Rubens at Como

RUBENS & OTHER FLEMISH MASTERS

FROM MARCH 27 TO JULY 25, 2010

IN VILLA OLMO, COMO

MASTERPIECES BY THE FLEMISH MASTER

Como presents one of the greatest artists of all time in the most important exhibition of the works of Peter Paul Rubens to be held in Italy over the last twenty years, featuring 25 masterpieces from the Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts, the Liechtenstein Museum and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, all in Vienna, together with more than 40 works by other 17^th century Flemish artists including Anthony van Dyck, Jacob Jordaens, Gaspar de Crayer, Pieter Boel, Cornelis de Vos and Theodor Thulden.

The successful exhibitions devoted to Miró, Picasso, Magritte, to the Impressionists, to Klimt and Schiele and to the Russian avant-garde maestros Chagall, Kandinsky and Malevic have so far attracted more than half a million visitors – an average of 90,000 every year – making the City on the Lake one of the landmark venues on the Italian exhibition circuit.

From 27 March to 25 July 2010, the interiors of the 18^th Villa Olmo will host the genius of Sir Peter PAUL RUBENS (Siegen, 28 June 1577 – Antwerp, 30 May 1640), the Master of Baroque art.

The City of Como together with the Gallery at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts bring together no less than 25 of the Flemish Master’s masterpieces from the collections in the Gallery itself, from the Liechtenstein Museum and from the Kunsthistorisches Museum. The exhibition shows one of the largest groups of works by Rubens ever to be seen on any one occasion in Italy, together with more than 40 works by other artists from his circle, including the great Sir Anthony van Dyck, Jacob Jordaens, Gaspar de Crayer, Pieter Boel, Cornelis de Vos and Theodor Thulden.

“The exhibition in Villa Olmo celebrates the genius and the modernity of one of painting’s unquestioned maestros, who after four centuries still manages to surprise us with the grandiose, exuberant forcefulness of the sign that made European Baroque so universal”, comments the curator Sergio Gaddi. “Rubens is still contemporary because his work fixes the endless beauty of the world in time and breathes the life of light and colour into his creations. His painting is a feast for the soul and the eyes and the works on show in Como narrate the great artist’s inexhaustible lust for life, the prodigious seductive force that springs forth from his visions. The consistent nucleus of works by Rubens is completed by a finely-chosen selection of paintings by other artists who had a variety of bonds with Antwerp and the maestro’s workshop, enabling the visitor to experience an exciting view of the golden age of Flemish painting in the seventeenth century.”

“With Rubens and his Flemish disciples, Como is about to experience another extraordinary period of great events, another step on the ambitious route first mapped out in 2004, which has already added our city to the circuit of capitals of art, bringing important benefits to its surroundings, to our natural vocation as a tourist destination and to our prestige,” states the mayor of Como, Stefano Bruni. “Seven years after we first started, I still support and believe in the unparalleled driving force unleashed by these exhibitions and in their ability to attract large numbers of visitors”.

The exhibition takes the visitor through nine rooms in Villa Olmo, illustrating the topics typical of Rubens’ painting, such as his sacred subjects and scenes from history and mythology, featuring several of the Flemish maestro’s leading masterpieces.

These include the Three Graces (1620-1624), a true manifesto of the contemporary ideal of feminine beauty, which Rubens modelled on the Hellenistic sculptural group found in Rome in the fifteenth century. Rubens painted the subject of the Three Graces several times, sometimes as a standalone and sometimes inserted in a broader context. In this case, the three female characters are depicted as the Greek goddesses of the seasons, clad in nothing but the flimsiest of veils and supporting a basket of flowers, which gives them an extraordinary circular movement, generating a natural, elegant pattern of hands and arms.

Boreas Abducting Oreithya (1615), a vigorous masterpiece and the image chosen as the symbol of the exhibition, depicts the tale told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses of the nymph Oreithya abducted by the winged, bearded Boreas, the personification of the north wind. Rubens blended the two bodies in a tight, fluctuating embrace, capturing the moment when the fear and violence of the abduction is transformed into an ecstasy of love and fantasy. The nymph’s body, like all Rubens’s female figures, is rendered with such a thoroughly realistic flesh colour as to make Guido Reni wonder: “Does this painter mix blood with his colours?”

Two works of outstanding importance included in this exhibition are the Circumcision of Christ (1605), which responded to clear iconographic standards dictated by the Counterreformation for expressing participation in religious sentiment clearly and immediately, and the Madonna Adored by Angels (also known as the Madonna della Vallicella, 1608) – possibly the most prestigious of the artist’s commissions in Italy – two models for altarpieces in the Jesuit Church in Genoa and the Church of Santa Maria della Vallicella in Rome, in which the theatrical use of light and chromatic atmosphere reveals the influence exerted by the great Venetian painters of the sixteenth century, whose work Rubens had studied during his stay in Venice in 1600.

The imposing The Dreaming Silenus, one of the Flemish maestro’s more unusual works, which he painted between 1610 and 1612, soon after returning to Italy, is striking not only for its allegorical sensuality, but also for the architecture of the composition, in which the group comprising Bacchus, the drunken satyr and the Maenad is set against a luxuriant still life, featuring priceless gilded pottery and a rich array of chalices and goblets.

One unquestioned rarity is The Judgement of Paris (1605-1608), one of only four works painted by Rubens on a sheet of copper, an unusual support for a recurrent theme in his painting, which he repeated several times, culminating in the celebrated painting executed in 1638-39 to a commission from King Philip IV of Spain, which now hangs in the Prado in Madrid. This is one of the most enchanting pieces of poetry ever painted by Rubens, where everything, from the composition as a whole to the figures, the landscape and the sky above them, is resolved in the colour and the paint applied with fluid brushstrokes, blending both the figures and the setting around them into a single, indissoluble whole. The painting illustrates the competition, judged by Paris, between the goddesses Hera, Artemis and Aphrodite for the title of the most beautiful on Olympus.

Of particular significance are the two large canvases of The Death of Decius Mus and The Trophy, both from the cycle that Rubens dedicated to the Roman consul Publius Decius Mus in 1616-1617. The cycle was inspired by the story told by Livy of the heroic Roman leader who lived in the fourth century BC. So strongly was the artist stimulated by the great epics that, in a letter addressed to William Trumbull in 1621, he wrote:

“I confess that an inborn gift has called me to execute large works rather than little curios. To each his own way. My talent is of a kind that no undertaking, however great and multiform the object, can overcome my self-confidence”.

There is considerable historical, as well as artistic, value in the series of small oils on board of sacred subjects, which Rubens painted as preparatory models for the 39 works commissioned from him in 1620 for the ceilings of the church of the Jesuits in Antwerp, works which were later lost when the church was destroyed by fire in 1718. The particularly dynamic construction of these paintings, with their view as seen from below, betrays evidence of the influence exerted by Paolo Veronese on Rubens’s imagination. In these priceless surviving preparatory works, the maestro’s own hand is conveyed very convincingly, as he made his sketches personally, while entrusting the completion of the finished full-scale work to his workshop assistants.

Alongside these masterpieces by Rubens, the exhibition in Villa Olmo also features 40 canvases by Flemish painters from his circle, in particular Anthony van Dyck, a friend of the maestro’s and certainly his most talented pupil – represented here by his celebrated Self Portrait as a young man and his splendid Portrait of a Commander in Armour – as well as works by Jacob Jordaens, Gaspar de Crayer and Theodor Thulden.

Outstanding for their quality and minute detail among these Flemish works are the still life executions by Pieter Boel, Jan Fyt and Jan De Heem, showing evidence of the blend of naturalism, exoticism and artificiality typical of the aristocratic Kunstkammer collections that were so fashionable in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. That is an apt description of Pieter Boel’s Still Life with Globe and Cockatoo, Jan Fyt’s Fruit Still Life with Monkey or the Richly Laid Table with Parrot by Jan Davidsz de Heem. One variant on the still life theme that was very much in vogue in Flanders around the middle of the seventeenth century, the display of game, is well represented in this exhibition by such works as The White Peacock by Jan Weenix (1693), or the two paintings of Still Life with Game, respectively by Jan Fyt and Melchior Hondecoeter.

Don Chisciotte, cavaliere del Barocco (Don Quixote, the Baroque Knight) is the new theatre project, edited by Teatro in Mostra of Como and directed by Eleonora Moro, that repeats the previous experience of staging a parallel didactic event to investigate the bonds between Rubens and the Baroque era.

Rubens at Como

Friday, April 2, 2010

Inauguration of Rubens and the other Flemish Masters

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

The Exhibition

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