Too Much Flesh

These days, nobody takes Rubens seriously. His vast and grandiose canvases, stuffed with wobbly mounds of female flesh, have little appeal for the modern gym-subscriber. And it's not just the bulging nudity we don't like. The entire tone of Rubens's art offends us. Everything in it is too big - the epic dramas full of tragedy, the fantastical celestial scenery, the immense canvases and murals adorning the walls and ceilings of Europe's grandest palaces. All of it seems too much for modern sensibilities. But Waldemar Januszczak begs to differ.

Shortly after my father died the phone started ringing. My father was Hugh Everett III. When he was 24 he wrote a ground-breaking thesis about physics most commonly known as "the many worlds theory". It challenged the accepted notion of how the world works in such a huge way, stating that there were actually countless versions of ourselves splitting off and going through as many different scenarios as you could imagine, and the physics powers that be (Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr) were having none of this.