Visual art - Rubens not only had a prodigious skill, but the ability to learn

Once, at the Prado in Madrid, I saw a guide march into a Rubens room and proudly tell his audience: "Here is the master of the chubby women." I laughed, but the idea that Rubens painted nothing but plump, dimpled and amply endowed females will not go away.

That is why the National Gallery's overwhelming new show is so salutary: it proves that Rubens could do anything.

As early as 1601, when he was only 24, this super-confident prodigy executed an enormous painting for the ducal palace in Mantua. His panoramic decoration shows The Council of Gods, and its flamboyant energy suggests that Rubens himself wanted to wield a god-like power. But he never stopped learning during his eight-year stay in Italy, and some formidable drawings of the celebrated classical Laocoon carving demonstrate how keenly he wanted to learn from sculpture, as well as painting.

His application paid off. By 1605, he was capable of producing a colossal canvas of Saint George and the Dragon. The hapless dragon has already been skewered by George's spear, and struggles to yank it out of an enormous, dramatically gaping mouth. But the Saint's upraised sword is poised to slice the monster in half. The only weak element in this formidable work is the rescued princess, who raises one hand in a stagey gesture and, in the other, holds a cute-eyed lamb against her robe.

If violence had become Rubens's forte, so too had sly erotic humour. His first version of The Judgement of Paris, in the late 1590s, had been an awkward affair, disappointingly stiff and oddly disjointed. But eight years later, the result was a feast of sexy satire. While Paris pretends to look dignified and thoughtful, leaning forward gravely to rest his chin on his hand, the three women vying for his attention twist and sway like marionettes. Cherubs dart among them, pulling off the contestants' lingerie like crazy infantile rapists.

When the commission demanded, Rubens could invest his female sitters with cool, sophisticated allure. Asked by a grand Genoese patron to paint the Marchesa Brigida Spinola Doria in the year of her marriage, he created a shimmering vision whose head seems to float effortlessly above her magnificently rendered lace collar. He could easily have become the Mario Testino of his day, and plenty of wealthy clients clamoured for his services.

Rubens, however, wanted to tackle the most challenging themes, as his hero Michelangelo did. Sometimes, in his eager- ness to produce a spectacular image, he delivers melodrama. A large panel called The Brazen Serpent, showing Moses saving victims from a plague of venomous snakes, is riddled with posturing. Stagey to a fault, it shows Rubens failing to control his exuberance with rigour. We become uncomfortably conscious of his need to bombard us into submission.

But such moments are rare. More often than not, Rubens's headlong attack pays off. Take The Massacre of the Innocents, where the butchery of mothers and children takes on an orgiastic frenzy. One woman claws at the cheek of her naked assassin, even as his heroically muscled arms pull her baby away. Another figure, who looks old enough to be a grandmother, tries to push away the sword aimed at her stomach. She cannot hope to prevent it, and the other women are reduced to bewailing the murder of dead infants strewn across the ground. It is an acutely distressing image, just as Rubens wanted it to be.

The most appalling incident in The Massacre of the Innocents occurs on the right, where another sinewy villain lifts a baby high above his head. It looks, at first, like a gesture of triumph, as if the man is powered by an urge to brandish his pudgy, flailing trophy in the air.

Then we understand, with a shock, that the plinth below him is besmirched with the blood of children's corpses heaped around its base. He is about to dash the infant's brains against the plinth, and the mother who raises her protesting hands cannot stop him. The assassin becomes even more macabre when we are made aware, from a nearby drawing, that Rubens based his merciless pose on a Michelangelo drawing of Christ rising from the tomb. Resurrection is turned into obliteration.

Recalled suddenly in 1608 to Antwerp by his mother's fatal illness, Rubens soon managed to produce a tour de force in Samson and Delilah, for the city's burgomaster Nicolaas Rockox. Slumped in the temptress's lap, Samson succumbs to a post-coital doze. Delilah gazes down at her victim while an assistant leans over and carefully snips his thick hair. It should be a moment of unalloyed victory, but the wavering candle-flame held in the darkness above Delilah's head suggests how transient her gratification will be. She rests a hand on Samson's naked back, and a hint of regret can be detected in a gesture at once possessive and tender.

Here, at the age of only 33, Rubens reaches a prodigious maturity and defines himself as an outstanding artist. The National Gallery show does full justice to his early prowess, making us impatient to see how well he managed during the later decades of his long, prolific and ceaselessly inventive career.

"Rubens: a master in the making" is at the National Gallery (020 7747 2885) until 15 January 2006

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