Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue
- Introduction
- 1 Samson and Dilemma: Rubens Confronts the Woman on Top
- 2 Making Assumptions: Marian Tropes after Italy
- 3 Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia
- 4 Peace Embraces Plenty: Queering Female Virtue at Whitehall
- 5 All That Depends on Color: Feminizing Rubens in the Seventeenth Century
- Epilogue
- About the Author
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue
- Introduction
- 1 Samson and Dilemma: Rubens Confronts the Woman on Top
- 2 Making Assumptions: Marian Tropes after Italy
- 3 Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia
- 4 Peace Embraces Plenty: Queering Female Virtue at Whitehall
- 5 All That Depends on Color: Feminizing Rubens in the Seventeenth Century
- Epilogue
- About the Author
- Index
Summary
Coming to clear conclusions about Rubens is a challenge. He was many things: so many, that not all of his aspects are easy to admire. Take his women. Not to be too polite about it—because politeness is not an obviously Rubensian quality—his women are usually thought too fat. In our world, we admire size 6, but not size 16. […] However, if you look through the entirety of Rubens's extraordinary career, you will find plenty of females crowded into his art who are not particularly fat. You cannot say that Marie de Medici, the focus of no less than 24 paintings at the Louvre in Rubens's momentous telling of her life story, is noticeably fat. […] And when Rubens painted his first wife, the enchanting Isabella Brant, sitting under the honeysuckle bower with him in their lovey-dovey wedding portrait of 1609, is she fat? Not at all. She's petite, demure, charming.
‒ Waldemar Januszczak (2014)Thus begins the reviewer for the Royal Academy of Arts Magazine, warming up the reader for his take on the blockbuster exhibition “Rubens and his Legacy: Van Dyck to Cezanne,” which traveled from Brussels to London in 2015 accompanied by a hefty and informative catalogue. That Januszczak's sexist and proudly fat-phobic appraisal is merely the latest addition to a centuries-old tradition of gendered Rubens criticism is by now, I hope, obvious. Feminist scholarship aside, a writer for the quarterly publication of Britain's longest established art school, “run by artists” since Reynolds's day in 1768, assumes the like-minded reader will appreciate Rubens's art only in proportion to his sexual attraction to (or revulsion for) the kinds of female bodies the artist paints. Of course, in 2014, Januszczak's jokey, locker-room inanity helped pave the way for what was coming. Two years later another recalcitrant chauvinist who “has repeatedly mocked women for being overweight” in the words of the New York Times, would become president of the United States “having accused women of having ‘fat, ugly’ faces and of repelling voters because of their looks.”
Had I begun this research at Berkeley in the era of Trump as, once again—as far as I know—the only out queer woman of color in the doctoral program in art history, but still interested in writing a book about Rubens and representations of female power—there are many things I would have approached differently.
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- Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens , pp. 239 - 242Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020