The Irresistible Passion of Peter Paul Rubens

“Rubens is my favorite artist, in part, because his paintings capture the totality of the human condition in its fleshy, pathological, and metaphysical realities.”

Peter Paul Rubens is one of the most recognizable names in art. He was one of—if not the—leading figures of the Flemish Golden Age and a supreme representative of the broader Baroque artistic tradition taking inspiration from Caravaggio. Rubens is my favorite artist, in part, because his paintings capture the totality of the human condition in its fleshy, pathological, and metaphysical realities. They speak to us, move with us, and inspire us.

The role of art and human life is a long and conflictual one. Plato famously banished the artists from his ideal republic. This was not because he disagreed with art (Plato wanted to be a dramatist before turning to philosophy, and this spirit is still visible in the fact that he chose to write in dramatic form rather than Pythagorean prose common to pre-Socratic philosophy) but because he thought the art espoused by the poets was insufficient for the good life. Luckily for us, Plato lost.

The 20th century saw a renewed struggle over the place and role of art in human life. Conservative humanists, in the tradition of Matthew Arnold—art being part of the humanist experience embodying in painted form “the best which has been thought and said” about the human condition—championed the role of art as part of a whole life. This, in turn, was rooted in the earlier romanticist movements of the 19th century. Avant-garde radicals, best represented by Susan Sontag, also wanted art at the forefront but offered “an erotics of art” in place of the supposedly static humanism of the conservative humanists. It is safe to say the Susan Sontag and the avant-garde butchers have won, at least for the moment, much to our broader cultural impoverishment; only a handful of largely classical and humanist preparatory schools and liberal arts universities retain that spirit of aesthetic humanism begun by Augustine and developed over the centuries after him and reaching a certain acme in the Council of Trent.