Why Rubens Was the Most Daring Painter of the Baroque Era

Rubens is the nastiest, most vulgar painter that ever lived. His pictures always put me in mind of chamber pots. Thomas Eakins. To my eye, Rubens's colouring is contemptible. His shadows are filthy brown, somewhat the colour of excrement. William Blake. What's this? He's gifted, but he's used his gifts to make nasty things. Picasso? The modern world really has it in for Rubens. It's as if everything he did jars with our sensibilities and goes against our grain. His religious pictures are completely over the top, aren't they? Too violent, too noisy, too Catholic. His mythologies are even worse. All those fleshy pink gods doing silly things in ridiculous mythological pantomimes. And as for his women, oh my god, Rubens's women. They're just too fat, aren't they? Women in art shouldn't carry this much cellulite. So that's what people think, but it's not what I think. I think Rubens was one of the most exciting painters the world has seen. Just look at all that invention, that energy, that drama. So yes, I'm a Rubens man. And in this film, I'm going to try and make all of you Rubens people too. I was never so disgusted in my life as with Rubens and his eternal wives. Lord Byron. Eternal wives. When Lord Byron complains about Rubens's eternal wives, he's complaining about all those notoriously large women in Rubens's art. The modern world simply doesn't tolerate women like this, does it? But why not? Seriously, why not? What's wrong with a few bulges and a bit of cellulite? Don't tell me nobody out there's got any. Even I've got a bit of cellulite. Besides, if you look back at the art of the past, the best evidence there is of the human worldview, if you go right back to the beginning, you'll see that Rubens's women are the norm, not the exception. This is the Willendorf Venus, the oldest known masterpiece of sculpture. Her task is to ensure human fertility. She's a bringer of life, a good luck charm. And look how fleshy and Rubensian she is. In any case, not all Rubens's women were like that. They weren't all fleshy housewives. Some of them were women of remarkable power and confidence. I mean, see all this. Everything in this room, this entire Rubensian outpouring, all of it is about one woman. That woman over there, the art-loving queen of France, Marie de' Medici. There she is being born. As a Medici, she was born in Florence. And that's why there are all these cherubs down here, popping out of the River Arno to welcome her. Here she is at school, being educated by the gods. Apollo is teaching her music. Hermes teaches languages. Over here, that's the French king, Henry IV, seeing her picture and liking it. Henry liked it so much, he married her. But don't worry, I'm not going to take you through all of it. There's still most of the room to go. 21 pictures in all, taking up a huge slab of the Louvre. But we're here for Rubens, not for Marie de' Medici. And there's a big Rubensian truth I want to tackle in here. About the impact of his work. You know, when you first come in here and you see all this, you're tempted to walk a bit faster, aren't you? To give most of this a miss. Don't worry, we all feel like that. I mean, all this is terrifying, right? With Rubens, there's so much to look at, isn't there? Too much. His art sometimes forms an impenetrable blob of bodies that frighten you away. Here's a good example. Rubens' fall of the dam. It's just scary, isn't it? Have you ever seen so many bodies in one picture? But then, when you step closer and start giving it a good look, see what happens. The fleshy blobs start to disentangle themselves and make sense. The details emerge and they're fascinating. Look at that. And that. The point is, Rubens always gave more than was asked of him. He was so inventive and daring, had so much fun painting his pictures. From a distance, that's not always obvious. From a distance, Rubens can seem frightening. But if you get closer to him, close enough to see what he's actually up to, Rubens is absolutely delightful. And guess what? You have an ally in this exciting exploration. The camera. The camera loves Rubens. It gets you close enough to see his details. High enough to inspect his corners. Since this painting left Rubens' studio, no one's been able to see it as well as this. So yes, stick with me. Stick with the camera. And let's plunge together into all that Rubens out there. Before we go an inch further into this film, we need to have a geography lesson. This is a famous map called the Leo Belgicus, and it was brought out in 1609 by a cartographer called Claus Janszoon Visser. And it shows Western Europe as it was in Rubens' time. The lion shows the outline of what used to be called the Spanish Netherlands. Today, it's three different countries. Belgium, around here. Holland, up here. And over here, Luxembourg. It was called the Spanish Netherlands because all these lands belonged then to the Spanish kings who'd inherited them from the Burgundians. And it was divided up into provinces, 17 of them. These 17 provinces were split on religious lines. Up here were the Protestants, the Calvinists. Down here, in the Flemish bit, were the Catholics. So this part and this part were at loggerheads. Then in 1568, the simmering tension between the Calvinist north and the Catholic south erupted into a terrible war. One of the most brutal and longest wars in European history, called the Eighty Years' War. Now, Rubens was born in 1577, just after the fighting started. He died in 1640, a few years before it finished. So for his entire life, all 63 years of it, the north was fighting the south. The Catholics were fighting the Protestants. It's the only reality he ever knew. All that was happening around him all the time. And it's against that backcloth that his life and his art was enacted. The conflict in the Netherlands stamped on everything. Not just history and maps, but entire families too. Rubens's father, Jan Rubens, was a lawyer from Antwerp, and interestingly, a Protestant, a Calvinist. And when the Eighty Years' War broke out in 1568, this Jan Rubens had to flee from Antwerp to escape an invading Spanish army that had turned up to enforce Catholicism and kill the Protestants. He fled here to Germany, where there was plenty of work going for a Protestant lawyer. Unfortunately, that's how he came into contact with this woman here, Anna of Saxony, the local princess, who employed him to sort out some financial matters. Now this Anna of Saxony was fascinating, but flawed. Very flawed. She liked to drink and she liked men. And as her new lover, she chose Jan Rubens. Jan was also married. He'd brought his wife with him from Antwerp. But when a princess seduces you, all the rules get broken, don't they? Their affair was short and grubby. Anna got pregnant and Jan Rubens was quickly imprisoned for the very, very serious crime of adultery with a princess. He was in jail for two years and when they finally let him out, he moved back in with the wife he'd betrayed and proceeded to have more children with her, including in 1577, the year Anna of Saxony died, a son called Peter Paul Rubens. Now Rubens's mother, Marie Pieperlings, seems to have been a rather reluctant Calvinist and when Jan Rubens also died in 1587, she took the family back to Antwerp, where they returned to a fully Catholic life, as if nothing had happened. Rubens was 10 when he arrived in Antwerp. He was put in a Catholic school and then trained as a painter. His talent was obvious and the new rulers of the Spanish Netherlands, the Habsburg Archdukes, Albert and Isabella, were quick to notice him and make him a favourite. But when you look at this early Adam and Eve, painted soon after he finished his apprenticeship, it's worth remembering that the sin of lust was embedded in his childhood, that religion and its conflicts had stamped on his history and that his betrayed mother was the only religious constant he really knew. Why did Rubens paint so many Madonnas and children and why are they all so soppy? I think it's because they're personal, very personal. The Rubens family house was up here in Sint Mikaelsstraat. Just around the corner meanwhile, in Kloosterstraat, lived the family of Jan Brandt, an Antwerp lawyer who had a vivacious daughter called Isabella, Isabella Brandt. Isabella was charming, sparky, fun to be with and hard-working. She liked to roll up her sleeves and get things done, which is what Rubens liked to do too. She lived so close to him they could hardly fail to meet and soon enough they were courting and not long after, in 1609, they got married. Rubens was 32 when he married Isabella. She was 18 but that was normal at the time. They moved into this big house here, the Rubens house, and as he was to do with all the people in his life, Rubens began putting Isabella into his art. Sometimes he did it officially as in their touching wedding picture in the Alte Pinnakothek in Munich. Rubens and Isabella sitting in a honeysuckle bower, all loved up and content. Other times Isabella is lightly disguised. Here she is pretending to be the Virgin Mary looking after the baby Jesus. And I'm pretty sure Jesus is actually their first son, Albert, born in 1614. And if I'm not wrong, and I don't think I am, isn't this her as well, gone blonde for a moment and popping up so cheekily as a jolly follower of Bacchus in one of Rubens's fleshiest mythologies, the drunken Silenius. They were married for 18 years until her early death in 1626. And in that time, God only knows how many Isabella Brands popped up surreptitiously in her husband's art. In front of Rubens, put on blinkers like those are horse wares. Ang wrote that. Horse blinkers. Ah, you don't need blinkers to look at Rubens. What you need is a bigger telly. Is there anyone called Chris watching this film, like Chris Froome, the cyclist, or Chris Martin, the pop singer? Well, if you are watching, all you Chris's out there, this bit of the film is dedicated to you. Chris's of the world. How often do you consider the true significance of your name? What does Christopher really mean? And what's it got to do with this stupendous Rubens masterpiece, The Descent from the Cross in Antwerp Cathedral? You have to follow me round here. See that huge fellow up there on the back of the side wings? That is Saint Christopher, and he's carrying Christ across the river. Because Christopher, of course, means carrier of Christ. Now, Saint Christopher was the patron saint of an organisation called the Arquebusiers Guild. The Arquebusiers used these things. Arquebuses, a big new gun that revolutionised warfare in the Eighty Years War. Here in the Spanish Netherlands, with their endless wars, the Arquebus was constantly in use. And in Antwerp, the Arquebusiers had formed their own militia, a kind of territorial army, whose task was to defend the city. And the president of this Arquebusiers Guild was a man called Nicholas Roccox. That's him on the left, standing behind the old man. In 1611, Roccox and the Arquebusiers commissioned Rubens to paint a new altarpiece for Antwerp Cathedral. It's his most famous painting, and probably his greatest. But to get back to all you Christophers out there, this idea of carrying Christ is what unites all the bits of this dramatic and magnificent altarpiece. So in the middle, the dead body of Christ is being carried from the cross. He suffered his terrible crucifixion, and now it's time to bury him. You can really feel the weight of his corpse, can't you, as all these helpers and apostles lower him down from the cross. But it's these women at the foot of the cross towards whom it all seems to be slumping. On the left, at the bottom, Mary of Cleophas, so youthfully beautiful, sheds a desperate tear. Next to her, Mary Magdalene, the reformed prostitute, lets Jesus' foot rest on her shoulder and makes him suddenly appear weightless. So everyone here is carrying Christ, and that's what this central panel is about. But over here on the left, Rubens winds back the clock to the time before Jesus is born, to the so-called visitation. And there's the blessed Mary again, the rather unlikely blonde with the red top. And as you can see, she's heavily pregnant. She's come to visit her cousin Elizabeth, and she's carrying Jesus in her womb. These days, the picture's always open, but in Rubens' time, it was often closed, like that, with Saint Christopher over here and the old hermit on the other side. And then, when they opened it, all this was revealed. It's like 17th century cinema, isn't it? Dramatic, emotional, vivid. And all you Christophers out there, I want to thank for this. Nicholas Rockhox, the president of the Arquebusiers, who commissioned Rubens' great descent from the cross, lived in this house here. Rockhox was the mayor of Antwerp several times, a very powerful and influential man, a good man for Rubens to have on his side. And that's him there, up on the left, of this devotional triptych that Rubens painted for him. And his wife, she's on the other side. Lucky old Rockhox had Rubens' all round the house, but the one I want to focus on now used to hang here, above the fireplace, where that Rubens Venus is now. And in Rockhox's time, this position here was occupied by a very naughty picture, a picture which calls for some music. The story of Samson and Delilah is told in the book of Judges. She was a woman from the valley of Sorek. He was an Israelite, famed for his great strength. The Philistines, traditional enemies of the Israelites, promised Delilah money, 1,100 pieces of silver, to find out the secret of Samson's strength. At first, he resisted her, but after a night of intense biblical lovemaking, Samson could resist no more. So Delilah finds out that the secret of Samson's strength is his long hair. And in the Rubens painting, the Philistines have just arrived at the door, and they've brought a barber with them. It's such an exciting picture. Rubens doesn't just bring the Bible to life, he sets it on fire. And when you look at Samson, exhausted by all that sweaty sex, just lying there, polaxed, like a goalkeeper who's banged his head against the post. So Nicholas Rockhox commissions Rubens to paint a big warning about the seductive power of women, and to put it above the mantelpiece here, where no one can miss it. And what does Rubens do? Well, Rubens paints him one of the sexiest pictures in the whole of Baroque art, an utterly tangible depiction of post-coital exhaustion. And if you look around Rubens' art of these busy years, you'll find lots of Delilah scattered about his crowd scenes, tempting the Samsons. All these beautiful blondes don't just look like Delilah, they are Delilah. The same blonde model popping in and out of Rubens' art, like a Baroque Barbara Windsor in a carry-on. Sometimes, as in this particularly violent depiction of the Massacre of the Innocents, she's even wearing the same dress. Other times, she's not. So, how does Rubens do it? How does he make his art so vivid? To find out, I've wangled my way into a top secret Antwerp warehouse, where a team of busy restorers is working on a Rubens' Madonna. It's painted as most of his best work was painted, not on canvas, but on wood. Antwerp, in fact, the Antwerp School of Painting is one of the few schools that is still painting on wood in the early 17th century. The tradition of painting on wood in Flanders had a long tradition, of course, since the times of Van Eyck and Bruegel. And on the smooth panels, every brushstroke is visible and remains visible. And so also the difference between these brushstrokes, so very smooth glazing areas, but also the very upstanding, very three-dimensional highlights. That's a difference that I always notice with Rubens. The surfaces look very kind of liquid almost, as if they haven't quite solidified. There's that brilliant sort of skating feeling across the paint. Absolutely. Rubens really loved to paint on a smooth surface. Also, on panel, you could paint very differently. So his painting on panel became more, let's say, atmospheric. Let's talk about this wood. Where did it come from? I think I read somewhere that a lot of it came from my country, from Poland. Well, it comes exactly from Poland and the Baltic region. It was, let's say, shipped towards Antwerp. And then when it arrived, it was, of course, cut into planks and then panels were made. And these panels had standard shapes, they had standard formats. When you look at Rubens, though, quite often you see the lines, don't you? You can still see the lines where the panels were. So it wasn't made from one panel, it was made from separate pieces. Yeah, that has to do with the fact that Rubens, when he developed his ideas, was one of the first painters that didn't take the format for granted. So while he's thinking about his composition, he often enlarges it. And a good example for us is the Madonna with a Parrot, which started as a smaller Madonna picture and then completely overworked, completely overpainted. And so it became this very Baroque, very Italianate, large piece. Maybe we can have a closer look as well. So the painting was started by Rubens in 1614 and the painting was, in fact, was a standing format from approximately here to there and high as such. So just a Madonna and Child. A Madonna and Child without a Parrot, without Saint Joseph, only the Madonna. Then the painting was still in his studio. He didn't sell it apparently. And then in 1630, he turned it into something which is far grander, far more monumental. So more an Italianate, Venetian painting. That's so interesting though. So can I ask though, why would he bother doing that? I mean, you've got a picture here, which, you know, by Rubens standards is quite modest. Why didn't he just start from scratch? Why would he begin to enlarge it like this? Never waste something that exists and transform it into your idiom of the moment. I think he wanted to get rid of an older Madonna he couldn't sell or he didn't sell. And makes it a much more glorious painting. Absolutely. Tell you what I really like here. This red. Absolutely. Rubens is red. Absolutely. It's like a lipstick on a woman's lips. That's his colour. That's his colour. His balance of colours is always turning to the reds. The reds are his. One of the big criticisms that's always levelled at Rubens is that he churned out too many pictures. His studio was biggest and busiest in Europe. So there are a lot of Rubens's out there. Too many for one man to have painted. So the worry is his assistants did it all for him. It's true. He was amazingly prolific and to achieve all that Rubens achieved did require the assistance of a busy studio. But why is that so terrible? We don't expect an architect to lay all his own bricks or a composer to play all the instruments. So why in art are we so reluctant to admire a collaborative effort? Now this little picture is by Rubens and by Jan Brueghel. So is this one and this one. They're so petite. Look. Five exciting little pictures. Packed. Rammed. With so much stuff. They're actually allegories of the senses. Five of them. Each picture a different sense. This one here with all the flowers, that's the sense of smell. The one with the telescope in it and all the magnifying gizmos, that's sight. And this one, my favourite, with Venus playing a lute and Cupid singing, that's hearing. The actual music that Venus and Cupid are playing in the picture and that you're listening to now is a madrigal by the 16th century English composer Peter Phillips. And all those notes on the table, those are the actual notes. The musical instruments are perfectly identifiable too. The birds are all birds that are famous for talking. The cause, a cockatoo. And under the keyboard, a cheeky toucan. To work out all the symbolism packed into these five paintings would take several hours. So my advice to you is to come back here to the Prado one day and to spend the whole day in front of Brueghel and Rubens. You'll really enjoy it. But why is Rubens working with Brueghel? Who did what in these exciting allegories? And why? Brueghel was renowned as a still life painter and he specialised in these busy allegories. He was actually taught to paint miniatures by his grandmother and some of the detail in this picture is so fine that he had to paint it with a brush that only had one hair. So most of what you see here was painted by Brueghel, who'd lay out the picture and pack it with details but he'd leave empty spaces for Venus and Cupid and the picture was then taken round the corner to Rubens's studio and Rubens would put in the figures. What an extraordinary way to make pictures. The question is, why bother? It certainly wasn't because Brueghel couldn't do the figures himself. In his own art, like this bustling country road in Brabant, Brueghel was perfectly capable of doing all sorts of figures. Brueghel didn't collaborate with Rubens because he couldn't do figures. Brueghel collaborated with Rubens, his friend and neighbour because their joint achievement was more valuable than an individual achievement. Brueghel pulled Rubens in a different direction. Their shared accomplishment was something more than a solo accomplishment and is collaboration really such a bad thing when it gives us art as good as this. You must agree that Rubens was a fool and yet you make him master of your school. Rubens, a fool. He just doesn't get it, does he? Just doesn't get it. Rubens was anything but a fool. If he'd never been a painter, he'd still have been an important figure in another crucial field of European history, politics. Rubens was the most politically active and powerful artist there's ever been. He was the Henry Kissinger of his times. To have achieved what he did in politics while keeping down his day job as Europe's greatest painter was remarkable. To give you a sense of the twisted political realities of Rubens's world, here's his head of Medusa painted in 1617. See Medusa's hair, how knotted and slimy and slippery it is. Well, the politics of Rubens's world were like that. To understand what was going on in Rubens's day between Spain, France, England, the Spanish Netherlands and the breakaway Dutch provinces, you don't just need a degree in history, you need to be pretty good at geometry too and biology. It's very complicated. Isabella, the ruler of the Spanish Netherlands, was married to her cousin Albert. So they were both Habsburgs and together they ruled the Spanish Netherlands. And this Habsburg connection is crucial because Isabella was also the daughter of Philip II, the Habsburg king of Spain, who you may remember was king of England too when he briefly married Queen Mary, the daughter of Henry VIII. Now Philip's dream was to restore Catholicism to England. That's why he sent over the Spanish Armada to conquer England. However, back in the Spanish Netherlands, Philip's daughter Isabella didn't want war with England. She wanted peace because Isabella's dream was to restore a united Netherlands and that's also what Rubens wanted. In 1621, Albert, Isabella's husband and cousin, died and that left Isabella as the sole ruler of the Spanish Netherlands. And so heartbroken was she by Albert's death that she retired from courtly life and became a nun, a poor Claire as they were called. From now on, she ran the country from a monastery with the help of her closest political advisor, her court painter, Rubens. As the greatest artist in Europe, Rubens was welcomed at every court. Everyone wanted to be painted by him and while he was painting them, well, there was lots of time wasn't there to discuss a bit of politics, share some confidences, make a couple of suggestions. Back at the 80 Years War, Isabella, hoping to achieve peace, needed Spain to ally herself with her historic enemy, England. So she sent her best diplomat, Rubens, to Spain where his task was to persuade the new Spanish king, Philip IV, who was Isabella's nephew, to enter into a new alliance with Charles I and England. And that's why in 1629, having smooth-talked Philip IV round to Isabella's way of thinking, Rubens arrived in London and set about charming Charles I as well. This was actually painted by Rubens's greatest pupil, Van Dyck. It still hangs in Buckingham Palace today. How do you get a king to eat out of your hand? You put him on a big white horse and give him the bearing of a mighty warrior. It's what's called the Rubens way. And it didn't stop there. To ingratiate himself further with Charles I, Rubens offered to paint the ceiling of this famous building here, Inigo Jones's Banqueting House in Whitehall. It's the only great painted ceiling by Rubens that's still in situ in the place for which it was painted. All this art, all this effort and time and invention lavished on England in the pursuit of peace. And do you know what? It worked. All this cunning artistic diplomacy by Rubens worked. And to thank Rubens for his diplomatic services, Charles knighted him and also gave him a diamond studded hat band for his hat. For Rubens though, enough was enough. He was a painter, not a diplomat. Having successfully engineered a peace between Britain and Spain, the Henry Kissinger of the Baroque returned to Antwerp and gave up politics forever. From now on, Rubens' attention was claimed fully by his day job and by the other great love of his life, women. Isabella Brandt had died of the plague in 1626 and a lonely Rubens needed to find a new wife. The one he found, Hélène Fourment, would become one of the most painted women in art. Hélène Fourment was 16 when she married Rubens and he was 53. Now in those days, it was less of an issue but it was still unexpected. Rubens' friends thought he'd choose a countess or maybe a duchess. That's how high he'd climbed up the social ladder. Instead, he chose the daughter of a tapestry salesman. Homely, unpretentious and beautiful in a full-bodied Flemish way. Rubens was always a very sensual painter, very physical, unusually physical and his art often makes very clear how much he enjoyed the pleasurable side of marriage. Hélène Fourment begins to appear and reappear in his pictures with remarkable frequency. Sometimes she's a country girl, sometimes a goddess, sometimes she's all over the place and pops up throughout the picture and sometimes she's entirely undisguised. Rubens' wife, mother of his children, the woman he loves. This is the most notorious of his depictions of her, Hélène Fourment in a fur coat. It's notorious because, well, you can see why, can't you? It's not every day that a great painter shows us his wife like this. She's just had a bath and as she steps towards us she's grabbed a handy bit of fur and wrapped it round herself to cover herself up. But the fur's not doing very well, is it? There's more of Hélène Fourment poking out than poking in. It's actually another clever bit of role-playing. She's meant to be Venus, the goddess of love, the most famous woman ever to step out of the sea naked and wet. And it's Venus in a particular guise, what they call Venus Pudica, the shy Venus. It's the same Venus that Botticelli painted in his most famous picture, coming out of the sea, covering herself up so shyly. But look how vividly Rubens updates her shyness, how real he makes it. There's an awkwardness to her, isn't there? As there would be if you had to stand about like that. But the fur coat, that's a brilliant touch, which plucks her out of the clouds and brings her right back down to earth in Antwerp in the 1630s. I love her dimply knees and that soft tummy of hers. That's not the tummy of a goddess, that's the tummy of a real woman. Rubens has cast his wife as the Venus of Antwerp, but he's also worshipping her evident humanity. A happy man in a happy marriage is making clear in his art how he feels about the woman he loves. Isn't that marvellous? I think we need a summary to count up all the things that Rubens achieved. One, he painted some of the most exciting and dramatic religious art of the Baroque era. Two, he painted some very entertaining mythologies and broke world records, fulfilling his pictures with cheeky cherubs and fleshy nudes. Three, he was a great portraitist. His portraits are so vivid and compelling, particularly his portraits of his wives, how touching they are. Four, size-wise, his scale is unchallenged. No one painted art as big and as ambitious as Rubens's art. Which takes me straight to number five, which is how madly inventive he was. Everywhere you look in Rubens, something remarkable is going on. Six, technically he was as good as any painter has ever been. A wizard of the paintbrush who made the paint sing and the colours dance. Seven, he collaborated with some of the best artists of his time and the results of this exciting pictorial democracy are glorious. Eight, and this is something I haven't even had time to deal with yet, but believe it or not, Rubens designed wonderful tapestries. And at the convent of the Poor Clares in Madrid, you get a really good sense of how big and spectacular his tapestries were. Nine, and I haven't been able to fit this in either, he was an architect. And the Church of the Jesuits in Antwerp, with that superb facade, that was Rubens's handiwork too. So here's a man who could achieve all that. Surely he couldn't do any more. Well, actually he could, because Rubens was also a great landscape painter. And that is When Rubens married Hélène Fourment, they moved out here to the Château d'Esteen, the great country house they shared so happily. Where Rubens's art put on its wellies and began filling its lungs with fresh country air. This part of Flanders around the Château d'Esteen is called Brabant, and this was his inspiration. Oh look, some gold finches. Oh look, a kingfisher. In his revolutionary landscapes, Rubens's brush explores the Brabant countryside like a happy dog. No one had painted landscapes as fresh and airy as these before. And look how big they are, and how far away the horizon seems in these endless panoramas. He did night scenes too. There's a particularly beautiful one at the Courtauld Galleries in London. The evening sky twinkling with dreamy stars, and such a gorgeous atmosphere of romance. Rubens at his soppiest, melting the hardest heart. But he could do storms too. They're some of the fiercest in art. You wouldn't want to be out in a Rubens storm. Rubens's views from his window celebrate nature's many moods. Having reinvented everything else, Rubens, at his final contribution, reinvents the landscape too. That's the kind of man we're dealing with here.