Rubens and the legacy of images
The ubiquity of images nowadays means it is easy for us to forget their relative absence in the past. We cannot move for glossy adverts on the tube, television or websites, and any celebrity's face is instantly recognisable. Likewise, if we want to see a particular artwork we need only type the details into a Google image search, and hundreds of versions will usually be instantly available, often accompanied by other artists' opies, responses and satires. Initiatives like the Rijkstudio mean that digital versions of famous old masters can now be adapted for any purpose you wish, and you might see Vermeer on your next milk carton.
Yet, this phenomenon is relatively recent. Until the explosion of print culture in 17th and 18th-century Europe, the only 'celebrity' image known to the average person would have been their monarch's profile on a coin, and their divinity's image in church. The wealth of colour and form that you could see in religious spaces would have been overwhelming in the way that the multiple screens in Picadilly Circus are today.
The movement of images around Europe, as paintings transferred between different collections or engraved versions began to circulate had an enormous effect, and one that it is now easy to overlook. It is this message that struck me as so well conveyed in the Royal Academy's current exhibition Rubens and his Legacy: Van Dyck to Cezanne. The display shows beautifully, I thought, how the availability of copies of a Rubens at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, or the arrival of an original in the collection of Robert Walpole at Houghton Hall, opened his work up to French or British artists. The display is arranged around a number of themes in which Rubens influenced later artists, such as poetry and landscape, power, lust, compassion and violence. The room on 'Elegance' is particularly effective, creating the sense of the picture gallery in an archetypal 18th-century British country house, in which portraitists like Reynolds and Lawrence sought to compete with Rubens' rich yet insightful portraits.
The exhibition is, understandably, fine-art-heavy, and in some places reliant on preparatory sketches where the finished masterpieces remain in situ. Yet, in the 'Compassion' room, there is one small decorative art object that is easily overlooked but speaks more than anything else of the influence of Rubens and the power of moving images. The room is focused around his altarpieces and how these spread through engravings. In particular, such engravings were taken to China by Catholic missionaries to aid in teaching and conversion. There in the corner of the room is an extraordinary object: a Qing dynasty plate, which the artist has decorated with a version of Rubens' Coup de Lance taken from the 1631 engraving by Boetius Adamsz Bolswert. The Christian iconography has been adapted and misinterpreted into 18th-century Qing conventions.
Not only do Rubens' works show his rapidly globalising world, full of trade objects, disseminated knowledge and ideas, but his works themselves formed a part in the spread of imagery at the very beginning of the ubiquity that defines our world today.