Size

Until the day of his death in 1640, Peter Paul Rubens lived hugely. He painted more pictures|than any other artist of the era, created 'hundreds of masterpieces. Portrait commissions and diplomatic missions made him a familiar figure at the courts of Europe, but he could most often be found at his mansion in Antwerp, surrounded by assistants and works-in-progress, plus his eight children, hunting dogs, peacocks, Spanish horses, ancient sculptures and cameos. "His life from one end to the other," said a French critic, "is one of those which reconcile us with life. In everything, he is a man who does honor to humanity."

A Manhattan gallery had 35 Rubens oils on exhibition last week--enough to hint at the height and breadth of his genius. For all its size, Rubens' genius was not deep in any spiritual sense: the pagan gods he painted were muscular and gay, his goddesses fat and sassy; his Christs were muscular and mild, his Madonnas magnificently maternal. A hearty, happy man, Rubens filled them all with the hot blood and gusty breath of life.

When the breath seems short and the blood thin, as in a few of the pictures on show last week, the chances are that they are factory products sketched by Rubens, painted by an assistant and then retouched and signed by the master's hand. He was an art manufacturer as well as an artist, and he needed lots of money for the sumptuous life he liked.

Rubens did best when he stood alone before a vast canvas; his finest works are huge mythological scenes filled with cream-and-honey nudes, and Biblical illustrations done on an equally grand and almost equally sensuous scale. But he could also put his passion for people into a small portrait, as his head of curly-maned Francesco Gonzaga, who later became Duke of Mantua, proves. The young nobleman's good-natured mouth looks about to speak, and his eyes are bright with thought, as though Gonzaga were in the midst of a conversation that both he and the artist enjoyed.

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