The Daily Telegraph - Features
Sex, violence – and a whole lot of creepycrawlies
Bruegel to Rubens: Great Flemish Drawings Ashmolean Museum, Oxford ★★★★★
“This,” says the label accompanying a 16th-century sheet in a new show at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, “is an incredibly erotic scene.” How so? “A group of half-naked and ecstatic women and girls sacrifice an ass and collect its blood in a container.” Oh.
There’s plenty of sex and violence depicted in this entertaining exhibition of 16thand 17th-century drawings from the Low Countries. A brutish torturer plucks out a martyr’s teeth with pliers; sour-faced women gossip intently, and you can readily imagine their prying tittle-tattle: “Have you heard about so-and-so’s affair?” Neptune gropes a virgin’s breast, and Peter Paul Rubens retouches another artist’s drawing of a nude woman encircled by a snake, so that her physique appears ampler, squidgier. He certainly had a type.
Apart from the explication of that scene of “ecstatic” revellers, the interpretation mostly avoids dwelling on such scabrous, blood-curdling material.
Instead, the focus is the “function” of these 120 drawings “in artistic practice at the time”. But doesn’t that dread phrase, “artistic practice”, drain away the fun?
We learn about the training of 16th- and 17th-century artists from the Southern Netherlands, about their techniques, and commissions. But such a diligent approach doesn’t really capture the lively, curious artistic spirit everywhere on display: the timeless, irresistible impulse that compelled, say, an anonymous 16th-century artist to depict a glistening earthworm (one of several creepy-crawlies on show).
The line-up here, though, is dominated by an out-and-out star: Rubens. There is an astonishing copy of a print made when he was just 13. Elsewhere, his stunning charcoal-and-chalk study of a nude male torso, for a prominent, pumped figure in The Raising of the Cross (1610-11), prompts a moment of uncharacteristic conjecture in the label: “Perhaps the body belonged to one of the burly men working in the Antwerp harbour.” At least such speculation resonates with the vigour of what we see.
From tomorrow; ashmolean.org