As everyone who studies and loves the art of Rubens knows, the essential challenge posed by his work is a tension between the colorful, dynamic sensuality of his figures and the abstract concepts they often represent. Lisa Rosenthal’s ambitious, beautifully wrought study reveals that this tension is not only Rubens’s deliberate project but an especially fruitful one. In a felicitously tight structure, Rosenthal concentrates on just five paintings: four political and mythological works and a family self-portrait. She offers bold yet extraordinarily subtle and sympathetic readings of the pictures and other related images, marshaling semiotics, feminist, and psychoanalytic approaches in her account of an artist whose work she sees as too complex to be encompassed by traditional iconographic study. Like Rubens’s five paintings, which she chooses for their engagement with the themes of war and peace, her discussion is dominated by concepts of gender. The paintings she has chosen are especially fraught with the ideals and anxieties of masculinity. For Rubens, the genders are associated with conflicting ideas: manhood is linked with nobility and reason, statehood and fatherhood, as well as violence and war. Femininity signifies peace, pleasure, and fecundity, but also threats to manhood. The works in question feature...