Michael Prodger at The New Statesman:
Peter Paul Rubens, known in his lifetime as “the prince of painters and the painter of princes”, is not, perhaps, a figure sympathetic to the modern age. He was by all accounts a charming man with graceful manners who could speak Latin, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, French and German; he was knighted by both Philip IV of Spain and Charles I of England; and employed as a diplomat and spy as well as a painter; he was a man as comfortable in Europe’s courts as in his studio. As such, he is just a tad too smooth when contemporary tastes run to artists with a bit of grit in the oyster.
What is more, as the pre-eminent painter of Catholicism he has never been embraced on these shores, and nor has the drama and movement of the baroque style, with which he was inextricably tied and of which he was the greatest exponent. Meanwhile, his supposed attitude towards women – their fleshy amplitude characterised as “Rubensian” – is not just out of favour but frowned on.
more here.