The Touch of Pygmalion. Rubens and Sculpture in Rome

Pieter Paul Rubens, Two Studies of a Boy from the Spinario, sanguine and red chalk on paper, British Museum, London. © The Trustees of the British Museum

During the seventeenth century Pieter Paul Rubens was considered by his contemporaries to be one of the greatest connoisseurs of Roman antiquities. Nothing seems to escape his powers of observation and desire to learn from and interpret these works. His drawings make the works he studies vibrant, adding movement and feeling to the gestures and expressions of the characters in the same way that he enlivened the subjects of his portraiture. His drawing of the famous Spinario, in sanguine and red charcoal, takes the pose from two different points of view and seems to be executed by a living model.

This exhibition looks at how Rubens’ formal and iconographic insights filter into the rich and varied Roman world of the 1600s, a question that has not yet been addressed systematically by scholars. This process of animating the antique seems to anticipate the approach of the artists who in the following decades would come to be called Baroque.

The presence in the city of painters and sculptors who had had the opportunity to train with him in Antwerp (such as Van Dyck and Georg Petel) or who had already come into contact with his works in the course of their training (such as Duquesnoy and Sandrart) certainly guaranteed the accessibility of his models to a generation of Italian artists, who, no less than the Flemish, had by then become accustomed to confronting the Antique in the light of contemporary pictorial examples and on the basis of a renewed study of Nature. Among them all was Bernini: his Borghese group reread famous ancient statues (the Apollo of Belvedere) to give them movement and translated marble into flesh, as happens in the Rape of Proserpine.

The exhibition will measure how much these masterpieces are indebted to Rubensian naturalism, as were certainly other youthful sculptures by the artist, such as the Vatican Charity in the Tomb of Urban VIII, already judged by European travelers of the late eighteenth century to be ‘a Flemish Governess.’ In this figurative context, the timely circulation of prints, taken from Rubensian graphic proofs, accelerated throughout the 1930s the dialogue by soliciting publishing operations such as the Galleria Giustiniana, where ancient statues now definitively came to life according to an effect already defined ‘Pygmalion’ by critics.

The exhibition planned for the Galleria Borghese, recovering some of these lines of research, aims to highlight the extraordinary contribution made by Rubens to a new conception of the antique, of the concepts of natural and imitation, on the threshold of the Baroque, focusing on what the disruptive novelty of his style in the first decade in Rome consisted of and how the study of models could be understood as a further possibility of momentum toward a new world of images.

In order to do this, the exhibition will take into account not only Italian works that document the passionate and free study of ancient examples, but also the ability to reread Renaissance examples and engage with contemporaries, delving into new aspects and genres.