DRAMATIC BODIES

The grammar of the human body is central to Rubens’s pictorial production – studied from life, explored in ancient models and interpreted in light of the lessons of the Renaissance masters, among whom a few artists stand out in particular.

First of all is Michelangelo, an artist already admired by Northern European Mannerists like Hendrick Goltzius, who were well known to Rubens before his trip in Italy. The artist’s astonishing interpretation of the famed Belvedere Torso in the red-pencil drawing in the Metropolitan Museum originated from his study of Michelangelo’s work and his personal observation of the Sistine Chapel. On the other hand, as regards anatomy and motion, Rubens learned from Leonardo, whom he discovered ex novo in Madrid, which he visited (1603–04) during his formative sojourn in Italy. In Spain, Rubens probably had access to Leonardo’s drawings, which were still in the hands of the sculptor Pompeo Leoni and which he studied avidly.

In his Hercules Strangling the Nemean Lion in the Louvre, the hero’s muscular Michelangelesque labour would be unthinkable without Leonardo’s lesson on strength. It also heralds the twisting seen in Bernini’s work, which would become typical of Baroque sculpture. The muscular hypertrophy of Rubens’s heroes is contagious, perhaps because it is inspired by ancient statues of those same heroes, including the Laocoön and Farnese Hercules. Indeed, masculine figures such as Samson Captured by the Philistines in Munich even seem to be evoked in the mighty pose of Bernini’s Pluto, in a rare mirroring of “betrayal and abduction” that confirms the common aspiration of early seventeenth-century painting and sculpture to find new narrative forms to depict the drama.

---