The Galleria Borghese has only two paintings by Peter Paul Rubens in its permanent collection, The Lamentation and Susanna and the Elders. They belong to a formative period in the artist's life when he lived in Italy between much of 1600-1608. The Borghese paintings form the nucleus of a recent book, The Touch of Pygmalion: Rubens and Sculpture in Rome, co-edited by Francesca Cappelletti and Lucia Simonato to accompany the exhibition they co-curated last winter. The Lamentation, with its dead Christ seated on a marble sarcophagus, embodies Rubens's vision of what could be achieved through the study of sculpture, lessons he learned in Italy. Although derived from ancient marbles, Christ is anything but stone. He is god made flesh through the power of painting. This is the subject of The Touch of Pygmalion, a series of essays and catalogue entries that explore Rubens's relationship to sculpture, ancient and modern. Available in English and Italian editions, the book is the scholarly meat of what was a visually sumptuous event at Galleria Borghese.

At the heart of The Touch of Pygmalion is Rubens's lost notebook, destroyed in a Paris fire in 1720. [1] The notebook contained Rubens's famed treatise De imitatione statuarum, known through Roger de Piles's Cours de peinture par principes of 1708. Rubens criticized in his treatise the way many artists stumbled in translating their studies of ancient sculpture into painting. They could not separate form from material, thereby ignorantly carrying over stony traces of their models and never accounting for real flesh. They lacked what the exhibition calls the touch of Pygmalion, the ability to animate their subjects. Ultimately, it was these ideas in De imitatione statuarum that Giovan Pietro Bellori would criticize in 1672. Rubens went too far in altering "con la sua maniera" ancient sources to the point they became unrecognizable. [2]

The notebook, which is known from copies and surviving sheets, was the product of Rubens's time in Italy. It was a compendium of his thought on art, affetti, anatomy, and physiognomy, most often taking shape in graphic and textual studies of ancient sculpture. Michael Jaffé orients readers to the contents of the notebook. In Rubens's drawings, we see a "game of image gathering," the "youthful harvest," as Jaffé describes it, that will feed the artist through his career (65, 67). Adriano Aymonino traces in an elegant essay the Flemish painter's innovative manner of depicting ancient sculpture. Rubens's techniques, he argues, demonstrate a new way of understanding Antiquity in the early modern period. Eschewing what Aymonino characterizes as the objective, documentary visual strategies of his predecessors, Rubens rendered sculptures from multiple viewpoints, interested instead in their visual effects and in infusing them with greater naturalism. There is a larger argument. Rubens's drawings after ancient sculpture are subjective representations, and this liberal interpretation of Antiquity would become synonymous with "the Baroque."

Rubens studied Leonardo's art and theory in his notebook as well. The relationship of these two artists is the subject of an essay by Carmen Bambach, who discusses the painters as parallel theoreticians. Leonardo's lost Battle of Anghiari is perhaps best known through Rubens's reworking of a Cinquecento drawing he acquired while in Italy. It was, as Bambach demonstrates, the expressive furor of Leonardo's battles and the violence of man that we see pulse through Rubens's most dynamic compositions.

It was the quest for dynamism that separated Rubens from many of his contemporaries as is seen from his treatise. Alessandro Giardini presents a concise introduction to De imitatione statuarum alongside parallel texts of the treatise in Latin, English and Italian. This alone will make the book a valued resource for students of art history. Anglophones will be charmed by Rubens declaring the imitation of statues should be done so it bears "no smell of stone". (215) [3] (Italian readers are given a drier translation.)

At the Galleria Borghese, Rubens's paintings on loan appeared in an easy dialogue with the sculpture that forms the permanent collection. For example, "the contrapposto of cruelty and tenderness" in Bernini's Pluto and Proserpina (1621-2) - one of hard and soft, of man and woman - is presaged by Rubens in his Munich Samson and Delilah (1614-7). [4] A ropey, bewildered Samson is torn from the bedroom by Philistines alongside Delilah, a sensuous, fleshy Venus of Urbino rising from her bed. There is a formal, stylistic relationship between the two works, but, as Simonato argues in her contribution, it is more than a "spiritual" affinity that connects these artists (73). It is a historical dialogue. She shifts focus from a backwards-looking Rubens to one fully engaged in the sculpture of his period. Rubens's revivification of ancient sculpture in painting impacted a young Bernini, who sought to render related effects in marble. Rubens, in turn, was greatly interested in the modern sculptors who worked in Rome after his departure. He sought to liberate his painted forms from the stoniness of their ancient models. This was a shared interest of Roman sculptors who wanted to surpass traditional constraints of marble. They all pursued "'form' heedless of 'material'". (90)

The "transmedial" process Simonato describes weighs heavily in the historiography of the Baroque, particularly in Wölfflin's conception of the malerisch. The essay should be read alongside research by Evonne Levy on intermediality and texts by Carolina Mangone and Joris van Gastel on pittoresco in sculpture. Simonato convincingly reconstructs a period eye that saw something "Flemish" in the soft flesh of Bernini's marbles, a point that will be of interest as scholars begin to interrogate ethno-nationalist underpinnings of style and periodization. Simonato's essay belongs in a reader of critical studies of the Baroque.

We come to see that sculpture was more than a canon of artworks for Rubens. It was part of an existential inquiry. In earlier publications, the late Arnout Balis worked extensively on Rubens's lost notebook for its deep significance in the artist's thought. In his view, Rubens moved beyond practical and intellectual pursuits. They were "metaphysical," the artist's attempt to understand the nature of mankind and his condition. [5] Rubens studied human physiognomy, Balis wrote, "not in terms of expression, but rather from an 'anthropological' and even anthropogenetic point of view: how did the human form we see today come about? How can we explain the analogies between human and animal forms [...]? And what does this teach us about the Urform, the true, lost essence, and its subsequent degeneration?" [6]

In De imitatione statuarum, Rubens writes of the degradation of man from the time of the ancients to his own. His was a time of slothfulness, of flabby bellies and weak arms enfeebled by drinking, so different from the bodies of ancient sculptures. The challenge in tackling a subject like Rubens and sculpture is how to account for these more unwieldy and esoteric aspects of Rubens's thought, his meditations on humanity and tragedy. This was powerfully on display in the first room of the exhibition, but it is difficult to capture in a book. The pained bodies of Prometheus, Seneca and Adonis hung alongside an oil sketch of the Allegory of War at the Galleria Borghese. It was November 14, 2023, the early days of a new global war. Here was the fruit of Rubens's labor, his study of ancient sculpture and of the tragedy of man.

Notes:

[1] The English edition contains a small typographical error in the introduction to De imitatione statuarum, not found in the Italian edition, that dates the fire to 1730 (210). The other essays state 1720 correctly.

[2] "[...] li alterava tanto con la sua maniera che non lasciava di esse forma o vestigio per riconoscerle." Giovan Pietro Bellori: Le vite de' pittori scultori e architetti moderni, ed. by Evelina Borea, Torino 2009, 1: 268.

[3] As Aymonino notes (16), the phrase "smell of stone" originates in the English translation of Roger de Piles: The Principles of Painting, London 1743, 87. It is most certainly an awkward translation of the French ("...qu'il ne sente la pierre en façon quelconque") in Roger de Piles: Cours de peinture par principes, Paris 1708, 140.

[4] "[... il] ratto di Proserpina rappresenta un'ammirabile contraposto [sic] di tenerezza, e crudeltà." Domenico Bernini: Vita del Cavalier Gio. Lorenzo Bernino, Rome 1713, 18.

[5] Arnout Balis: Rubens's lost Theoretical Notebook, in: The Rubenianum Quarterly 1 (2011), 4.

[6] Arnout Balis: Rubens and Inventio: The Contribution of his Theoretical Notebook, in: Thinking Through Rubens: Selected Studies by Arnout Balis, ed. by Elizabeth McGrath / Paul van Calster, London 2023, 126. First published in German in 2001.

Shawon Kinew