Samson, a huge muscular hunk of a man, slumbers in the lap of his seducer Delilah, in a bedchamber sumptuously lit by candle. As Delilah looks down on the unconscious form of the great biblical hero, her accomplice is cutting the very tangled locks that hold his superhuman strength. Meanwhile, at the door, soldiers are waiting by torchlight. At the heart of it all is Samson’s rippled naked back, nestled on the woman’s pink silk skirts.
Is this a painting by the Flemish baroque master Peter Paul Rubens? Hell, yes. The wonder is that anyone would ever think otherwise. And yet some do. Michael Daley and his campaigning group ArtWatch UK, and the art historian Euphrosyne Doxiadis (among others), are getting traction with their claims that the National Gallery owns a “fake” or “modern copy” and is covering up that reality.
They appear to be talking about a different painting from the one I know. In an UnHerd article about her long struggle to disprove this painting’s attribution to Rubens, Doxiadis reveals that, from the moment she first beheld it at the National Gallery in the 1980s, she rejected it – and still does – as “a shoddy artefact, lacking the brilliance of my favourite European painter”.
We’ve all got our own tastes, but I cannot recognise this description. Shoddy artefact? Samson and Delilah currently hangs in a gallery of other Rubens masterpieces and easily takes its place there – it commands the room, draws you in, and it repays detailed, repeated looking. I looked at it again only last week, as I have been looking at it for years, always finding new nuances.
This lovely painting, however, has been confusing people since the National Gallery bought it in 1980 because it doesn’t look like the cliche of a Rubens. Where are the swirly draperies, fiery skies and flouncy paintwork? But it doesn’t look typical of him for a good reason: it is his passionate attempt to paint like someone else.
When Rubens painted Samson and Delilah in 1609-10, he had recently returned to his home in Antwerp, Belgium, after an eight-year working holiday in Italy. While this was typical of north European artists in the dying years of the Renaissance, he stayed longer than most, studying the dead greats such as Leonardo, Michelangelo and Titian but also becoming obsessed with one living artist – Caravaggio, whose works were prominent in Rome and Florence.
They never met because Caravaggio went on the run after killing a man in 1606, but unknown to him, he had an eloquent champion in Rubens. After Caravaggio’s shockingly real, even godless painting The Death of the Virgin was rejected by a church in Rome, Rubens persuaded the Duke of Mantua to buy it and when his collection was sold to Charles I this radical Caravaggio came to Britain – before ending up in France after Charles was beheaded. Rubens also clearly copied Caravaggio’s Medusa into his own works, more than once, including on Athena’s shield in the National Gallery’s Judgement of Paris.
But Samson and Delilah is Rubens’s most extravagant homage to Caravaggio, a painting in which he tries to fully understand this outlaw artist’s lighting, sensual shocks, and even his creamy yet exact brushing, which means a much smoother, more consistent surface than you get with later, more expressive and “painterly” Rubens canvases. The soldiers at the door, the old woman with the candle, the hair-cutting – though Caravaggio preferred to sever the whole head – are gloriously Caravaggio-like.
The way that Rubens lingers on every shadowed furrow of that exposed male back is very like Caravaggio, too. It also resembles Rubens’s powerfully erotic drawings of male nudes – including his enthusiastic portrayals of classical statuary. Yet only Rubens could have painted both this lavishly sexualised male body and, just inches away, dote on Delilah’s breasts with that strip of linen setting off their fleshiness. This is more than voyeurism. Delilah is one of many powerful women who appear in Rubens paintings – so frequently, indeed, that it’s another clue to his authorship.
Even when he’s imitating Caravaggio, Rubens can’t help being himself. The light is his, the candle glow is buttery and warm, like a pancake in an Antwerp kitchen. That mixture of southern sensuality and northern homeliness is another Rubens trait.
The quirkiness of this painting that gets some people’s goat – its cocktail of Caravaggio-ism and Rubens’s own carnal abandon – is actually a clue to its authenticity. What copyist would have been so subtle as to recreate this moment when Rubens takes on Caravaggio – especially in the earlier 20th century when Caravaggio was not rated as he is today? The window for such a faking is improbably narrow – between the 1950s when Caravaggio started to be rediscovered and 1980 when this was bought by the National Gallery.
I’ve criticised the National Gallery plenty but it does not engage in cover-ups. In 2010, it put on an exhibition owning up to “fakes” in its collection. That information is also on labels in its rehang: for example, the label for Giorgione’s The Sunset reveals that Saint George and the dragon are a modern addition. It is not confessing anything about the Rubens because there’s nothing to confess.
Is Samson and Delilah a “shoddy artefact” that a 20th-century copyist could have slapped together? No, it is a superb, seductive masterpiece about the power of desire, in which Rubens assimilates the vision of Caravaggio while remaining utterly himself.
