Rubens in excelsis: the complimentary Rubens exhibitions at Lille and Antwerp are visually intense and full or telling comparisons��although the thematic organisation is sometimes skewed

This year sees the most important exhibitions on Rubens since the commemoration in 1977 of the quatercentenary of his birth, at Antwerp, Genoa and Lille. Lille offers a survey divided by types of client and commission rather than genre or chronology. It is complemented by a smaller exhibition at the Rubenshuis in Antwerp, 'A House of Art: Rubens as a Collector', which covers all aspects except prints and books. Those are either currently under scrutiny at the Plantin-Moretus house in Antwerp, in the exhibition 'A Devotion to Books: Rubens and his Library', or will be the subject of other shows in Antwerp later this year. Only those who have Latin need apply to the Plantin-Moretus exhibition.

Lille puts the best face on Rubens for those who respond to Rembrandt, the Master of Introspection, and not this Master of Certainty. However such is the quality of the Lille show that it may represent a turning point in the critical fortuna of Rubens. If so, that will be a lasting achievement, but at a cost. Catalogue entries are informative, economical, transparent and uncomplicated. Perhaps, however, there are occasions when it is clear that things could have been more ambitious. All this may have rather more to do with complicity with the politics of Lille as the current cultural capital of Europe, than with the instincts as scholars of the team who compiled the entries. Writing perhaps to a difficult ministry brief--scholarship and populism--cataloguers may have regretted that they were not given the chance to air rather more of the complexities of current Rubens research. For example, the important exhibition on Rubens's drawings after Italian masters, 'Drawing on Italy', held at Edinburgh and Nottingham eighteen months ago, does not feature. Nonetheless, the Lille catalogue is a handsome and well illustrated volume with much of lasting value in the text. The scholarly ambition of the catalogue for the Rubenshuis, A House of Art, unquestionably extends the boundaries of the subject in significant ways. The Rubenshuis exhibition must be seen alongside Lille, both for its intrinsic distinction, but also because the two shows resonate: Antwerp is showing Rubens's copy of Titian's portrait of Philip II; Lille, Rubens's copy of Titian's Rape of Europa. The Rubenshuis exhibition offers small scale treasures not to be found at Lille: objets personal to Rubens which he enjoyed as a connoisseur. In a dark hammer there is Georg Petel's ivory Crucifix: a candle flame encircled by such sumptuous gems as The Triumph of Luna.

The Lille exhibition begins with Italy. The presence of the intriguing Aeneas leaving Troy is especially welcome. The catalogue is right to point out a dependence on Giulio Romano, but surely Rubens was also looking to Ferrara, and, for his landscape background, to Dosso Dossi especially, In the Borghese Lamentation, the crowded uncertainty of the mourners may have given Caravaggio inspiration for the claustrophobic group imprisoned by grief on the great tomb stone of his Entombment. Rubens in Genoa is represented by the most lustrous of all his portraits of a woman, the Maria Serra Pallavicini. The sitter, with complete psychological mastery of her ambience, sits enthroned in silver stiff as kitchen foil, encased in festive architecture on a basilical scale.

At Lille, grouping is by theme of commission and, in one instance, this allows a comparison of brushwork as much as eighteen years apart: the massive St Ambrose and Theodosius of 1620 (Vienna), hangs next to the Martyrdom of St Andrew of 1638 (Madrid). The differences are intriguing. The second section is bourgeois Antwerp, subsumed under the heading, 'Rubens's commissions for the middle class--profane painting'. But here problems begin which become intrusive in section four, 'Rubens's commissions from the clergy--religious art'. For example, in the Antwerp section, there is too much emphasis on portraiture at the cost of the altarpiece. This gives an utterly false picture. It was merchants such as Nicolas Roxcox, wrapped in Baltic furs, who encouraged Rubens to repopulate parish churches with altarpieces of exceptional quality. Such canalisation of the carver gives the false impression that once returned to Antwerp, Rubens gave up on Michelangelo to become the recorder of a smug middle class.

It is in the Antwerp section, too, that a sneaking suspicion begins to intrude. There is too much patrimoine where there could leave been still more bonne peinture. The Ministry in Paris has gallicised Rubens. The problem is at its most acute in section four, with massive altarpieces, each the size of a stained glass window, few of which do the painter full justice but all of which come from French towns. Matters would have been simpler had a conventional chronological format been adopted.

A memorable aspect of Lille is the breath-taking modelli, though some are too skied to see properly: Amandus, Walburga, Eligius and Catherine (Dulwich), and Minerva striking down Discord (Antwerp) for example. One of the best is the extraordinary Groningen Adoration of the Kings, crackling and exploding like wires on an Antwerp tram. Just what a loss the destruction by fire of the ceiling in the Jesuit Church in Antwerp represented is forcibly brought home by the extraordinary animation of the sketch for the Martyrdom of St Lucy. On a piece of wood smaller than a tea tray, the martyr's executioner strides into the void like a trapeze artist, as he suddenly twists back to puncture a sack of silken flesh; blood, anemone coloured, squirts into the air like milk from a Rubens breast.

There are wonderful drawings demonstrating how the variety of graphic style which Rubens commanded surpassed that of arty high renaissance artist. There is a particular excitement in seeing Rubens' copies after Holbein's Dance of Death. The sheets are executed with as much finesse as the Flemish miniatures from the recent Royal Academy exhibition; though here too, as at the Academy, the detail is hard to see due to low lighting, and at Lille the angle of the glass, which encourages reflection. This gallery is lined with examples from each of the commissions for tapestries: the Constantine series showing how it was in this field, the most prestigious in which an early modern artist could compete, that Rubens took on Raphael, who was otherwise relatively absent from his creative thinking.

Rubens may have come to shun portraiture but he was certainly devoted to portraying the face of Brabant. A wonderfully preserved solar radiance, Landscape: The watering place, sunset effect (Louvre) shows a pantheism anticipating Blake's naivete and Palmer's fervour.

Although there are controversial aspects of the hang--the Marseilles Hunt is so high it cannot be seen properly--there are respired congruities: the Landscape with St George and the Dragon (Royal Collection) on an opposite wall to the Devotion of Rudolph of Habsburg (Madrid). Here, a well-judged juxtaposition allows new insights. Rubens put everything inter the St George whereas he delegated the Rudolph landscape to Jan Wildens. It is like looking at dried grass in a herbarium after walking across a lawn.

Lille is an intensely visual experience, though there are important aspects of the life of Rubens which we do not see: neither Het Steen nor Het Pelsken, and the comfort Rubens found late in life from his teenage wife, get a look in. Lille has chosen to emphasise the man who, when offered the Whitehall ceiling, replied: 'my talent is such that no undertaking, however vast in size or diversified in subject, has ever surpassed my courage'. What is played down, and here there is an irony for those overwhelmed by the dominance of a gigantic personality, is the reflective Rubens. There is little about a man who may have constructed a Genoese palace on the Wapper in Antwerp, but who also chose to remember himself in its garden; at peace with the world and happy in his family. It is an elegiac side, absent in Lille, but poignantly confessed to Pierre Dupuy in 1626, after the death of his wife: 'I find it very hard to separate grief for this loss from the memory of a person whom I must love and cherish as long as I live'. But I am not complaining. At Lille Rubens is arrayed in all his glory.

The exhibition 'Rubens' is at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille (+33 [0]3 20 06 78 00), until 14 June. The catalogue, by Arnauld Brejon de Lavergnee et al., is published by the Palais des Beaux Arts, Lille, and Snoeck Publishers, Ghent, 2004, ISBN 90 5349 500 2, 42.00 [pouns sterling (cloth). The exhibition 'A house of Art: Rubens as collector' is at the Rubenshuis, Antwerp (+32 [0] 3-201 15 55), until 13 June. The catalogue, by Kristin Lohse Belkin and Fiona Healy, is published by Rubenshuis and Rubenianum, 2004, ISBN 90 7670 470 8, 45 [euro] (cloth), 35 [euro] (paper).

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

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