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Rubens's the prodigal son: A reassessment

The Counter Reformation emphasis upon the salvific value of penitence helped to make the parable of the Prodigal Son one of the most popular subjects in seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art. It is in keeping with the individualistic spirit of Rubens's painting that his treatment of the parable differed substantially from established compositional and iconographie types. This is not to say, however, that Rubens's The Prodigal Son (Fig. 1), painted during the same period as some of his largest and most energetically Baroque canvasses (c. 1618), represents the approach we might expect him to have taken to a theme so laden with dramatic and emotive potential. Rather, we are confronted with an image which Jacob Burckhardt called 'a whole of the strangest kind', a conflation of genres among which the religious subject must compete for prominence with elements of other popular Netherlandish themes, such as animal, landscape, rustic and still-life painting. Since none of these genres appears obviously dominant, a collective uncertainty has arisen among scholars concerning the categorization of the painting, along with a consequent tendency to deal superficially with the question of interpreta-