ART REVIEW : ‘The Age of Rubens’: Following the Leader : Exhibit at Museum of Fine Arts is the first American attempt at full survey of Flemish Baroque painting.

Today, Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) looks like history’s greatest propaganda painter. Charged with making a dramatic, convincing case for the Counter-Reformation in support of the 17th-Century Catholic Church--and, not so incidentally, in support of the aristocracy with which the church was in league--Rubens was happily possessed of inventive, alluring skills as a maker of operatic, over-the-top spectacle. The guy knew how to push around paint.

There has never been a true survey of Rubens’ astonishing art in the United States, and with good reason: Even if a site large enough to accommodate such a grand event could be found, the immense canvases that paper the walls of Madrid’s Prado Museum, Munich’s Alte Pinakothek, Paris’ Louvre Museum and other palatial European repositories are so large as to be next to impossible to move. In all his wide-ranging diversity, Rubens is one of those artists destined to remain known only through bits and pieces--unusually big bits and pieces--via peripatetic travels over time.

Which is not to say certain of the artist’s most salient qualities cannot be grasped in more modestly scaled endeavors. “The Age of Rubens,” which is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts here before traveling to Ohio’s Toledo Museum of Art in February, is not exclusively devoted to Rubens’ amazingly prolific career. Instead, it is notable as the first American exhibition ever to attempt a full survey of Flemish Baroque painting.

However, even though other worthy artists and admirable specific works are included in the show, any survey of the period will rise or fall on the strength of Rubens’ representation in the galleries. The museum’s curator of European painting, Peter C. Sutton, has managed a reasonably impressive selection.

A strong group of 20 of Rubens’ canvases has been assembled, including the Prado’s celebrated “Garden of Love” and Toledo’s own radiantly airy “Crowning of St. Catherine,” which may be the best painting by the artist in an American collection. His abundant work in portraiture, mythology and history painting is attended to, sometimes superbly.

The breathtaking “Portrait of Michiel Ophovius,” for example, lent by the Mauritshuis in The Hague, reduces all the fire and fury of Counter-Reformation oratory into the invincible gaze of a single, bulky, calmly posed, potentially flammable Dominican monk. As the grave Ophovius’ hand reaches out for yours, pushing into tangible space in Rubens’ patently magical way, your first impulse is to flee--if only you dared look away.

There are also a dozen of the small oil sketches so essential to Rubens’ elaborate practice. The large, carefully organized studio he developed to handle the demanding flood of commissions that came his way is, of course, well known. His oil sketches, prepared to guide the painting crews with whom he worked, often convey a spirited liveliness.

The exhibition makes the important point that, as inheritors of a 19th-Century Romantic faith in the power of individual talent, we have trouble coming to terms with this kind of artistic collaboration. (The “Portrait of Michiel Ophovius” was likely done with the aid of an apprentice.) Think of Rubens as a kind of domineering director, with teams of fellow artists turning out cinematic dramas.

Certain pupils and studio assistants are also generously represented in the show, especially Anthony van Dyck (1599--1641) and Jacob Jordaens (1593--1678), who went on to important careers of their own. (Van Dyck, who was the subject of a widely admired survey exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum in 1990, is nowhere more movingly represented than in a tiny oil sketch of the infant Princess Anne cradled by the young Princess Elizabeth.) To oversimplify, Van Dyck elaborated on Rubens’ precedents in aristocratic subjects, while Jordaens honed in on his moralizing tendencies.

And thus the splintering begins, in a time and place that saw the rise of astonishing specialization in artistic styles and subjects. Amply represented in the show is the proliferation of Flemish history painting, portraiture, genre painting, architectural painting, landscape and seascape, still life (including such sub-categories as florals and wedding banquets), animal painting, hunt scenes and, finally, gallery paintings--which, as depictions of collectors and their collections, are paintings of paintings. Some 40 artists are represented.

As a result, “The Age of Rubens” is a rather odd exhibition. Rubens completely dominated the Baroque era in Northern Europe, much the way Bernini did in the South. He rightly dominates the show. Yet, as a survey of Baroque painting in Flanders, what we see in the galleries is a sort of snapshot-in-time. Unusual things get juxtaposed.

It’s disconcerting to encounter a presentation that begins with the publicly scaled acreage of Rubens--painter, diplomat, international bon vivant and confidant of kings--and ends with a small, privately focused, exquisitely painted still life of a pie by Clara Peeters, about whom next to nothing is known. You may leave the Boston museum’s galleries scratching your head.

In fact, that peculiar disjunction may be one of this show’s more notable assets. We lazily slip into thinking of art’s history as a chain of great moments, linking genius to genius, when in fact it’s a messy stew of disparate stuff--some wonderful, some tedious--from which occasional episodes of staggering brilliance emerge, episodes that reverberate against subsequent art in a host of unexpected ways. “The Age of Rubens” lays it all out.

Of course, nothing can obscure the larger paradox of Rubens himself. It’s easy to admire his lusciously bravura art, with all its astonishing inventiveness. He could paint the sensuous stuff of the world like nobody’s business--satin, fur, marble, atmosphere and, most of all, flesh and blood--and he could manipulate pictorial space to uncanny effect, inventing eye-popping labyrinths of figures and whirlwinds of flashing light. But, it’s awfully hard to really love the stuff.

The exhausting pyrotechnics can finally get in the way. Like the end of a dazzling display of fireworks, the light fades quickly. You’re left with pleasant memories of an exciting time, which are interrupted by the pungent smell of drifting smoke.

* Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Ave., Boston, (617-267-9300), through Jan. 2, 1994. Closed Mondays.