Gianfranco Malafarina

Watching & Understanding Rubens and his century “Flesh is sad “, Mallarmé wrote. “Beauty is bitter “, Rimbaud reiterated. Prophetic words, still well fitting these times of ours featured by cruel diets, diaphanous and angel-like models, anorexic vocation to a threadlike and ascetic body. But there was a time (and here at Ferrara it's a real joy to verify it), when woman body could exhibit its indolent and opulent beauty, to overdo a triumph of happy and exuberant fleshes, unaware of punishing constraints and unreachable paradigms. A time when the body, both male and female, was not the symbolic drive of a Gnostic spiritualism or an efficient dynamism, but the healthy, euphoric, shameless container of an indisputable joie de vivre. Rubens and his school have been by antonomasia the singers of this special baroque sensibility toward the exultation of fleshes, the northern contralto of that ancient and New Testament grand guignol that attended instead about the quick of man, at the south of Alps,- by the means of Caravaggio and his followers- the shadow line, the dark side of death and putrefaction lurked in the folds of the most exhibited and glorious bodies. Even colour, nowadays our designers obstinately castigate even for women after having attempted vainly to impose it to the male world, was at service by these times of an explicit choreography of figure, and when the black, always in ambush in the catholic environments, did no impose its offering of contrition, textures, costumes and the endless changing looks of shapes and textures exalted slyly those rounded limbs replying and multiplying seductive appeal. All that in the south Low Countries where till 1585, year of the reconquest of Antwerp by Alexander Farnese in name of the King of Spain, the Calvinism determined a quite different climate, imposing among others the almost total exclusion of works of art from religious places. In few years the situation changes at all, and risen to power the arkduches Albert and Isabel of Habsburg, the Flemish painters - leaded by Rubens and his school- became in brief the interprets of the court heroic ideals, transmitting its political religious and dynastic message. So art as propaganda, but which is the art really being not? From the theocratic mysticism of the Byzantine art to the man centrality proper of the Rinascimento, from the bourgeois sentimentalism of the nineteenth-century painting to the modern cult of individual, all arts divulge and propagate, more or less consciously , the spirit of its times, and the Flemish baroque is not less. So here there are the religious subjects paged up, at the height of the Counter-Reformation, so to establish the truth of the dogma by involving emotion and wonder. Mythological and genre scenes are plenty of moralizing mention often clashing with the sensual female appeal or with the joking notes of costume. Still life, the same allusive, but of a sumptuous refinement. Parade portraits where the public role of the portrayed often overwhelms the psychological research. Well then the full range cross-section of a proud and aristocratic society, well determined to drive, by the means of the images of the most talented artists, the entire power and idelogic system.    Rubens and his century  Ferrara, Palazzo  dei  Diamanti March 28th- June  27th  1999 - Every day  Opening time 9.00 -  19.00  Ticket L 12000

 

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