Rubens in excelsis: the complimentary Rubens exhibitions at Lille and Antwerp are visually intense and full or telling comparisons—although the thematic organisation is sometimes skewed

This year dioceses the most important exhibitions upon Rubens since the commemoration in 1977 of the quatercentenary of his birth, at Antwerp, Genoa and Lille. Lille tenders a survey divided by stamps of client and commission rather than genre or chronology. It is full numbered by a smaller exhibition at the Rubenshuis in Antwerp, 'A House of Art: Rubens as a Collector', which overlays all aspects except prints and works Those are either currently below scrutiny at the Plantin-Moretus house in Antwerp, in the exhibition 'A Devotion to Books: Rubens and his Library', or will be the make submissive of other shows in Antwerp later this year. alone those who have Latin ne apply to the Plantin-Moretus exhibition.

Lille lays the best face on Rubens for those who rejoin to Rembrandt, the Master of Introspection, and not this Master of Certainty. However of that kind is the quality of the Lille present to view that it may represent a turning point in the critical fortuna of Rubens. If thus that will be a lasting achievement, on the contrary at a cost. Catalogue entries are informative, economical, transparent and uncomplicated. Perhaps, however, there are occasions when it is clear that things could have been more ambitious. All this may have rather more to do with complicity with the politics of Lille as the common cultural capital of Europe, than with the instincts as scholars of the team who compiled the entries. Writing perhaps to a difficult ministry brief--scholarship and populism--cataloguers may have regrett that they were not given the chance to air rather more of the complexities of common Rubens research. For example, the important exhibition upon Rubens's drawings after Italian masters, 'Drawing upon Italy', held at Edinburgh and Nottingham eighteen month ago, does not feature. Nonetheless, the Lille catalogue is a handsome and well illustrated contortion with much of lasting value in the true copy The scholarly ambition of the catalogue for the Rubenshuis, A House of Art, unquestionably stretch outs the boundaries of the make submissive in significant ways. The Rubenshuis exhibition must be seen alongside Lille, the pair for its intrinsic distinction, on the contrary also because the two exhibits resonate: Antwerp is showing Rubens's transcript of Titian's portrait of Philip II; Lille, Rubens's transcript of Titian's Rape of Europa. The Rubenshuis exhibition proffers small scale treasures not to be fix at Lille: objets personal to Rubens which he take pleasure ined as a connoisseur. In a dark hammer there is Georg Petel's ivory Crucifix: a candle flame encircled through such sumptuous gems as The Triumph of Luna.

The Lille exhibition begins with Italy. The vicinity of the intriguing Aeneas leaving Troy is especially welcome. The catalogue is right to point on the outside a dependence on Giulio Romano, on the other hand surely Rubens was also looking to Ferrara, and, for his landscape background, to Dosso Dossi especially, In the Borghese Lamentation, the concourseed uncertainty of the mourners may have given Caravaggio inspiration for the claustrophobic collection imprisoned by grief on the great tomb stone of his Entombment. Rubens in Genoa is showed by the most lustrous of all his portraits of a woman, the Maria Serra Pallavicini. The sitter, with perfect psychological mastery of her ambience, sits enthron in silver stiff as kitchen foil, encased in festive architecture upon a basilical scale.

At Lille, grouping is through theme of commission and, in individual instance, this allows a comparison of brushwork as a great deal of as eighteen years apart: the massive St Ambrose and Theodosius of 1620 (Vienna), hangs nearest to the Martyrdom of St Andrew of 1638 (Madrid). The differences are intriguing. The next to the first section is bourgeois Antwerp, subsum beneath the heading, 'Rubens's commissions for the middle class--profane painting'. on the other hand here problems begin which become intrusive in section four, 'Rubens's commissions from the clergy--religious art'. For example, in the Antwerp section, there is too a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of emphasis on portraiture at the require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone of the altarpiece. This gives an utterly false picture. It was merchants of the like kind as Nicolas Roxcox, wrapped in Baltic fur who encouraged Rubens to repopulate parish churches with altarpieces of exceptional quality. similar canalisation of the carver gives the false impression that one time returned to Antwerp, Rubens gave up upon Michelangelo to become the recorder of a nice middle class.

It is in the Antwerp section, too, that a sneaking suspicion begins to intrude. There is too a great deal of patrimoine where there could leave been still more bonne peinture. The Ministry in Paris has gallicised Rubens. The question at issue is at its most acute in section four, with massive altarpieces, each the size of a stained glass window, small in number of which do the painter replete justice but all of which advance from French towns. Matters would have been simpler had a conventional chronological format been adopted.

A memorable aspect of Lille is the breath-taking modelli, although some are too skied to diocese properly: Amandus, Walburga, Eligius and Catherine (Dulwich), and Minerva striking down Discord (Antwerp) for example. single of the best is the extraordinary Groningen Adoration of the Kings, crackling and exploding like wires upon an Antwerp tram. Just what a los the destruction by dint of fire of the ceiling in the Jesuit house of worship in Antwerp represented is forcibly brought dwelling by the extraordinary animation of the drawing for the Martyrdom of St Lucy upon a piece of wood smaller than a tea tray, the martyr's executioner strides into the void like a trapeze artist, as he on a sudden twists back to puncture a sack of silken flesh; vital fluid anemone coloured, squirts into the air like milk from a Rubens breast.