That Rubens and the Human Body, a beautifully illustrated volume of eleven essays providing a “detailed evaluation of the paradigmatic status of the Rubensian body” (back cover), might consider the gender and sexuality of that body is suggested in the introduction. There, in an essay well suited for teaching, editor Cordula van Wyhe deftly situates the artist's painted and drawn bodies in humoral, philosophical (mainly Aristotelian), and medical early modern epistemologies. Van Wyhe also gives a sensible nod to current cultural discourses on beauty norms and “size diversity” (11), and her own gender-inflected analyses lead the reader to expect similar investments from subsequent authors. Likewise, Joanna Woodall, in her elegantly meditative and materialist afterword, implies such concerns: “Gender,” she writes, “also seems to be at stake in the question of the open-textured, integrated being or the closed, embodied agent” (342).
However, apart from Margit Thøfner, whose essay on Minerva Protecting Pax from Mars productively augments the growing literature on Rubensian lactation imagery, only Suzanne J. Walker provides a sustained consideration of gender's constructedness. Walker's refreshingly formal reading of Rubens's Abel and Prometheus as rhetorically feminized victims diverges from the usual exaltations of the robustly masculine figures populating his oeuvre. For readers interested in other approaches to the Flemish painter's strategies for representing the human form, the book has much to offer. On balance, the authors are more concerned with the artist's intentions than his reception—at least beyond the critical realm of Roger de Piles, who is extensively quoted throughout. This orientation, along with the origin of the papers in a 2010 conference held at the University of York, helps to explain the collection's somewhat hermetic flavor.
The first chapter, nearly twice the length of the others, is the late Andreas Thielemann's engaging exploration of Rubens's oft-quoted treatise, On the Imitation of Statues, a brief text which is usefully reprinted in English, Latin, and German in an appendix. Building on the work of Jeffrey Muller (but seemingly unaware of the scholarship of Catherine Lusheck, relevant to several of the book's essays), Thielemann seeks to understand Rubens's transmaterialization of classical sculpture and sources with respect to early modern concepts rather than established ancient topoi. He thus concentrates on potentially overlooked or misunderstood terms such as maccatura—provisionally, the “result of a violent physical impact” (70)—used by Rubens to describe the appearance of bodies. Thielemann's expansive study, grounded in textual commonplaces and foundational Rubens scholarship, furnishes an excellent point of departure, and reference, for what follows.
Indeed, Rubens's repair to the ancients is foregrounded in this volume. Lovers of the artist's bacchic imagery, especially the Sileni, will not be disappointed, for nearly half the essays address this enduring fascination of his. Focusing, for example, on Silenus's physical instability as an embodiment of his off-balance humors, Lucy Davis draws on a range of proto-gerontological sources to persuasively flesh out Rubens's epitome of the unregulated, sometimes melancholic, old man. Irene Schaudies also takes on Rubens, Bacchus, and Silenus, adding not only Jordaens, but also Christ, to propose intriguing textual and formal consonances—the former via Plato and Erasmus, the latter in paintings by Van Dyck. Elizabeth McGrath's impeccably dense and informative chapter turns to bacchic paintings for further study of Rubens's portrayal of Black bodies, essentially absolved in these settings of racist, though perhaps not racialized, valences. Even so, for some it will be difficult to read of a Black bacchant “dancing and snapping his fingers with careless abandon” (316), without following such figures to their logical conclusions in minstrelsy and blackface. Satyrical, mainly classical, imagery also provides exemplary bodies for Karolien de Clippel's study of Rubensian drapery, understood as archeological, decorous, and art historical, though not, as also seems possible, as a species of Warburgian pathosformel, or expression of emotion. While not explicitly bacchic—and attending to Pythagorean vegetarianism rather than hedonistic indulgence—Katerina Georgoulia's cogent and original “Rubens and Early Modern Dietetics” sheds additional light on his appetites.
The remaining essays—Jacques Bos's elucidating discussion of early modern psychology vis-a-vis philosophy and medicine; Anne Haack Christensen and Jørgen Wadum's technical and theoretical analysis of Jordaens's painted flesh; and Joost Vander Auwera's pan-European take on the economic and aesthetic implications of compositional scale and figural size—while related to Rubens's practice, range stimulatingly beyond it as well.
