Rubens' works are very many, nearly four thousand pictures and sketches being attributed to him and his scholars. Many are still at Antwerp, many at Madrid, but most are at Munich, where, in one great saloon and cabinet, there are ninety-five pictures by Rubens. In England, at Blenheim, there are fifteen pictures by Rubens, as the great Duchess of Marlborough would give any price for his works. I can only indicate a very few examples in the different branches of art which he made his own.
First, of his 'Descent from the Cross:' it is a single large group, distinguished by luminous colouring and correct drawing, and with regard to which the mass of white sheet against which the body of Christ is in relief in the picture, has been regarded as a bold artistic venture. An enthusiastic admirer has called it 'a most wonderful monument of the daring genius of the painter. The grandest picture in the world for composition, drawing, and colouring.' Its defects are held to be 'the bustle of the incidents and the dreadfully true delineation of merely physical agony--too terrible, real, picturesque, but not sublime--- an earthly tragedy, not a divine mystery.'
'Remit the anguish of that lighted stare; Close those wan lips! let that thorn-wounded brow Stream not with blood.'
There is a tradition that an accident happened to the picture while Rubens was painting it, and that Van Dyck remedied the accident by re-painting the cheek and chin of the Virgin and the arm of the Magdalene.
With regard to another picture of Rubens at Antwerp, 'The Assumption of the Virgin,' it is said that he painted it in sixteen days, for sixteen hundred florins, his usual terms being a hundred florins a-day.
'The Virgin and Serpent' (from the 12th chapter of Revelation) in the Munich gallery is very splendid. The Virgin with the new-born Saviour in her arms is mounting on the wings of an eagle, surrounded by a flood of light. The serpent, encircling the moon on which she stands, is writhing beneath her feet. God the Father is extending his protecting sceptre over her from above. The archangel, clothed in armour, is in fearful combat with the seven-headed dragon, which is endeavouring to devour the child. Although struck by lightning, the dragon is striving to twist his tail round the legs of the angel, and seizes the cloak of the Virgin with one of his hands. Other infernal monsters are writhing with impotent rage, and falling with the dragon into the abyss.'