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Looking closer, with an awareness of the artistic conventions of his time, we can see that Rubens' painting actually celebrates life writ large. His painting epitomized the Baroque spirit in art. Realistically conceived figures in a new kind of space which reaches out towards us, out of the picture frame, and the rhythm of light and dark and expressive colour created profoundly affecting images which reflected the "passions of the soul". That was what his patrons expected, and what the Catholic Church, and the royalty of Europe, needed for their propaganda purposes. The visual images of ecstasy and violent feeling that sometimes seem to us stagey and overstated, were essential to the paintings' purpose. Our difficulty with these powerful displays of emotion is that today the spiritual in art is more often about serene, meditative visions - and we don't accord the monarchy the divine status that Rubens and his contemporaries took for granted.
Kenneth Clark wrote that Rubens "takes the female body, the plump, comfortable, clothed, female body of the North, and transforms it imaginatively with less sacrifice of its carnal reality than had ever been necessary before. He creates a new, complete race of women." However unfashionably difficult their heftiness, the "carnal reality" of Rubens' female nudes reveals to us his most virtuoso handling of oil paint and his humanistic ideals. TheThree Graces convince us of their solid humanity in their monumentality, and the unidealized, down-to-earth, workaday femininity of Helene in her fur wrap, echoed often in the paintings of his Dutch contemporary, Rembrandt, indicates both Rubens' supreme mastery of subtle colour and his love for his young wife. For Rubens, too, the exuberantly ample female form, which conformed entirely with seventeenth century ideals of beauty in Northern Europe, was connected with fertility, abundance and above all the idea of peace, which he pursued throughout his life. Reconciling ourselves to the overwhelming effect of Rubens' nudes enables to see his real artistic genius.
Rubens' influence was crucial to 18th century French painting - Watteau and Boucher's ebullient, graceful Rococo nudes develop from Rubens' engaging female forms. The Romantic painter Delacroix admired the energy and vitality of Rubens' fluency with paint, writing "He dominates, he overwhelms you with so much liberty and audacity." Renoir was surely looking backwards to Rubens' female forms for his monumental "Bathers". Perhaps a postscript to the story of Rubens' epic nudes might involve the contemporary artist Lucian Freud's candid investigation of massive female form.
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