Voluptuous nudes

Rubens is seen as the great painter of the Counter-Reformation and looking at 'The Descent from the Cross' in Antwerp Cathedral, his mastery of sacred theatre is unquestionable. Nicodemus and his workmen, John the Apostle, Mary, Mary Magdalene and Mary Cleophas, move in unison to take the wounded body of the dead Christ carefully and lovingly from the cross. It evokes feelings of sadness, pity and guilt in the eyes of the viewer. So when I went to meet Ben van Beneden, curator in the Rubens House Museum in the centre of Antwerp, I was expecting to have a conversation on Rubens as the master of Catholic Propaganda. This we did, but it was when I made reference to Rubens's fleshy women that Ben became very animated. Presuming I had meant "fleshy" in a negative sense, he jumped to defend the voluptuousness of Rubens' nudes.

"It is one of the things he is criticised for today – the roundness and fatness of his nudes. But this was the fashion of the time; fat and corpulence stood for wealth and the good life. Rubens knew how to paint flesh. Now maybe today Velazquez's Venus is more to modern tastes, but I say look at Rubens' 'Little Fur', the portrait of his second wife Helen almost in the nude but half covered by a piece of fur. I am prejudiced, I know, but that is a sexy painting."

Warming to his theme, he went on, "I hope I am not offending any of my Dutch friends but, for example, Rembrandt is much more down to earth than Rubens. We have Rembrandt's painting of the couple making love in the alcove bed and its quite naturalistic and that is, in some eyes, what makes it sensuous. But I think it's less erotic.

"You have that fantastic painting of Rembrandt's wife pulling up her skirts and bathing in a pool or stream," he continues. "That is erotic, but a different kind of eroticism than you see in Rubens. It is much more down to earth. Rubens, on the other hand, is an idealist. Everything is idolised and I believe, when depicting sex, things are frequently idolised, and need to be."

Kay Sheehy

Eye Candy on the work of Peter Paul Rubens is on RTÉ Radio 1 at 7.30pm on Tuesday, 6 June