A RARE RUBENS BY RUBENS

WHATEVER pleasures there had been in being a Renaissance man, the Flemish artist, Peter Paul Rubens, took them. Every afternoon he rode his Spanish thoroughbreds. He ate richly enough to die of gout, fathered eight children, dabbled sufficiently in diplomacy to be knighted by the King of England, and as a 53-year-old widower married a 16-year-old beauty. His love of life was so consuming that it was amazing that he had any time left in which to paint.

Actually, few of the 2,000-odd paintings that are recognized Rubenses were totally done by his hand. He ran a well-organized factory with pupils and assistants who blocked out figures and filled in landscapes based on his sketches. Then Rubens would overpaint here and there, lending his master touch.

Now on display at Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery is its new acquisition, a rare Rubens (above), which Expert Jakob Rosenberg, senior research fellow at the National Gallery, calls "practically the only case where the artist himself has declared this picture to be completely by his own hand."

The Daniel in the Lions' Den is an early Rubens, dating near 1610. It was a popular Biblical subject for Flemish artists. But other representations were pallid compared to Rubens', who, according to Rosenberg, "gets to the heart of it, the drama and significance of the story." Other artists' lions were "only little toys, poodles," by comparison. In keeping with the Renaissance adoration of man, Daniel is more hero than saint.

Executed when Rubens was still in his early 30s, the Daniel reflects the influence of Italy, where he had studied for eight years. But Rubens added his own naturalism. In part, this comes from Rubens' good fortune in having live models close at hand to study. There were no zoos in Italy, but Antwerp, where Rubens lived, boasted one, and there he was able to sketch lions in their coiled-spring power. And it is within the painting's faithfulness to nature that the miracle becomes more believable. Remains of their former meals lie scattered in the foreground. Amidst their curling manes and rippling bodies, Daniel is impaled by a shaft of light that slashes into the den. The sheer force of the composition points directly at the baroque style then in its flowering.

In 1618, Rubens sold the 7-ft. by 10-ft. oil to the British Ambassador to The Hague for 600 florins. A surviving letter, signed by the artist, describes the work as "Daniel amidst many lions, which are taken from the life. Original, the whole by my hand." Rubens is often dismissed as a rote fabricator of effulgent flesh, of plump nudes and pillared panoramas of bestial warriors. His Daniel is, otherwise, dramatic proof of the baroque at its turbulent best.

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