On a whim today, after exploring the storybook cuteness of Brussel’s Grand Place (various winding cobblestone side streets, delightfully whimsical facades, etc.), I happened by the Royal Museums of the Beaux-Arts.

I was thinking more about eating lunch at the Museum Cafe than anything else, but I was drawn in by the Rubens Room. It is huge, the walls are almost oxblood red, and the paintings are truly magnificent.

Normally, I don’t go in much for religious focused art, but in this case, I was truly touched by the artistry of this Master. [I must say that the whole idea of artistic "Mastery" seems offensive to me in so many ways, but here, I must say, Rubens demonstrates a facility with his brush that can only be described as great ease--it is this that makes him seem a "Master" to me--a master of himself, say, rather than of some abstract ideal of the medium].

The “Pieta with St. Francis” is particularly affecting. At first, I was mainly interested in the girl wearing a lovely lavender silk dress (yes, I was looking at the fashion!) kneeling at Christ’s feet. She has apparently pulled the curved, dagger-like nails from his feet and is holding them like she might stab them into her own chest out of grief. The more I looked at this the more I became engaged with this figure–and she is the only one at eye level, so it makes sense that she brings you into the painting, she makes you want to understand the scene in this specific circumstance–rather than just the general myth of Christ being crucified.

Christ, despite having hung on the cross, looks solid and earthy. The Belgian artists of this period generally made their figures solid, almost monumental, but Rubens does it with a breathy kind of looseness that I find invigorating and simply, as I said above, “masterful.”

Years after Western Civ class, to finally see these pieces in person is quite–well, touching.

In another room I stumbled on to David’s “A Marat.” I’d always loved this painting in reproduction because of the vast empty space above Marat’s dead body in the bath. The simple planes seem to foreshadow those of more modern works that would be influenced by the treatment of space in Japanese block prints.

Seeing David’s work in person was enlightening because I’d never known before that he’d painted Marat as though his dead flesh barely contained a kind of light seeping through him, as though he was already transforming into a being of light and fire. More than Christ in Rubens’ painting, Marat looks like his body is barely containing the ineffable.

~Wei Ming Dariotis