Maria Serra Pallavicino is a queen. Technically she’s a Marchesa. But no one could look more monarchical here, in the painting by Peter Paul Rubens. She looks down imperiously from the throne where she sits swathed in silver, with an impossibly huge ruff collar of floating filigree lace tinged with gold. But it’s her intense face and dark eyes that hold you. Amid her finery, she’s engaging and mysterious, her personality more precious than her pearls.
Rubens is a painter’s painter. No great artist communicates the sheer fun of holding a paintbrush like he does. He’s an ebullient chef, laying on thick sauces of glinting, creamy colour. And women were his favourite ingredients. He lavished his attentions on them clothed and naked, at prayer and in bed. The intimacy and warmth of the results make Dulwich Picture Gallery’s show Rubens & Women a riotous feast.
It starts with a staggering array of grand yet disarming portraits. Isabella Brant smiles delicately, wistfully: Rubens is trying to preserve that face before its kindness vanishes from his mind. Brant was his first wife, but she died, probably of plague, in 1626 and it seems this painting may be posthumous, as if the artist is using all his skills to keep her alive, at least on the wall.
In a world where death came often and unannounced, prayer was consoling. There was an intense revival of Catholicism in the age of Rubens and it gave women new roles as spiritual leaders and actors, in art at least. Rubens draws women acting out impassioned parts as saints, martyrs, the Virgin Mary. In one portrait Isabel Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain, poses as a Poor Clare – a nun dedicated to the Franciscan ideal of poverty – with her sombre face enfolded in a black habit. In another a woman has her hands bound and turns her head upward, hair wild, as she models Saint Catherine. Hagar in the Desert wears the dress of Rubens’s day, her long blue skirt shimmering as she prays alone by a rock.
So if you thought Rubens just painted frolicking nudes displaying an abundance of flesh, here’s ample proof that many of his paintings of women are emotional, characterful studies of the soul, not the body. In fact the first naked body to grab your attention is male. This is the greenish, rubbery corpse of Christ, lamented by his mother and Mary Magdalene. Rubens gets distracted by the dead man’s flesh: is it pitiable or repulsive? This eerie nude has the unease of modern depictions of corpses by Delacroix and Manet. The nudes that follow are equally unexpected.
Rubens was Flemish but went to Italy as a young artist to refine his education. It’s natural to think he discovered “the nude”, the classical tradition of depicting ideal male and female forms, in Italy where it had been revived by the likes of Titian and Michelangelo. At the centre of Dulwich’s exhibition space, an ancient nude statue, Crouching Venus, is displayed in a hall of mirrors. Now owned by Charles III, it was in the Gonzaga collection in the Italian city of Mantua when young Rubens was a court artist there, and a key classical influence on how he saw women.
But this exhibition reveals he got his interest in unclothed bodies closer to home, from the raw religious art of northern predecessors like Van Eyck. Here is his first big nude scene: Adam and Eve, painted in about 1599 before going to Italy. Adam, sinewy and hairy, tells Eve not to be sinful: she coils back, her skin smooth, hips curvy, breasts round. They are the first man and first woman, their difference visible in their anatomy. But is it that simple? Rubens found otherwise when he started looking at nudes in Italy.
The classical nude, for Rubens, is an artistic dream in which anything is possible. Men may even change into women, or vice versa. He draws, with mesmerising clarity and feeling, Michelangelo’s statue Night – showing precisely how unfemale this nude’s breasts are. Another drawing, Sleeping Hermaphrodite, depicts an ancient statue with a fusion of curves and a masculine face. In yet another drawing a woman has stomach muscles as rippling as those of a Michelangelo male nude.
Where is Rubens going with this? Into the realm of artistic freedom where anything is possible. If he wants to make a woman look like one of Michelangelo’s men, he will. And if he wants to make milk fly through space he can do that too.
Women’s breasts don’t just attract Rubens. They move him religiously. The goddess Venus squeezes her own breast to send white milk spurting into her baby son Cupid’s mouth, in a painting of the gods at home. Juno does the same for the infant Hercules: the milk she spills becomes a white river in the night sky, the Milky Way. The word “exuberant” literally means this – coming out of a breast. Rubens is nothing if not exuberant.
In a drawing of a woman crouching naked, Rubens gets his model to pose as the ancient statue that so haunted him. You could see him as a predator here, making her crouch for his eye’s pleasure. But you can also sense her soulful presence, exposed and unsure. Rubens wants you to feel both.
