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Rubens and the Decorum of
Flesh
Suzanne Walker, Tulane University
If decorum was central to early
modern art theory, its visual
qualities resisted clear definition
in words. The criteria of
appropriateness or decency were
abstract, and threatened to lead to
a hermeneutic circle, in which the
definition of decorum depended on
the individual interpretation of an
event, figure, or action. This led
to incontrovertible but fruitless
assertions that the figures in a
painting should be portrayed in a
manner consistent with their
status. More specific examples of
decorum were not necessarily more
helpful. Writers such as Giovanni
Battista Armenini and Franciscus
Junius tended to concentrate on
transient qualities, such as facial
expression, hand gestures, or
costume. Such recommendations
suggest that the artist is like the
director of a play, with a given
set of actors whom he may costume
and pose as he chooses. But the
artist could not take the figure
for granted, especially in the
context of an aesthetic that was
deeply invested in the
representation of the human body.
The verbal descriptions of art
theory, perhaps inevitably, glossed
over the pictorial problem of
building a properly decorous figure
out of line and color.
Peter Paul Rubens developed an
approach to decorum that treated
its relationship to the body at a
more fundamental level. As a
practicing artist, Rubens was well
aware of the importance of the
torso, the source of bodily force
and motion, to the construction of
the human figure. In Rubens’s
oeuvre, the torso became a central
locus of the characterization of
the figure in the context of
decorum. This paper examines the
decorum of flesh in Rubens’s early
works, concentrating on his images
of the dead Christ. In a series of
Lamentations from the 1610s, the
body of Christ is disjointed and
disproportionate, with narrow
shoulders, twisted midsection, and
slack, paunching belly. Rather than
failures of anatomy, these features
are better understood as embodying
the passivity and absence of
autonomy of the victim’s corpse. By
taking decorum beyond the
relatively superficial elements of
gesture and costume, and extending
it to the actual anatomy of the
figure, Rubens’s paintings generate
a visual discourse of the decorum
of the body. If almost none of
Rubens’s reported writings on art
have survived, his works themselves
provide a model for thinking about
the intertwining of anatomy and
action in the theoretical construct
of decorum.
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