Notes on Rubens' "Prometheus Bound" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Pt. 1
Rubens’ Prometheus, which hangs at the Philadelphia Museum
of Art, operates from 2014 on a number of different levels which would not
necessarily have been operative in 2004, 1994, etc. The subjective overlay I
impose upon the painting— what myself and my cohorts initiated from (as it
were) Philadelphia (and Chicago and London) in the Aughts— a monstrous push
behind major high art consonance, against the confounding tides of contrived,
instrumentally formed and manipulated post-modern mediocrity— is difficult to
transcend or even elide, standing in different spaces in the PMA European Art
room where this piece is prominently featured. This surfeit of subjective
awareness develops for me into a kind of pleasing pain, or a redemptive ache.
Most serious onlookers would note— reproductions of this are
not going to hang in anyone’s living room, or in a doctor’s office. Despite its
heroic grandeur, this Rubens also has a hinge to both ugliness and awkwardness.
The composition, though even, and the semi-absurd head over heels posture in
which Rubens freezes Prometheus, make a bold statement that, to enlarge a
Keatsian Romantic conception, the beauty in this rendering of Prometheus and
his core narrative myth is in the truthful representation of his agony.
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