Visual Art: A little Rubens goes a long way

Here's a landscape, painted on wood, on loan from the Louvre. Made in the 1630s, at the same time as Claude's first Arcadian visions, it seems to share that artist's fascination with bucolic classicism - Rome with sheep. The picture's not by Claude, though. The sky alone - a blazing freehand sunset that looks more like Turner - tells you that. So does the beautiful (but impossible) disposition of light, a luminosity that has nothing to do with nature and everything to do with invention.

Genre painting more your thing? Well, here's a cowshed, borrowed from Antwerp this time and framed into a series of smaller pictures by its subject's uprights and crossbars: cows in full profile, horses in profile perdu, pigs foreshortened arse-end on. For all its countrified ooh-arr- ness, it's a fantastically subtle work, the beasts' animation forming a tight counterpoint to the stasis of the architecture; pictorial staves and crotchets in harmony. And here, by the same hand as both the above, is a drawing that could have been a study for either: a pen and wash sketch whose assured brilliance - mark and meaning reduced to single, strong strokes - belies the ordinariness of its subject, a path between fields.

And who are all these works by? Rubens. Yes, he of the Banqueting House ceiling, the knighthood, the diplomatic missions; the painter of Ceres and Venus, of Pero suckling her father at the breast and Juno squirting a galaxy from hers; the 20-square-metre man, the ultimate Grand Mannerist; the court painter extraordinaire. And if you're surprised that these unassuming, unenormous paths and cows are by Rubens, then you're meant to be. An exhibition at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Lille includes all these works and many more: cartoons, tapestries, portraits, oil sketches, drawings. Its aim is to show that Rubens is a broader artist than we popularly imagine, but also that he is something else: a more modern artist, more accessible to our post-romantic sensibility; more likeable.

It's an ambitious project, because the later Rubens - the one we think of as the Rubens - is inescapably hard to like. I wish I could write this review without using the word "fat", but I'm afraid it's unavoidable. In an age where wealth is signalled by restraint - in which rich women are whippet-thin while their Walmart-shopping sisters sway like whales - Rubens' dimpled Venuses and lactating Junos seem repellent.

Fat is not a feminist issue in these pictures. Rubens's goddesses aren't big because they have the freedom to be, but the opposite: because the artist has made them so. Just as 17th-century women wore clothes that showed off their marital wealth while leaving them hobbled, so Rubens's women wear their bigness as a sign of powerlessness. It's not that their size is - or can ever have been - erotic. Their fat is a metaphor for the money of the princes who paid him.

And there's more. One of the famous fault-lines in painting is between southern and northern handling of flesh. The former, supposedly born of Italian warmth, is concerned with an inner world of blood and muscle, the latter - the product of Netherlandish winter days - is primarily about surface: the play of light on porcelain, glass or female skin. It's a line that divides late Titian from late Rubens, that makes the former easy to love and the latter hard to. Rubens's women aren't women at all, but commodities: inflated objects that give the artist a handily large surface on which to show his virtuosity.

The Lille exhibition sets out to show that this wasn't always so; to remind us of the day when Rubens's brilliance wasn't about bigness. This was the man whom Goethe, of all austere critics, loved best: Rubens's landscapes, he said, were "higher than nature". The artist we see at the start of this show can paint not just landscapes and genre scenes of unsurpassed brilliance, but women: Rubens's portraits of his wife are among the most complicit, the most humane, ever made.

Moving on to a vitrine full of oil sketches, we see that this brilliance survived in those intimate moments - increasingly rare, as his studio churned out allegories for crowned heads - when Rubens set his own hand to paper. And then, seamlessly, we're among the Junos and Ceres, the Venus frigidas; and we're meant to see that these, too, are humane. But they aren't. This exhibition is valuable in reminding us that there was once a young Rubens; but I doubt very much that it will make you love the old one.

c.darwent@independent.co.uk

`Rubens', Palais des Beaux Arts, Lille (00 33 3 20 06 78 00), to 14 June

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