Rubens explores masochism and bondage
A masochistic sensibility and themes of bondage are obvious in the art of the great painter Rubens.
Bellori referred to Caravaggio and his followers as naturalists, the first use of the term in art history, but Caravaggio and later caravaggisti like Valentin de Boulogne were far less interested in the surface detail of things than the Flemish. It is only in Caravaggio’s attention to the wrinkled and papery texture of aged skin, like that of his Saint Jerome, that he comes at all close to what the Flemings had been doing for several centuries.
The contrast is particularly clear in the 15th century, when the main concern of the early Renaissance masters is to give figures volume and mass, set them on their feet, as Vasari says of Masaccio, and situate them in a credible, rationalised space. The Italian painters, in other words, are more concerned with abstract and even conceptual ways of representing the world than in reproducing appearances, and no artist better illustrates these qualities than Piero della Francesca, whose figures could almost be wooden models.
At the same time, the great Flemings like Jan van Eyck and his followers were obsessed with the visual appearance and texture of the real world: with the weight of ageing jowls, the stubble of unshaven cheeks, the lines and wrinkles around the eyes – and at the same time with the weave of fabrics, the sheen of metallic or glass objects, the freshness of flowers and plants. All of these qualities are epitomised in van Eyck’s Madonna of Canon van der Paele (1434-36), in the features of the kneeling donor as in the astonishing brocade of Saint Donatian’s mantle or the minute precision of the oriental carpet under the Virgin’s feet.
Conversely, for all their fascination with surface detail, Flemish pictures have neither the solidity of figures – as though these impressive robes and vestments could be hollow inside – nor the coherence of perspectival space that concerned the Italians. And this fundamental difference of priorities would continue to affect the Italian and later Italo-French mainstream view of northern art in general. The northerners, they thought, were distracted by irrelevant surface detail, lacked the capacity for a higher-order synthesis, and often fell into vulgarity.
Michelangelo certainly had no time for Flemish naturalism. The Venetian school was the most receptive, partly because, having remained closer to their Byzantine origins, they continued to value light and colour above all, even after assimilating the new sense of volume and space from the south. They also had a direct connection with the Flemings, through the Flemish-trained Sicilian Antonello da Messina.
Antonello’s Saint Jerome in His Study (c. 1475), beautifully represents the fusion of Renaissance perspective with a jewel-like northern attention to detail. We can see the influence of this new style in Giovanni Bellini’s vivid portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan (c. 1501), as in the exquisite combination of naturalistic detail and poetic harmony that we saw in the San Zaccaria Altarpiece (1505). Bellini’s pupils Giorgione and Titian, however, turned away from surface naturalism in pursuit of the synthesis of light and colour.
The Flemish artists in turn began to absorb the lessons of the Italian renaissance in the later 15th century, and throughout the 16th there was considerable exchange between north and south. This occurred in France as well, in the age of Fontainebleau, and most significantly in Germany with Albrecht Durer. But because Italian art itself was going through the turbulent period of Mannerism, the northerners frequently found themselves imitating eccentric models, to which they added their own northern love of the naturalistic, the grotesque and even the trivial.
Flemish art regains its footing in the deepest and soundest principles of modern Italian art with Peter Paul Rubens, who became as wealthy and famous as Titian in the previous century, was personally acquainted with more monarchs than probably any painter in history, and who had a parallel career as a diplomat negotiating between the hostile powers of Britain and Spain.
Rubens was immensely gifted, but he was also one of the humblest of the great artists in his willingness to learn from his predecessors. Even before his first trip to Italy in 1600, he had made drawings after prints by Raphael and Michelangelo, and even made paintings inspired by Raphael’s prints. When he was in Rome, he drew the great sculptures of antiquity, like the Laocoön and the Farnese Hercules, then still at Palazzo Farnese but today in Naples.
His way of drawing the antique was very distinctive, however, and after his return from Italy in 1608 he wrote some Latin notes on the subject. Following Vasari’s remarks about Mantegna, he knew that while there is much to learn from antique statues, copying them too literally can produce a certain hardness of style. He therefore consciously translated stone back into flesh, as we see in his drawing of what was then believed to be a portrait bust of Seneca; the same bust appears in his Four Philosophers (1611), which includes a self-portrait as well as portraits of his late brother Philip, the neo-Stoic philosopher Justus Lipsius and the latter’s secretary Joannes Woverius.
If Rubens’s drawing practice reflects the importance of suggesting life and vitality, the same is true of his approach to painting, and especially painting flesh. In his self-portrait in Canberra, for example, we can see the care he takes to evoke the complexion of the skin, the moist transparency of the eye and the sense of life and growth in the hair and beard. These are all things that concerned van Eyck too, but for Rubens they have a new meaning arising from the art debates of the previous century.
A hundred years earlier, the rivalry between Leonardo and Michelangelo had been generalised into a debate about the relative merits of painting and sculpture. One side held that sculpture was superior, because it produced real and solid figures, while painting could only evoke illusions on a flat surface; the other side retorted that marble sculpture was lifeless and inert, while painting captured the colours and textures of life itself.
This so-called “paragone” had a profound effect on artists; as my friend Dr Michael Hill has pointed out, it explains Bernini’s love of parted lips and the suggestion of breath; he wants to refute the claim that sculpture is inherently inert. And Rubens’s passion for colour and texture in skin, hair, eyes and lips is similarly a demonstration of what the art of painting is uniquely good at, which is capturing the illusion of life.
This is of course why he emphasises the fleshiness of his figures. The famous “rubensian” nudes are not simply the reflection of a Flemish fondness for soft plump female bodies, but also the expression of Rubens’s quest for the effect of living flesh. The Three Graces (c. 1635) shows three girls who are quite tall, as we can tell from the proportion of their heads. They are not obese; they are simply soft and have very little muscular development which, as Rubens explains in the notes mentioned above, comes from physical exercise.
The figure on the left is modelled on Rubens’s second wife, Helene Fourment, whom he had married in 1630, four years after the death of his first wife, Isabella Brant. He had loved Isabella, and had been shattered by her death, but his marriage to Helene led to a personal reinvigoration and a flowering of erotic subjects, mostly in the guise of mythology.
Like his contemporary Poussin, whom we will consider next week, Rubens was steeped in the philosophy of neo-Stoicism. Unlike Poussin, however, he was unambiguously Christian in outlook; his version of Stoicism was ethical, but did not extend to cosmological or natural speculations. The neo-Platonic theories of the renaissance, meanwhile, largely survived by this time in occultist thinking that did not appeal to Rubens.
Although a highly-educated and well-read man, Rubens does not seem to have attached any deeper philosophical meaning to his mythological subjects, nor was he reticent or puritanical about dealing with erotic subjects. He takes an uninhibited pleasure in the loves of the gods, particularly the adventures of Jupiter as recounted by Ovid, but also in a number of other less common subjects.
Thus Rubens follows the lead of Titian, another thoroughly Christian yet sensual artist, in expanding the repertoire of erotic themes in art. One such subject is Andromeda, the Ethiopian princess who is tied to a rock to be sacrificed to a sea monster, until she is rescued by Perseus as he returns from slaying the Gorgon Medusa.
In earlier art, the masochistic sensibility and themes of bondage had mainly been explored through the subject of Saint Sebastian, tied to a pillar and shot full of arrows; Mantegna produced three versions of the martyrdom, Antonello da Messina painted the exquisite panel in Dresden (1477-79), and the homoerotic implications of the subject only become more explicit in the work of 17th century artists such as Guido Reni and later Nicolas Regnier, who settled in Venice and painted Sebastian many times in the most sensually provocative manner.
Andromeda provides the feminine equivalent of the subject: beauty bound, exposed, helpless and vulnerable. Titian is the first important artist to have represented her completely naked and chained to the rock in the version he painted for Philip II (1554-56), which was soon afterwards followed by Vasari in Florence and Veronese in Venice. Rubens would also have seen the Andromeda by Domenichino after drawings by Annibale Carracci in the Farnese Gallery.
Rubens had already painted Andromeda several times in earlier years, but the subject was completely renewed with Helene as model; the 1638 version in Berlin, indeed, is almost completely focused on the figure of the girl, with Perseus merely suggested in the background. Although the hero is meant to liberate the girl, close inspection of the painting shows that it is in fact Cupid who dissolves the chains that bind her with his flaming torch.
The most intimate of all Rubens’s pictures of Helene is the one he himself called “Het Pelsken”, “the little fur” (1636-38). Her lovingly painted flesh, curly hair and bright eyes are offset by the sumptuous fur in which she wraps herself after a bath; fur, like hair, is a growing organic substance, a symbol of life, vitality and sexuality, so that the very garment in which she covers her nakedness serves to enhance the erotic charge of the painting.
It is a powerful, tantalising and ambiguous image; much later, the painting was to make a deep impression on the adolescent Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-95), whose novel Venus in Furs (1870) inspired Richard von Krafft-Ebing to coin the term “masochism” in his Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). This was the book which also introduced the words and concepts “sadism”, inspired by the writings of the Marquis de Sade, “homosexuality” and many others to the English language and to the currency of everyday assumptions.
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