While the familiar term ‘Rubenesque woman'  invokes artist Peter Paul Rubens' (1577 - 1640) name and work to refer to an idealized voluptuous body type,  many of Rubens' images of women do much more than depict beautiful form. They speak to the ‘woman question,’ a byword in Rubens’ day for debates about the appropriate roles (socially, morally, biologically and spiritually) of women.  In the politics of Rubens’ world, women led powerful nations, and Rubens himself was embroiled in immediate questions of national power. As Svetlana Alpers wrote in her book The Making of Rubens, “kings and queens saw and understood themselves and their rule through Rubens’s brush” (Alpers 5). Two of the female sovereigns who served as Rubens’s patrons, French Queen Mother Marie de Medici and the Infanta Isabella of Spain, who governed the Spanish Netherlands, appear in this exhibition as they were depicted by Rubens (and the artists of his studio, without whom he could not have been so prolific). For Isabella, Rubens carried out diplomatic missions at a time when power in Europe was in flux. For Marie de Medici, he created a series of images telling her life story and legitimizing her rule while avoiding further conflict through the adoption of allegory.  

Rubens was also well educated and drew from rich narrative sources, incorporating mythology, allegory, and religious figures into his compositions. These sources, and Rubens’s paintings, include episodes in which powerful women subvert patriarchy through a variety of means, including completing martial acts and achieving power through their sexuality. Ranging from Delilah to Minerva, these women are neither universally admirable or villainous, but the power of each is represented on the canvas. 

Rubens’s ubiquitous fleshy nudes make appearances in several of the images in this exhibition, but even when they appear beside the hulking musculature of Rubens’s men, the women in this exhibition are depicted as powerful. Although Rubens "is often seen as a, even the, crude painter of men on top," Svetlana Alpers writes that, in his work, "the power of women" is an "iconographical preoccupation" (Alpers 152). This exhibition approaches that preoccupation through three pairings, in three categories: Sovereigns, Biblical Narratives, and Myth & Allegory. Drawing from recent feminist approaches to Rubens’s art, the exhibition explores Rubens’s depictions of women left out by the familiar but reductive term ‘Rubenesque.’ 

Contact Courtney to read the full catalog essay.