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The work of Peter Paul Rubens, one of the most influential painters of Baroque Europe, is sometimes difficult to appreciate. Rubens' seventeenth-century visual vocabulary for artistic message-making, classical mythology and allegory, is a foreign language to most. His frolicking, chubby women, often ludicrously naked, displaying cellulite and all, embarrass us: their largeness is an anathema to the iconic female slenderness we now surround ourselves with. The sheer busy-ness of Rubens' paintings, and the exaggerated expressions and poses of his characters seem theatrical, contrived and even melodramatic. The nuances of the diplomatic niceties in his epic royal commissions aren't easily decipherable without knowledge of the historical context; nowadays we aren't susceptible to the religious fervour his passionate biblical evocations were designed to provoke. Rubens' overt ambition and self-promotion, and his business-like approach to his art, make him seem somewhat unappealingly immodest and prosaic to us, too. Our idea of an artistic genius isn't confirmed by the fact that Rubens' assistants did much of the painting.
Rubens, despite the deep appreciation of his work by generations of painters, hasn't really enjoyed overwhelming popular appeal or fashionable status, perhaps for these reasons. Possibly we find it easiest to see something of Rubens' artistic greatness in his most personal and direct paintings, in his late landscapes and his vivid and sensitive portraits of his family.
Rubens was born in 1577 into a turbulent Europe, deeply divided by the religious and political strife which was to dominate his life and work. Rubens' early years mirrored this conflict; his family lived first as Protestant refugees in Cologne, then converted to Catholicism; Rubens lived from the age of ten in Antwerp, in the Spanish Netherlands, under a Catholic Spanish government. Rubens' excellent education had given him an avid interest in Classical art, literature and thought, and after training as a painter, he travelled to Italy in 1600 to experience both Classical and Italian Renaissance art at first hand. His appointment as court painter to the Duke of Mantua allowed him to visit Venice, Genoa and Rome. There he studied and drew Classical sculpture obsessively and saw and copied work by other Italian artists, particularly Michelangelo and Caravaggio. In 1603, Rubens visited Spain on a diplomatic mission to Philip III, and discovered Titian's paintings, later to become so important to his subtle use of colour, in the Royal Collection in Madrid.
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