It is an unprecedented perspective, one that goes beyond the traditional canons of art history, that Michele Raja, neurologist and psychiatrist, casts on the Baroque Master, Peter Paul Rubens.

Not just a celebration of forms and colors: the Flemish painter, known for the lush sensuality of female bodies, is reinterpreted in the light of psychoanalysis as a complex investigation into the human condition.

The catalog of his paintings, compiled by Michael Jaffé in 1989, lists 1403 originals, excluding copies made in his workshop.

This impressive work, divided into two volumes each of about 500 pages, presents and analyzes 540 Rubensian masterpieces. The structure of the work is designed to guide the reader through a progressive exploration of the pictorial material: the first volume focuses on the act of looking and the emotional impact of the images, while the second addresses the darker side, analyzing the body as a place of tension where the gaze transforms into a question about our own identity and continues to be an experience for the viewer.

Through the thoughts of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, the Author demonstrates how, beyond the initial aesthetic impact, the sumptuous figures inhabiting the canvas speak directly to our unconscious, becoming the stage where desires, impulses, and conflicts intertwine.

Rubensian carnality expresses a universal psychological truth that emerges powerfully in all the artist's creations.

In The Origin of the Milky Way, the splash of milk generated by the abrupt contact between the infant Hercules and Juno's breast becomes the perfect visual representation of Freudian drive. Rubens does not paint a maternal idyll, but an energetic clash. The goddess's body is not a passive object, but a source of pure energy that transcends the boundaries of anatomy to become the Cosmos.

Meanwhile, the naked body of “Susanna and the Elders” offers itself to the tragic dialectic of the gaze in Lacan's sense, understood as the object that captures, exposes, and tears the subject. The elders do not just look: their desire becomes invasive, transforming Susanna's intimacy into a psychic battlefield. The luminous body of the woman, caught in the attempt to defend herself, shows the vulnerability of the subject in the face of the invasion of the Other's desire.

With engaging writing, Michele Raja demonstrates that painting is not (just) ornament, but an experience of truth, and the great painting of the past is by no means a closed chapter, but a mirror reflecting the fragilities of our contemporaneity.

Preface by Luciana La Stella.

Paola Stefanucci