ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one of Peter Paul Rubens's best-known versions of the monumental, robust male nude: the so-called Kneeling Man, c. 1609. The Boijmans drawing depicts a lone adult male nude endowed with substantial musculature, kneeling and bending to lift a presumably heavy object, viewed obliquely from the rear. In many ways, the prominent kneeling robust man of the Boijmans sheet and the Madrid Adoration held the promise, in visual form, of this seminal historical moment when Antwerp was thought to hold the potential to regain its recently diminished status as Europe's chief economic, intellectual, and artistic powerhouse. Rubens's relatively fluid, bold approach to style in the Boijmans drawing similarly suggests that he valued artifice and classical rhetorical persuasion over direct transcription. Unlike the overall evenhandedness characterizing Dutch ad vivum nudes, the manner of the Boijmans sheet appears more freely and emphatically wrought, and at moments, even stylistically contradictory.
