PETER PAUL RUBENS
1577-1640
85 Anatomical Studies
Pen and brown ink; H: 28 cm (n in.); W: 18.7 cm (7^3 /s
in.)
88.GA.86
MARKS AND INSCRIPTIONS! None.
PROVENANCE: Sir Roger Newdegate; by descent (sale,
Christie's, London, July 6, 1987, lot 61); art market,
London.
EXHIBITIONS: An Exhibition of Old Master Drawings,
Richard Day, Ltd., New York and London, November-
December 1987, no. 23.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: M. JafFé, "Rubens's Anatomy Book,"
in sale catalogue, Christie's, London, July 6, 1987, pp.
58-6i;J. GarffandE. de la Fuente Pedersen, Rubens Can-
toor: The Drawings of Willem Panneels (Copenhagen,
1988), vol. i, pp. 79-80; D. Jaffé, Rubens' Self-Portrait in
Focus, exh. cat. (Australian National Gallery, Canberra,
1988), p. 31; D. Bodart, "Abbozzo di ritratto," in Pietro
Paolo Rubens (1577-1640), exh. cat. (Palazzo della Ra-
gione, Padua, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, and So-
cietà per le Belle Arti ed Esposizione Permanente, Milan,
1990), pp. 16, 18.AMONG THE MOST IMPORTANT RECENT ADDITIONS TO
Rubens's oeuvre is a group of eleven anatomical draw-
ings.^1 Executed in a luminous light brown ink, the pres-
ent drawing is one of six in the group (lots 57-62) por-
traying full or partial views of heroically muscular
acorches in motion. The principal figure demonstrates the
musculature of the back, buttocks, and legs. It is depicted
from a vantage point at the bottom right, with subsidiary
views of the same figure and a detail of the left arm por-
trayed from the top left. The web of diagonals and or-
thogonals created by the figures and enhanced by their
lunging poses evidences a complex and dynamic grasp of
the human form in three dimensions.
JafTe (1987, p. 58), who first attributed the newly
discovered anatomical drawings to Rubens,^2 argued that
the artist made them and several other surviving écorchés
in preparation for a projected instructional book on anat-
omy that he was unable to publish.^3 Copies of a number
of these anatomical drawings, probably by his assistant,
Willem Panneels, form part of the so-called Cantoor
group of drawings preserved in Copenhagen (Statens
Museum for Kunst, Den Koneglige Kobberstik-
samling). These include a copy of the right-hand figure
on the present sheet (Box vi, 44). After Rubens's death,
Paulus Pontius reproduced the Museum's and several of
the other anatomical studies as part of an album of en-
gravings after the master's drawings.^4 The print after the
Museum's drawing, which is in reverse, follows it in
most details. Jaffa's suggestion (ibid.) that Rubens orig-
inally made the drawing with an engraving in mind is
corroborated by its linear technique and the calculated in-
terrelation of the forms on the page.
Taken as a whole, this drawing encapsulates the in-
tensive and synthesizing study of the human form which
Rubens undertook during his Italian sojourn. Calling to
mind his study of the Laocoon as well as of antique sculp-
tural combatants of the type represented by the Borghese
Warrior (Louvre), it also evidences a grasp of the body's
muscular structure, which presupposes a study of An-
drea Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica (1543). This is
notable particularly in the truncation of the main figure's
right arm to suggest antique sculpture, continuing a con-
vention begun in the Vesalian illustrations.^5 Above all,RUBENS • FLEMISH SCHOOL 2O3