Peter Paul Rubens, The Union of England and Scotland, 1633-4, Oil on gessoed wood (oak) panel. via

The Royal Academy has tried to rescue Rubens from the Rubenesque. There are enough paintings in the show to satisfy those seriously attached to his amply built, callipygous nudes, but the main thrust of the exhibition is to show how very diverse Rubens’s work was and how much it influenced later artists. What is also striking is how the various European nations picked up on, admired, and copied quite different aspects of Rubens’s work. The English loved his landscapes and his full-length portraits, the Spaniards were drawn to his magnificent baroque altarpieces, and the French liked his frivolous and amorous social gatherings. The rulers of both Britain and France employed Rubens to paint elaborate triumphal ceilings, celebrating their own deeds and those of their ancestors.

Rubens was, in addition to being a painter, a well-traveled diplomat and an astute businessman. His travels and his networking brought him foreign commissions, and he was keen to have prints made from his work that could be widely disseminated. Hence his Europe–wide fame, though his sheer genius would have ensured that anyway. Rubens the businessman merely gave it a boost.

It was Rubens’s religious paintings whose popularity traveled the furthest, for Catholic Spanish missionaries used them in their work converting the native peoples of the lands that the Spaniards had conquered in Latin America and in the Far East. Rubens’s images