Fortuna

Peter Paul Rubens
oil on canvas, 1636-38
Museo Nacional del Prado

De koperen slang

Peter Paul Rubens
oil on canvas, c. 1635-40
National Gallery, London

Assumption

Peter Paul Rubens
De hemelvaart van Maria, c. 1626
Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal, Antwerp

Tête d’un satyre, après Rubens, c. 1714

Drawing auctioned at Sotheby’s in 2009

As the Sotheby’s website helpfully indicates this drawing by Watteau derives from Rubens’ great painting The Drunken Hercules. Watteau would never have seen this painting and probably made his copy of the satyr’s head from an album of character heads produced by Rubens’ workshop. This album was available to Watteau’s circle in France but has since been lost. Watteau made many superb drawings from the works of Rubens, one of his greatest influences.

Peter Paul Rubens, The Drunken Hercules, 1611
Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden

Pan and Syrinx, 1617

The Rainbow, 1636

This evening as light rain began to fall we watched a rainbow not unlike this one fade into the dusk.

via

Susanna and the Elders, 1636-39

Another Rubens Bacchanal

Bacchanal

In vino poesis?

According to Johann Gottfried Herder, “A nation in its wild state is strong in its language, its images and its vices – drunkenness and violence are the favourite vices of a nation which still holds manliness (arete) to be a virtue, and drunken frenzy to be pleasure. All the refined weaknesses did not yet exist which nowadays make for our good and bad qualities, our happiness and unhappiness, rendering us pious and cowardly, cunning and tame, learned and leisurely, compassionate and voluptuous. It was this drunkenness that gave rise to savage revelries, a wild dance, a rude music and in the unpolished language of the age, a rude kind of song.

“Thus it was not by the altar, but in wild dances of joy that poetry was born… It was this drunken poetry that was led to the altars for expiation. Here it was religion that commanded drunkenness in wine and in love and thus drunkenness submitted to religion: its song was full of the animal sensuality that informs the language of wine, and the wine in its turn raises it to a certain mystic sensuality that is the language of the gods… “

And Nietzsche: “Even under the influence of the narcotic draught, of which songs of all primitive men and peoples speak, or with the potent coming of spring that penetrates all nature with joy, these Dionysian emotions awake, and as they grow in intensity everything subjective vanishes into complete self-forgetfulness.”

Drunken Silenus, Peter Paul Rubens, 1618