RUBENESSENCE.

My favorite picture in "Peter Paul Rubens: The Drawings," at the Metropolitan Museum, portrays an ox. In black and red chalks, with enhancing traces of other mediums, the work conveys ponderous mass, rippling musculature, bristling hair, and creased and dimpled, somehow palpably warm, skin. Turning its great head to gaze at us with mild, blameless stupidity, this is an ox's ox--likely the pride of one of the farms that Rubens owned outside Antwerp--by history's chief painter's painter. It was executed around 1618, in the early middle of the Flemish master's long, uniformly triumphal career as the leading pictorial decorator, propagandist, and entertainer for a Catholic Europe in the advanced phases of the Counter-Reformation. (As an adroit diplomat for the Spanish Netherlands, fluent in five languages, Rubens worked to reconcile kingdoms riven by religious wars; he also found time to be, among other things, a courtier, a scholar, an architect, a pageant master, a family man, an art collector, and a numismatist.)

What I particularly appreciate about "An Ox" is that it isn't the image of a naked human being. Like many people, I have trouble with Rubens's nudes, especially the female ones: all that smothering flesh, vibrantly alive but with the erotic appeal of a mud slide. (Rubens, owing to moral constraints of the time, rarely worked from nude female models, and many of his women are what they look like: male models imaginatively plumped and upholstered, fore and aft.) Nor do Rubens's characters appear significantly more intelligent than his farm animals. They are puppets of an unrelentingly inflated rhetoricism, numb to pain and immune to wit, that touches ground nowhere in common human experience.

People who like Rubens's paintings will love this show; the rest of us will be hard put not to like it. The drawings are consummate and informative (copies of Michelangelos and of ancient statuary reveal sources of Rubens's style), and they isolate exciting aspects of the artist's talent--notably a truthtelling realism that was not limited to oxen. Rhetoric-free portraits of a Korean man in native dress and of a Jesuit missionary in Chinese costume are clear-eyed confrontations with strangeness that, forgoing exoticism, have a tough, bracing humility. But heightened realism was just a subordinate means for Rubens, as it had been, slightly earlier, for Caravaggio, to accomplish the pictorial revolution of the seventeenth century: eclipsing Mannerism's distorted figures set in windowlike, perspectival recesses with rounded, convincing bodies in an airy space that opens outward, to envelop the viewer. Realistic imagery stabilizes the meringues of Italian and Northern Renaissance traditions with which he modelled the Baroque in grandiose, public, polemical glory. Today, most of us far prefer the taut, darkling Baroque of Caravaggio and his followers; but Rubens was the rage in that era, and he affected the development of the two best painters of the seventeenth century (and thus, in my view, of all time). As Simon Schama suggests, in his richly detailed book "Rembrandt's Eyes," the example of Rubens goaded Rembrandt--his younger would-be rival, barely ninety miles but a political world away, in Protestant Amsterdam--toward the revelation of a new social reality that was as personal, dramatic, and profound as Rubens's artificial paradise was unfelt and arbitrary. And in the years 1628-29, when Rubens was in Madrid to promote a treaty between Spain and England, he coached the rising court painter Diego Velazquez. Like Rembrandt, Velazquez would comb the bombast from Rubens's formal innovations and apply them to a lived circumstance--in his case, that of a refined and cruel Spanish monarchy on the brink of decline.

Painters of my acquaintance dote on Rubens. They readily look past his subject matter to his form and his technique. What Rubens says may not be compelling, but he says it with an unsurpassed eloquence. The art historian Jacqueline Lichtenstein has written, "Standing before the paintings of the great colorists, a viewer has the impression that his eyes are fingers." So it is with Rubens, who equalled Titian--a painter he came to revere in his twenties, during a decisive, ...