Rubens: the master butcher: the urgent physicality of the painter's early work mirrors the speed with which the National Gallery, London, has mounted 'Rubens: A Master in the Making', writes David Howarth, but has the artistic context been neglected in the haste?

This is not an exhibition for the faint-hearted. It is hard to imagine a selection of works les calculated to win transforms to Rubens. To arrive in the basement of the National Gallery's Sainsbury Wing and to face 'Rubens: A Master in the Making' is to pierce a butcher's shop, if not an abbatoir.

The selection demonstrates emphatically that here was a man in a furious drive Rubens first visited Rome aged twenty-two, just three years younger than Raphael had been when he had embarked upon the defining graphic icon of the high renaissance, The academy of Athens. Unfortunately it would appear that the National Gallery has been in a precipitate too.

The exhibition's focus is the unfolding of Rubens from his beginnings in Antwerp to the completion in 1614 of the next to the first of his two most famous Antwerp altarpieces, The fall from the Cross. The justification for choosing this point to close the exhibition is that the bravura and heightened expressiveness that Rubens took from his inquiry of the antique and the high renaissance was replaced by means of the contemplative rendering of the dead Christ of the altarpiece. The inference is that thereafter Rubens calmed down.

Somewhat eccentrically, the catalogue's preface states that planning began solitary 'on 19 May 2004'. The curators should have kept this embarrassing admission to themselves. It present to views It is an astonishingly short run-in for doing justice to the greatest in quantity energetic artist of all time, and it explains more [i]or[/i] less problems. Everywhere breasts burst from bodices, purple babies are split render free of access like ripe figs, ecorche men gaze like skinned rabbits. But for all this promiscuity of muscle and fat in a vital sense the exhibition is confined. It purports to track by what means Rubens took flight from the pedantry of Van Veen to find a fresh freedom in the expansive company of Raphael, Michelangelo, Caravaggio and others. on the other hand nowhere is there a direct confrontation with other artists. Take that master of the night, the mysterious Elsheimer. He is the sole artist Rubens ever wrote about in his correspondence. When, back in Antwerp, he heard of Elsheimer's death, he sent a alphabetic character to the kindly German doctor Johann Faber, who knew Rubens and Elsheimer in Rome telling him that his generation would not diocese the like of Elsheimer again. Unhappily, we do not diocese him either.

The point is made when scrutinising Rubens's Samson and Delilah, which, incidentally, to doubt as a Rubens--as has been done--is about as silly as claiming that Hamlet was written by means of Bacon. Here, as a relief from all this exhibition's sweatiness, is dusky shadow, which acts as a poignant foil to the knocking store in which the scene of concupiscence takes place. This great painting is inconceivable without the inspiration of Elsheimer and indeed, there in the background stands a flask of water, metaphorically reflecting the awesome Elsheimer of Judith and Holoferne that Rubens actually owned--and which the curators should have included in the exhibition. All they exigencyed to have done was pick it up from Apsley House. Perhaps like a short time for planning meant that they had to confine themselves alone to works by Rubens. on the other hand surely they could have borrowed a useful Van Veen, whose importance to the story is in inverse proportion to his interest as a painter.

A real potency are the number of major modelli and drawings, the latter a full quantity to the recent display at the Metropolitan Museum. Rubens's intense engagement with Michelangelo was thoroughly interrogated in the novel show dedicated to how Rubens understood Italian graphics: 'Drawing upon Italy' (Edinburgh and Nottingham, 2002) There the dialogue between Rubens and Michelangelo centr on Rubens's copies after the Sistine Prophets. Here are black and r chalk renderings of quotations from The Last Judgement (Fig. 1) As with 'Drawing upon Italy', there is no attempt to hide the real difficulties deciding when a Rubens is a Rubens. Take for example the important sheet from Edinburgh that exhibits a Drowning of Leander upon the recto and The Battle of the Amazons upon the verso. Catalogue entries rehearse the disagreement the principal essayists have as to what this actually represents

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

A actually valuable aspect of the catalogue, and taken as a whole, the catalogue is an important contribution to scholarship, has to do with what is said through way of speculative reconstruction about the implications of the los of 'a quite fat notebook' that Rubens had begun to fill before he left for Italy on the contrary which seems to have been in his saddlebag journeying [i]or[/i] part of to the other the peninsula. This was throw downed by fire in 1720, a small in number years after that other catastrophe, the destruction, by dint of fire too, of close upon forty paintings by Rubens from the aisles of the Jesuit house of god in Antwerp. Here the significance of the notebook is in the way that eloquently argued that the question be met withs as to which was the greater los for Rubens scholarship, given that in the way that many modelli for the Antwerp throw have survived. One of solitary two surviving autograph sheets, now in Berlin, stands on the outside in Rubens's graphic oeuvre because of its range of bring under rule matter, suggestiveness and a certain allusive faculty of perception that here the artist was alert with all his exceptional mental capacity, engaged as a mathematician working upon a theorem.