox and His Wife Adriana Perez. 1613-15. Oil on canvas
It's as close to self-evident as anything in art can be to say that Rubens is all about the way he paints his flesh: it's supple, motile, topographical in its rhythms of shadowed pits and peaks; unimaginably differentiated in hue and texture, too, but also as real as the skin on your own arm, or somehow more real despite its mottlings of strange reds and blues. Problem is, Rubens has many pictures where, in addition to showing you that he can paint bodies with such controlled bravura, he also works to prove that he can get away with compositional murder — swinging masses and reaching forms in all sorts of states of collision, diagonals against diagonals against diagonals, tableaus nested in vignettes within pictures inside of pictures. It's seldom not breathtaking but it's usually too much, and it muddles his virtue as an essentially figural artist. So, in pictures like this Epitaph, where every inch of the arrangement seems calibrated to focusing attention on the perfect painted flesh of Christ, it's possible to recognize Rubens's genius acutely. It's an almost craftsmanly genius, one born above all from attention to the task of rendering. But then, what makes this altarpiece exceptional isn't the complex luminosity of the Lord's torso alone, but, more generally, the way the whole of this ensemble prepares you to see the flesh of your savior. His body is opened out towards the picture plane. His head in profile is pressed against the indistinct ground behind it, flat and regular like the atmosphere of an icon. The patrons in the side panels occupy not only a different, but also a much more developed and particularized space than Christ and his figure group at center, underscoring the arbitrariness of and therefore the simple enframing function performed by the grey background. The apostles are rapt, staring at Jesus; their slightly convex arrangement cups the Lord and counters his left arm's extension, concentrating the energy of the picture right at the point where his hip meets his shrouded elbow. (TFS, 2026)
Antwerp, Belgium: Rubens House Museum
90%
Self-Portrait. c1623-1630. Oil on panel
In this painting there's everything that's great about Rubens, with none of the cocky hogwash or allegorical flotsam. All the vivacious bending and tilting, all the selectivity of focus, all the fullness against all the flatness. None of the paint-pushing, none of the largeness for its own empty sake. Rubens' cap manages not to graze the edges of the panel; his beard is painted with such movement; the unreal redness of his lips finds a friend in those broken rust-colored seams that run down his jacket; there's the perfect amount of disparity between the way the face and the way the rest of the scene has been painted: the one voluminous and firm, the other airy but present. Things that are often liabilities in Rubens' art have here been made into virtues. (TFS, 2026)
Antwerp, Belgium: Cathedral of Our Lady
88%
Raising of the Cross. 1609-10. Oil on three panels
Despite how full-bodied his paintings always seem, Rubens actually deals in extremely shallow space, here as elsewhere. Volume is much more the attribute of objects and figures than of space itself. (This is why his backgrounds often seem so phoned-in, as do the sky and the stones in this painting.) There could be mere feet, even inches, of recession into depth between the tugging bearers at bottom right of the central panel and the upraised arms of the attendants at upper left: and however much distance there actually is between them, their extension backwards into the core of the painting is, at every crucial point, countered by an even bolder projection out towards the picture plane (this mostly comes in the form of Caravaggesque highlights on each muscle's bulge). Through this dramatic push-and-pull between the inside and out of the image, which seems to take place not in any one location but fractally across the painting's whole surface, there emerges a sense of connectedness between all of the figures, but also of violent dehiscence. The forms in the painting seem at once to be coagulating and rending themselves apart. While the same effect is more convincingly (because more quietly and economically) achieved in the best works of Caravaggio, this is among the artworks where Rubens' busy braggadocio is most aesthetically legitimate. (TFS, 2026)
Antwerp, Belgium: Royal Museum of Fine Arts
81%
The Prodigal Son. c1618. Oil on canvas
It actually suits Rubens to be working in this unusual (for him) low Netherlandish idiom, rather than to be aping grand Southern structures. Closer to Beuckelaer than to Titian in its arrangement, but still replete with extravagant handling, this picture contains more places than usual where Rubens's handling can go safely wild, without getting lost in itself — the flank of a cow or the rump of a horse; the webs in the rafters; that brief lit segment of wall at left, before it gives way to bric-a-brac and darkness. Rubens was such an avid paint-pusher that, in his pictures, vastness often became a liability, and structure could come to seem like an afterthought or an apology for his indulgent working of the surface. This picture, instead, possesses the orderly disorder of early Flemish still life, but Rubens has suffused it — a necessary addition to that idiom's somewhat picky visual language — with the vivacity of Venetian facture. It makes his bravura in this medium seem controlled and deliberate, almost completely necessary. This is probably because brushwork here is specifically keyed to, bounded by, discrete "things" in the painting: swine, legs, wooden wheels, sunrise. If nothing else, it's interesting to see Rubens engaging in "inverted still life" (shoving the "prodigal son" action into the bottom right corner of the canvas) and the covered-candle trope (which the Utrecht painters were only just then perfecting). (TFS, 2026)
Antwerp, Belgium: Cathedral of Our Lady
78%
Descent from the Cross. 1611-14. Oil on three panels
The discontinuity between the three scenes in this triptych is interesting, especially as a foil to the inter-panel unity of its companion, the Raising of the Cross altarpiece. But in the final estimation, things don't quite come off: compared to the Rockox triptych — which uses a similar separation of its wing panels from the action in its central scene to control and concentrate the effects of Rubens' extravagant facture — discontinuity in the Descent seems instead to detract from the monumental oneness of the figure group in its middle panel, and to draw away from the magnificent paint handling that makes up the body of Christ. (Look especially at the cocky horizontality of the stairway Mary's standing on at left, at how it gets no response till the meek rungs of the ladder to the right of the Lord.) The Descent shares with the Raising an anxiously shallow depth of field, as well as a heavy implication that there exists in the space just behind its figures some massive, vacuous force that's in the process of breaking apart but still somehow scaffolding everything around it. In the Descent, however, this force is cloistered in the heart of the central panel; in the Raising, it flows through every formal relation. (TFS, 2026)
Vienna, Austria: Kunsthistorisches Museum
78%
The Feast of Venus. c1636. Oil on canvas
As often happens with Rubens, it seems his virtuosity has here gotten in the way of good design. But look at almost any individual tableau within this whole baggy scene, and notice how set it is in all its relations. Up in the trees, that fifth cherub from the right bends its body to continue the arabesque set off by the reaching woman just below; the carousing girls and satyrs at left vibrate in response to the way the circle of putti to their right lurches towards them. Perhaps things in this painting are balanced, if bloated. Then again, keep looking. You'll come upon passages that don't resolve into the noise around them, places on the canvas that appear to have been left out of the theatrics completely: that block of red sky left of center that's grading up to blue, for instance; the kissing cupids at bottom right. Since the thick action of this painting is little but a pretense for Rubens to indulge in careening colors and wild contrast, such lapses in the scene's logic are almost forgivable. But a perfect painting wouldn't compromise itself as much as this one does. (TFS, 2025)
Antwerp, Belgium: Royal Museum of Fine Arts
76%
Venus Frigida. 1614. Oil on canvas
I'd be insane to say that the figures here are anything other than perfectly sculpted, or that the brood of the sky or the desolate sway of the hills are anything other than miracles of Rubens's brush. Venus looks at once lissome and like she's made out of stone; the left side of the canvas rivals anything ever done by El Greco. But there's something fake and inexcusable about Rubens when he paints like this, so controlled in his recklessness, so choosy and witting. Is the stone/stump mass to the right of the goddess a stunning little passage? Is it an abstract cry across the canvas to the turbid background, unsettling even the most settled forms in the satyr's belly and Venus's back? Yes, of course it is. But is this "all-over" quality in the surface of this painting ultimately only in service of the flesh Rubens so relished painting? Is there a carelessness at work in three-fourths of this painting that makes you question the virtue of every delectating muscle and fold in the quarter of the canvas that really counts? Also yes. (TFS, 2026)
Antwerp, Belgium: Museum Plantin-Moretus
72%
Portrait of Christophe Plantin. 1616. Oil on canvas
Rubens was always so freewheeling with his influences — one could say showboat-y — that it's nice, in a portrait like this one, to see the quietude and the austerity of Netherlandish painting poking through. (There's some El Greco, too, but it's tempered, as El Greco himself often was with his own portraits.) The bravura is still there in the highly worked background, and of course it's present in the romping blue tones behind the skin on Plantin's face. But there's a hardness to the eyes that strikes me as serious and un-Rubensian; it talks back a bit to the frolicsome handling of paint. This is not even a noteworthy portrait, but it rewards looking by reminding you of the subtler charms of which Rubens was capable, despite himself. (TFS, 2026)
Atlanta, GA: High Museum of Art
63%
Holy Family with a Garland of Flowers. c1620. Oil on panel (with Workshop and Jan Brueghel the Elder)
The collaborative element (this is one of many JB/PPR dual canvases) makes this, ultimately, a metapainting — it's a trompe l'oeil painting of a framed and garlanded painting. This means that the reasons we typically appreciate Rubens (the freeness of his hand, his roving color, the buxom nature of his compositions) are all attenuated, and subordinated to the piece's conceptual aims. This isn't the worst thing, as the sort of one-note reflections on the fiction of painting that trompe-l'oeil stimulates serves, here and there, to make us better notice this painting as a painting. The conceit that the flowers are "real" but the family scene an "illusion" tinges the way we notice chromatic affinities between these two components of the total painting; the octagonal shape of the painted internal frame around Rubens's contribution enhances the energy produced by the network of cast glances. But these are small painterly potatoes when it comes to an artist of Rubens's caliber. (Brueghel's a minor painter and can't be blamed for what are ultimately trifles, if interesting ones.) (TFS, 2025)