the _Descent from the Cross_ owes the extreme favour that it
enjoys. For those indeed who would like Rubens to be somewhat as he is,
but very much also as they imagine him, there is here a seriousness in
youth, a frank and studious flower of maturity which is about to
disappear and which is unique.

I need not describe the composition. You could not mention a more
popular composition as a work of art or as an example of religious
style. There is nobody who has not in his mind the ordering and the
effect of the picture, its great central light cast against a dark
background, its grandiose masses, its distinct and massive divisions. We
know that Rubens got the first idea of it from Italy, and that he made
no attempt to conceal the loan. The scene is powerful and grave. It acts
on one from afar, it stands out strikingly upon a wall: it is serious
and enforces seriousness. When we remember the carnage with which the
work of Rubens is crimsoned, the massacres, the executioners torturing,
martyring, and making their victims howl, we recognize that here we have
a noble _execution_. Everything in it is restrained, concise, and
laconic, as in a page of Holy Writ.

There are neither gesticulations, cries, horrors, nor too many tears.
The Virgin hardly breaks into a single sob, and the intense suffering of
the drama is expressed by scarce a gesture of inconsolable motherhood, a
tearful face, or red eyes. The Christ is one of the most elegant figures
that Rubens ever imagined for the painting of a God. It possesses some
peculiar extended, pliant, and almost tapering grace, that gives it
every natural delicacy and all the distinction of a beautiful academic
study. It is subtly proportioned and in perfect taste: the drawing does
not fall far short of the sentiment.

You have not forgotten the effect of that large and slightly hip-shot
body, with its small, thin, and fine head slightly fallen to one side,
so livid and so perfectly limpid in its pallor, neither shrivelled nor
drawn, and from which all suffering has disappeared, as it descends
with so much beatitude to rest for a moment among the strange beauties
of the death of the just! Recollect how heavily it hangs and how
precious it is to support, in what a lifeless attitude it glides along
the sudarium, with what agonized affection it is received by the
outstretched hands and arms of the women. Is there anything more
touching? One of his feet, livid and pierced, encounters at