RUBENS AND HIS LEGACY: VAN DYCK TO CEZANNE

Although he gave us the term, there was nothing ‘Rubenesque’ about Sir Peter Paul Rubens. Tall, slender, a court charmer, this prolific painter rose at 4am, worked all day and then headed off for a rigorous horse ride to keep the fleshy bits in check. But it is fleshy bits, of course, that we love him for. Particularly those on the allegorical altarpieces that made his name. Rubens loved Big. The bigger, the better.

From the age of 23, Rubens spent eight years in Italy absorbing the Renaissance masterpieces of Michelangelo and Titian and morphing them into a more fluid, arresting style. His capacity to deliver vast scenestoppers, coupled with his polished diplomacy skills (he was a classically trained scholar), served him well, and he was knighted by both Philip IV , king of Spain, and our own Charles I. In 1636, he undertook a commission for the Banqueting House ceiling – it is now the only surviving in-situ work. The paintings are also the last pleasant images that Charles I saw before he was executed on a scaffold directly outside a decade later.

The Royal Academy’s latest blockbuster pays homage to Rubens’s enduring influence on other artists through the centuries, and the line-up is both obvious and impressive. Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Turner, Manet, Watteau and Delacroix; you get a lot of first-class pictures for your entrance fee. What you don’t get is wall-to-wall Rubens – partly because they are too big to move or are now permanently installed in other museums.

The Marie de Medici series is now a gem at the Louvre, and although there are some exquisite studies, the real thing is only visible via a short film projected on a screen. That said, there are still some corkers. The exhibition is themed, focusing on poetry, portraiture, religion, violence and lust, with a satisfying scattering of huge canvases featuring brave men and even braver lions and boars with the odd sea monster thrown in. His was a prodigious output, one that wouldn’t have been possible without a team of studio assistants.

In addition to the main attraction, Jenny Saville RA has orchestrated an exhibition of works by 20th- and 21st-century artists similarly influenced, herself included. Picasso, de Kooning, Cy Twombly and a Lucian Freud sit alongside Sarah Lucas’s 1992 assemblage Two Eggs And A Kebab, an abstract comment on the female form. Two decades on, it still amuses and provokes. One incensed visitor told me, ‘People pay good money for that stuff.’ It wasn’t clear whether she meant the artwork or the kebab.

Until 10 April, Royal Academy, London W1: 020-7300 8000, www.royalacademy.org.uk