On the other hand, with what ease he moves among these formulae, with what freedom he makes use of them, with what tact he disguises or confesses them, according as he takes pleasure in revealing the well-informed man or the novice.  However, whatever he may do, we feel the Romanist who has just spent some years on classic ground, who has just arrived and has not yet changed his atmosphere.  There is some unknown quality remaining with him that reveals travel, such as a foreign odour about his clothes.  It is certainly to this fine Italian scent that 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?