Rubens: An Extra Large Story

So what's this?

"Rubens is the nastiest, most vulgar painter that ever lived.

"His pictures always put me in mind of chamber pots."

Ha!

Thomas Eakins.

What's this?

"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? Ugh!

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 world view,

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's Fall of the Damned.

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, oh.

And that,

oooh!

And that,

argh!

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's 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 Claes Janszoon Visscher,

and it shows Western Europe as it was in Rubens's 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's 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

and, in 1568, the simmering tension between the Calvinist North

and the Catholic South erupted into a terrible war.

One of the most brutal, 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 back cloth

that his life and his art was enacted.

ECHOING YELLS

CLASHING WEAPONS

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 a 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 Pypelincks,

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 ten 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-Michielsstraat.

Just around the corner, meanwhile, in Kloosterstraat,

lived the family of Jan Brant,

an Antwerp lawyer who had a vivacious daughter called Isabella.

Isabella Brant.

BICYCLE BELL RINGS

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 Pinakothek 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 Silenus.

They were married for 18 years until her early death in 1626.

And in that time God only knows how many Isabella Brants

popped up surreptitiously in her husband's art.

"In front of Rubens, put on blinkers like those a horse wears."

Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres?

Ingres wrote that?!

Horse blinkers! Ah!

CHURCH BELLS RING

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 Chrises out there,

this bit of the film is dedicated to you.

Chrises 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 St Christopher, and he's carrying Christ across the river

because Christopher, of course, means carrier of Christ.

Now, St 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 Nicolaas Rockox.

That's him on the left, standing behind the old man.

In 1611, Rockox and the arquebusiers commissioned Rubens

to paint a new altar piece 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 altar piece.

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's 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's time it was often closed.

Like that.

With St 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 you for this.

DOOR CREAKS

Nicolaas Rockox, the President of the Arquebusiers,

who commissioned Rubens's great Descent from the Cross,

lived in this house here.

Rockox 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 Rockox had Rubenses 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 Rockox's time this position here

was occupied by a very naughty picture.

A picture which calls for some music.

MUSIC: Delilah by Tom Jones

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.

# But I was lost like a slave that no man could free... #

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.

# She was my woman... #

It's such an exciting picture.

Rubens doesn't just bring the Bible to life,

he sets it on fire.

# My, my, my... #

And will you look at Samson, exhausted by all that sweaty sex,

just lying there, poleaxed,

like a goalkeeper who's banged his head against the post.

# I could see

# That girl was no good for me... #

So Nicolaas Rockox 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's art of these busy years,

you'll find lots of Delilahs 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's art

like a baroque Barbara Windsor in a Carry On film.

# So, before, they come to break down the door... #

Sometimes, as in this particularly violent depiction

of the Massacre of the Innocents,

she's even wearing the same dress.

# Forgive me, Delilah

# I just couldn't take any more. #

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.

'Thank you for letting me in here.'

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 Aken and Brueghel,

and on the smooth panels

every brush stroke is visible and remains visible.

And so also the difference between these brush strokes,

so the very smooth glazing areas,

but also the very upstanding, very three dimensional highlights.

That's a difference that I always noticed with Rubens.

The surfaces look very kind of liquid almost,

as if they haven't quite solidified.

There's a brilliant sort of skating feeling across the paintings.

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.

Now, 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 toward 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.

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.

A good example for us is the Madonna with the 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?

-Yes, absolutely.

So, the painting was started by Rubens in 1614

and the painting was, in fact, 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 St Joseph.

So, 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.

Can I ask, though, why would he bother doing that?

I mean, you've got a picture here

which, 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 the...

And it makes it a much more glorious painting.

Absolutely.

I tell you what I really like here...

..this red.

-Absolutely.

-Rubens's red.

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 the 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's 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.

CHOIR SINGS

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 Philips.

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.

Macaws, 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.

Breughel didn't collaborate with Rubens

because he couldn't do figures.

Breughel 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?

-HE SIGHS

-Not more Blake.

"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 want 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...

BELL TOLLING

..and became a nun.

A Poor Clare, 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 Eighty Years' War, Isabella, hoping to achieve peace,

needed Spain to ally herself with her historic enemy, England.

So she spent 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 Dyke.

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' 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 hatband 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's attention was claimed fully by his day job

and by the other great love of his life.

Women.

Isabella Brant had died of the plague in 1626

and a lonely Rubens needed to find a new wife.

The one he found, Helene Fourment,

would become one of the most painted women in art.

Helene 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's 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.

Helene 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's wife, mother of his children, the woman he loves.

This is the most notorious of his depictions of her.

Helene 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 her 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 Helene Fourment poking out than poking in.

It's actually another clever bit of roleplaying.

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 for filling 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 or not Rubens designed wonderful tapestries.

And at the Covent 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 number ten.

When Rubens married Helene Fourment

they moved out here to the Chateau de Steen,

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 Chateau de Steen, is called Brabant,

and this was his inspiration.

Oh, look, some goldfinches.

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, as his final contribution, reinvents the landscape, too.

That's the kind of man we're dealing with here.