‘Somehow they seem more naked than if they were disrobed’ – John Banville on a late work by Rubens

From the December 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

A middle-aged friend tells of stepping out of the shower one recent morning and catching a glimpse of herself naked, damp and dripping, in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door, and thinking, ‘Oh, dear – Rubens!’

Her dismay is understandable. The Flemish master’s buxom nudes can look as if they were moulded from vatfuls of wet bread dough. They are as far as can be from Botticelli’s exquisite androgynes, say, or Raphael’s unwrinkleable fornarina, though the latter must have known a thing or two about the makings of a loaf.

In Rubens’s late work, The Garden of Love (1630–35), which hangs in the Prado in Madrid, the female figures are decorously gowned, yet somehow they seem more naked than if they were disrobed. There is a lot of potential love-making here, and the putti can hardly wait for it to get going – look at the little fellow down in the left-hand corner, giving one of the ladies an encouraging push in her rear end.

This woman is taken to be Rubens’s second wife, Helena Fourment, whom he married when she was 16 and he was 53. The Garden of Love was probably painted to celebrate the marriage, and if so it is the artist himself, in a fancifully youthful form, who is embracing his new wife. A figure bearing a resemblance to Fourment also appears in Rubens’s larger-scale The Three Graces (1630–35) and in the c. 1638 version of The Judgement of Paris – both of which are also in the Prado.

The Garden of Love is a celebration of an ageing man’s sensuous delight in his young spouse. And sensuality is the keynote of the picture. Consider the pose of the figure in the centre of the group, as she leans back languorously to look up at the hovering putto directly above her – we can almost hear her sigh of pleasure, though it may be more gasp than sigh.

Rubens was one of those unembarrassable artists for whom the erotic is among the higher states to which human beings aspire. Pleasure, in this garden of playful delights, is transcendent. As the critic Jed Perl has observed, all of Watteau is prophesied in this picture.

The Garden of Love (1630–35), Peter Paul Rubens. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

And delight is conveyed in large measure by the play of light. Rubens’s technical mastery is breathtaking. The glow of the women’s gowns conjures, paradoxically, the fleshly bounty of the bodies underneath. Look at the two figures entering from the right with their little dog – always, always there is a little dog – and the flush of rich red reflected from the man’s cape on to the back of the woman’s silvery skirts.

This small detail illustrates (illuminates!) a large aspect of the overall artistic endeavour. It is the task of the artist to concentrate with full force on the object under scrutiny, no matter what the object may be – the fall of light on fabric, or the human form the fabric envelops. The artist’s gaze is entirely democratic; all is grist to the painter’s palette. And this extreme effort of concentration has an effect upon the thing considered.

This little bit of silk, this big red robe, did not expect to be thus singled out. The things of the world may in themselves be mundane, but when the artistic imagination fixes on them they find themselves suddenly isolated, particular. And they blush, in an instance of self-awareness, and become more vividly what they are. As Rilke puts it in the ninth Duino Elegy:

Are we, perhaps, here just for saying: House,
Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Fruit tree, Window, –
possibly: Pillar, Tower?… but for saying, remember,
oh, for such saying as never the things themselves
hoped so intensely to be.

Is not painting, is not any art form, a way of saying things into their fullest existence?

In The Garden of Love, the two women who look out directly at us know the truth of all this. They know, posed there among a fricassee of putti – to steal an image from Madame du Barry – that this moment on earth, this moment, on their earth, will last for as long as pigment is preserved and canvas coheres.

From the December 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.