Dramatic, Violent and Bold: A Hallmark of Sir Peter Paul Rubens

This painting is almost hard to look at. A picture that's vibrant, violent, extremely bloody and was certainly intended to be shocking. It's absolutely the epitome of Rubens on the cusp of ceasing to be an Italian painter and about to become a Flemish painter. One of the absolute highlights of the New York sale this January has got to be Rubens's wonderfully violent, shocking depiction of the beheading of St John the Baptist and here with me to discuss it is George Gordon. George. Andrew, good to see you. Yes, this is an extraordinary picture which I've known for a long time and always admired since it appeared many years ago. This is a salvation, this painting, of his Italian career. By this stage he'd been in Italy for seven or eight years but it was painted back in Antwerp. It's on a Flemish oak panel. His career had blossomed in Italy. He had absorbed everything he saw, endless drawings he made, buildings, classical sculpture, etc. etc. and of course he looked at the old masters such as Tintoretto, Titian and he certainly looked at artists who were near contemporary such as Caravaggio and Alzheimer who was a personal friend. And this picture was painted almost as soon as he got off the boat and it's almost as if he's compressing so many of his Italian memories into one picture. There's a lot of sculpture in the composition and there's also surely an awful lot of admiration for Caravaggio who was the great sensation in Rome when Rubens was there. I think it's unimaginable without Caravaggio the direct violence of it. We see the dead body of Saint John on the ground, the executioner is sheathing his sword in the fasces. The head of Saint John is on a platter being admired by Salome. Saint John the Baptist had reproved Herodias, Salome's mother, for living with her brother-in-law. That's why she'd asked for the head on the plate. So Herodias is saying your tongue that was what insulted me. I've now got you by the tongue. And also that the figures in the painting exemplify different aspects of life or death. So the beautiful woman witnessing with satisfaction the death of this man. The horrible old woman Herodias who I'm sure is taken from the Caravaggio figure of the crown in Judith and Holofernes. And then the horrified maid who's looking at this scene and thinking goodness are you really doing that pulling at his tongue. You could make it into a into a play. Rubens like so many great artists moved backwards and forwards within his own career. He picked up motifs and ideas from earlier on and reworked them. The figure of Salome is very similar same model as the princess in Saint George and the Dragon which is painted in Rome just a couple of years earlier. There's a great deal of self-awareness in Rubens more I think than in almost any other painter certainly of his own age. What Rubens did when he came back from Italy was to transform history painting in the Netherlands completely. I mean nothing was ever the same after his return and I suppose the huge success that he had instantly pretty much upon his return I mean within months and certainly within a year and a half is probably the reason why he never went back to Italy. The patronage that he received when he got to the Low Countries was so great that he could never go back to Italy. They made him an offer he couldn't refuse. I think so yes. There's huge power in it in each brush stroke. It's an unhesitating painting which is a characteristic of his great onrush of energy that we see when he got back to Antwerp. It's a startling, exciting, extraordinary painting. Thank you very much George. It's been a pleasure.