Rubens: the master butcher: the urgent physicality of the painter's early work mirrors the speed with which the National Gallery, London, has mounted 'Rubens: A Master in the Making', writes David Howarth, but has the artistic context been neglected in the haste?

This is not an exhibition for the faint-hearted. It is hard to imagine a selection of works less calculated to win converts to Rubens. To arrive in the basement of the National Gallery's Sainsbury Wing and to confront 'Rubens: A Master in the Making' is to enter a butcher's shop, if not an abbatoir.

The selection demonstrates emphatically that here was a man in a furious hurry. Rubens first visited Rome aged twenty-two, just three years younger than Raphael had been when he had embarked on the defining graphic icon of the high renaissance, The School of Athens. Unfortunately it would appear that the National Gallery has been in a hurry too.

The exhibition's focus is the development of Rubens from his beginnings in Antwerp to the completion in 1614 of the second of his two most famous Antwerp altarpieces, The Descent from the Cross. The justification for choosing this point to conclude the exhibition is that the bravura and heightened expressiveness that Rubens took from his study of the antique and the high renaissance was replaced by the contemplative rendering of the dead Christ of the altarpiece. The inference is that thereafter Rubens calmed down.

Somewhat eccentrically, the catalogue's preface states that planning began only 'on 19 May 2004'. The curators should have kept this embarrassing admission to themselves. It shows. It is an astonishingly short run-in for doing justice to the most energetic artist of all time, and it explains some problems. Everywhere breasts burst from bodices, purple babies are split open like ripe figs, ecorche men look like skinned rabbits. But for all this promiscuity of flesh, in a vital sense the exhibition is confined. It purports to track how Rubens took flight from the pedantry of Van Veen to find a new freedom in the expansive company of Raphael, Michelangelo, Caravaggio and others. But nowhere is there a direct confrontation with other artists. Take that master of the night, the mysterious Elsheimer. He is the only artist Rubens ever wrote about in his correspondence. When, back in Antwerp, he heard of Elsheimer's death, he sent a letter to the kindly German doctor Johann Faber, who knew Rubens and Elsheimer in Rome, telling him that his generation would not see the like of Elsheimer again. Unhappily, we do not see him either.

The point is made when scrutinising Rubens's Samson and Delilah, which, incidentally, to doubt as a Rubens--as has been done--is about as silly as claiming that Hamlet was written by Bacon. Here, as a relief from all this exhibition's sweatiness, is dusky shadow, which acts as a poignant foil to the knocking shop in which the scene of concupiscence takes place. This great painting is inconceivable without the inspiration of Elsheimer and indeed, there in the background stands a flask of water, metaphorically reflecting the wonderful Elsheimer of Judith and Holofernes that Rubens actually owned--and which the curators should have included in the exhibition. All they needed to have done was pick it up from Apsley House. Perhaps such a short time for planning meant that they had to confine themselves only to works by Rubens. But surely they could have borrowed a good Van Veen, whose importance to the story is in inverse proportion to his interest as a painter.

A real strength are the number of major modelli and drawings, the latter a complement to the recent display at the Metropolitan Museum. Rubens's intense engagement with Michelangelo was thoroughly interrogated in the recent show dedicated to how Rubens understood Italian graphics: 'Drawing on Italy' (Edinburgh and Nottingham, 2002). There the dialogue between Rubens and Michelangelo centred upon Rubens's copies after the Sistine Prophets. Here are black and red chalk renderings of excerpts from The Last Judgement (Fig. 1). As with 'Drawing on Italy', there is no attempt to hide the real difficulties deciding when a Rubens is a Rubens. Take for example the important sheet from Edinburgh that shows a Drowning of Leander on the recto and The Battle of the Amazons on the verso. Catalogue entries rehearse the disagreement the principal essayists have as to what this actually represents.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

A truly valuable aspect of the catalogue, and taken as a whole, the catalogue is an important contribution to scholarship, has to do with what is said by way of speculative reconstruction about the implications of the loss of 'a quite fat notebook' that Rubens had begun to fill before he left for Italy but which seems to have been in his saddlebag journeying through the peninsula. This was destroyed by fire in 1720, a few years after that other catastrophe, the destruction, by fire too, of close on forty paintings by Rubens from the aisles of the Jesuit church in Antwerp. Here the significance of the notebook is so eloquently argued that the question occurs as to which was the greater loss for Rubens scholarship, given that so many modelli for the Antwerp project have survived. One of only two surviving autograph sheets, now in Berlin, stands out in Rubens's graphic oeuvre because of its range of subject matter, suggestiveness and a certain allusive sense that here the artist was alert with all his exceptional mental capacity, engaged as a mathematician working on a theorem.

The Warburgian Elizabeth McGrath, one of the curators, has done more than anyone in our generation to peer over Rubens's shoulder as he reads his Cicero and his Ovid and it is exciting to observe her applying methods to materials. Her capacity to bring Rubens's reading alongside the cryptic Latin tags with which he sometimes annotated drawings, and her ability to consider them with more attention and imagination than previous classical scholars, yields not only many valuable insights into the creative processes of this most widely read of all painters, but, no less valuably, changes our understanding of what a piece of paper might actually be. Her contributions are a triumphant affirmation of her claim that for the artist 'Classical texts were ... sources of inspiration, liberating rather than confining and restricting'.

A surprising number of the exhibits were recently shown at Lille for the Council of Europe exhibition in 2004 (APOLLO, May 2004) and in the National Gallery's own 2003 exhibition on The Massacre of the Innocents, a painting that features prominently here once more. There are also many things much less familiar but no less interesting: the Prague Council of the Gods (1601-1602) and the Toronto ricordo for a proposed print after The Raising of the Cross (1610/38). However, there are many ghosts not at this feast, among them Archduke Albert.

Rubens confessed to being bored by portraits but the most moving exhibit is one. It is of someone soon to become a ghost for Rubens, his daughter Clara Serena (Fig. 2), who was born in 1611 and who died in 1623. For those cowed by all this ardent muscularity, turn to her to discover, at the last, a private Rubens, that man of exceptional refinement and sensitivity.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

'Rubens: A Master in the Making', National Gallery, London, 26 October-15 January 2006. The catalogue, by David Jaffe et al., is published by the National Gallery and distributed by Yale University Press, ISBN 1 85709 371 2 (cloth), 25 [pounds sterling] and ISBN 1 85709 3267 (paper), 9.95 [pounds sterling].

David Howarth is a reader in the history of art at the University of Edinburgh.

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