Rubens and body image

We had an intriguing discussion on Friday night about Rubens and body image. It was at the Royal Academy in conjunction with the "Rubens and his Legacy" show.The point was to confront the basic, common idea of the "Rubenesque"...or, to go down a notch or two, the idea that Rubens is all about fat women. I mean, there are plenty of fat men in the Rubens repertoire, and plenty of people who are not fat at all, and plenty of clothed bodies and religious bodies... so how do we approach them?

Our panel on Friday consisted in me (as chair, probably talking too much), with in alphabetical order Germaine Greer, Grayson Perry, and Tom Shakespeare. Both Grayson and Tom expressed some antipathy to Rubens as a kick off, but where did we go from there?

Well the truth is that for quite a lot of the time we rater skirted the body issue. Take the painting above, of the Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus by Castor and Pollux, which was not in the RA show (although a sketch for it was). Interestingly, both panel and audience tended to focus on everything but the rape.

Germaine wanted to talk about this as abduction, not rape (I worry about that distinction). One audience comment pointed us to the horses. I still felt that the central part of the painting was -- like it or not -- rape.

Tom was concerned to focus on the Beauty and the Beast theme, which actually worked rather well. He focussed in on the Rubens  painting just above, of Maria Grimaldi with (her?) dwarf. I thought this was an extraordinary image -- partly because of the conceit about a dwarf being as big as the woman (what do we imagine he was standing on?)  Predictably Tom packed a punch on this (he is a dwarf.. and has a pretty inalienable right to speak on the subject). But he took it on to the wider theme in Rubens of swarthy blokes, often animaline in some form, in sexual conflict/congress with a very white woman.

This seems to me to pick up classical themes (satyr vs nymph) but to go way beyond. As does this body image of  female satyrs in the corner of another Rubens canvas.

I wonder what people make of the those figures at bottom right. This seems to me to be putting two fingers up at classical iconography??