Crime and punishment

The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Wrath of the Gods

In
5 minute read

Coming on the heels of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s big Impressionist show comes a much smaller but intellectually more ambitious exhibit centered around the museum’s holding of Rubens’s Prometheus Bound, provocatively entitled The Wrath of the Gods.

You don’t get anywhere these days by blowing a horn too softly, and the exhibit begins by informing you that “In the 1610s, Peter Paul Rubens created an aesthetic of horror.” Apart from Prometheus Bound itself, painted in 1611-12 by Rubens and his highly capable collaborator, Frans Snyders, the only pictorial evidence offered for this assertion are two versions of the Crucifixion, one a painting and the other an ink sketch. Neither shows a particularly scarifying Jesus, particularly when compared to far grislier Renaissance prototypes.

The painting depicts him, his face admittedly gray with pain, raised against a late-day sky whose subtle tints of cloud and color seem actually to have interested Rubens more than Jesus. Nor is the Prometheus Bound itself, with the relatively serene-looking fire-stealer suffering the torments of his eagle with philosophic calm, particularly disturbing as a rendition of the classic theme.

Rubens was a painter of great vitality and dazzling skill with a seemingly endless curiosity about the facts of life, and among the facts he observed were predation and cruelty. But he did not dwell on them — it was always on to the next thing, the next commission — and though he is the least prudish of painters, the sheer range and candor of his art doesn’t lend itself to any sort of restrictive aesthetic. So, what have we really got here?

Creating humankind

Prometheus may be the most interesting figure of ancient myth. Starting with his dramatization in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, he has stood on the ambiguous margin of what the Greeks called hubris and what his great modern redactor, Shelley, reinterpreted as the eternal quest for freedom. Prometheus steals fire from the gods to assist, and effectively to civilize, humankind; in some versions, he is not merely our benefactor but our actual creator.

His suffering, the result of the gods’ punishment for his transgression, finds its echo in the story of Jesus himself, who like Prometheus is cruelly wounded in the side. Like all great and resonant myths, the story of Prometheus has haunted the Western imagination because of its inherent moral ambiguity. If it is good to help humans, is it proper to do so by defying limitations placed by the gods themselves? Is it wise, ultimately, to place in human hands the source of light and warmth, but also of destruction?

Prometheus thus truly creates humankind, because his gift enables humanity to aspire beyond its “natural” limits — it makes human ambition possible. It was this circumstance, I suspect, that particularly attracted Rubens, who was certainly no stranger to ambition himself.

Back to Laocoön

The exhibit, once it gets down to cases, traces the lineage of Rubens’s image of the great hero to ancient depictions of captivity and stress, going as far back as the famous Greco-Roman statue of the Laocoön, a 19th-century cast that is part of the current show. The Laocoön group shows a father and his children in the toils of giant snakes that are strangling them; the father, as the central figure, writhes and struggles in his doomed effort to escape.

The image indicates how natural forces entangle and drag us down; the father’s straining limbs signify the heroic resistance to fate. At the other end of this spectrum, human aspiration — our desire to defy all bonds and penetrate the highest spheres of consciousness and being — meets its inevitable repulse, and sends us hurtling downward. What both situations offer, however, is the heroic display of the male body, muscles tensed, limbs outthrust, agony expressively suffered.

Beyond limits

For Rubens and his Renaissance precursors, this tragic heroism defined the extremities of the human condition. Man [sic: editor] challenging higher powers, or struggling against grosser forces that dragged him down, most fully displayed himself: the body, articulated in striving, was in pictorial terms the human apotheosis. Rubens’s Prometheus is a figure falling downward, almost through the very picture plane, but this fall is as admirable as it is terrible, for it is the result of a man’s attempt to rise beyond the limits set for him.

Snyders himself essayed a large Prometheus of his own in 1640, the year of Rubens’s death, and it makes an effective contrast. His Prometheus is an older man, tumbling headlong with an expression of agony, his fall witnessed by an enigmatically smiling Mercury. It’s in some ways a more interesting picture, scarcely less accomplished pictorially, and the moral seems more sober: Those who would crash heaven’s gates have far to fall indeed.

The knavish Tityos

Michelangelo, 'Punishment of Tityus,' c. 1532
Michelangelo, 'Punishment of Tityus,' c. 1532

A mighty influence on Rubens (and everybody else) was Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, but though Philadelphia has snagged Pope Francis, the Sistine Chapel doesn’t travel. Instead, Michelangelo is represented by a small sketch, not of Prometheus but of a cognate figure, Tityos, who was hurled to Tartarus with an eagle affixed to his liver — not, alas, for heroism but for rape. This figure inspired a magnificent painting by Titian that, borrowed from the Prado, is the third outsized canvas in the show. Like the versions of Prometheus by Rubens and Snyders, Titian’s Tityos is plunged downward but, unlike them, he signifies only just punishment. The gash in his side is huge, and the eagle that plucks at his liver is not heroically emblematic but a busy predator who is all the more terrifying for simply bending to its work. Some trespasses will have no upside.

The show focuses on work Rubens actually saw on his wide travels, but it also includes Carlo Cesio’s Hercules Liberating Prometheus, a work that, dating from the 1650s, suggests the transformation of Prometheus into a modern culture hero, which climaxed with Shelley. A comic-book version of Prometheus “today” commissioned for the show looks silly beside masterworks — credit PMA Director Timothy Rub for this bit of dumbing-down — and a droning video is merely distracting. That’s modern merchandising, folks. But ignoring the gimmicks (and the hyped-up title), this modest show suggestively treats deeply important human themes.

What, When, Where

The Wrath of the Gods: Masterpieces by Rubens, Michelangelo, and Titian. Through December 6, 2015 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia. 215-763-8100 or philamuseum.org.

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