"All that pink flesh, all those buxom nudes!" The exuberance of Ruben's style often evokes such responses. For certain art historians he is "the king of the Baroque"; Baroque painting often verges on the Romantic, they add, and few painters so perfectly illustrate this convergence. "No such thing," others retort: "Romanticism is a kind of madness, an unhealthy and humourless art, in which man sets nature at defiance and is crushed by it. Who could be more remote from such madness than Rubens, a thoroughly grounded man, cheerful, equable and the image of health?" Health and vigour he had almost to excess, using his art to master nature apparently without effort, and therefore representing man - and more especially womankind - as effortlessly dominant.
……
