One of my favorite paintings in the Louvre is Rubens’s “Flemish Kermis [or] Village Wedding” (1635-8). Roughly 5 feet tall and 9 feet across, the painting has an intimacy and intricacy seemingly at odds with its grand scale. An idyllic landscape worthy of Bruegel, for its naturalism, and Claude, for its sense of the pastoral, “Village Wedding” bursts with close to 100 peasant figures – from infantile to elderly – drinking, dancing, sleeping, singing, feasting, fighting, and fondling one another. Encyclopedic in scope, as full of life as a novel by Dickens or Tolstoy, the painting explores the full range of human nature.

“Village Wedding” is Rubens at his best. The painting is made up of dizzying, loopedy-loop forms and spinning figures that spiral ever outward, then boomerang back in. Starting small – say, at an infant suckling his mother’s breast – we unfurl through the painting, moving from curve to curve through belly, hip, jug, couple, group, grove, distant hill, and back again until – coming full circle – we arrive at an open mouth, full with drink or song, the arc of a dog’s tail, or a couple kissing, dancing, or groping. We move from infancy and nursemaid to drunkenness, marriage, slumber, and old age all within a single whirl.

A drawing study for “Village Wedding” (“Seventeen Studies of Dancing Peasants for a Kermis,”ca.1630-6) is one of the more than 100 drawings in the stupendous show that opens this afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The beautiful pen, chalk, and ink drawing is rough, a jumble of overlapping and variously scaled dancers stacked in rows across the page, leaning inward and backward against one another.

The 17 dancing couples that twist together – hand in hand, spinning, kissing, and caressing – show Rubens as inventor and storyteller. In some of the figures, he stresses clasped hands; in others, clasped mouths; in others still, their contorted union, their shared, central contour, or their rhythmic turn and bounce. Each couple, cinematically redrawn, feels isolated as a study; their movements and turns, however, the various line weights and pressures of Rubens’s pen, appear to interact, inspire, and respond to one another. It seems as if the figures were sharing the page – or the floor.

The Met’s retrospective, the first ever devoted to Rubens as draftsman, is an astonishing show of an astonishing master. “Seventeen Studies of Dancing Peasants,” like many of the drawings in it, is not “finished” by any means. Nor is it the best work on view. But when an artist of Rubens’s caliber puts brush or pen to paper, his innate understanding of rhythm, proportion, and torsion, of the relation of curve to curve to curve (and Rubens loved the curve) is at such a high level that the drawing pulsates and the figures laterally flow through the space with a grace reminiscent of the movement across a Poussin, a Greek vase, or the Parthenon frieze.

The Flemish Rubens (1577-1640) was one of the most prolific and influential artists of the 17th century. He worked in, and revolutionized, all genres: from large-scale altarpieces, history cycles, mural, tapestry, and ceiling decoration to portraits, landscapes, and hunting scenes. A scholar, collector, dealer, and diplomat, Rubens was fluent in five languages and sought after by ecclesiastical leaders, dukes, princes, kings, and queens.

His Antwerp workshop produced more than 2,000 commissions, some staggeringly large, such as the 21-work cycle “Life of Marie de Medicis” (1622-5), which now occupies a block-long gallery in the Louvre. Most of the paintings that came out of Rubens’s studio were worked on by assistants under Rubens’s supervision, but the master designed and finished the paintings. The assistants might have begun the figures, flora, and fauna; Rubens brought them to life.

The drawings, on the other hand, he executed himself. He made them for a variety of purposes: for reference, as studies, designs, and preparatory drawings, or as samples to be shown to clients before the actual paintings were begun. They were never ends in themselves, but Rubens so valued his drawings that he locked them up when he was away so that competitors could not see them.

He also made copies from other artists’ works, which was – and continues to be – an essential practice in an artist’s education. The exhibition at the Met begins with a few copies – some early, some late – after artists such as Michelangelo and Titian. Rubens knew what he wanted, and he took what he needed. We can feel him gathering his forces as he comes into his own.

“The Libyan Sibyl” and “God the Father Surrounded by Angels” (both 1601-2), copied from the Sistine Ceiling, demonstrate his mastery of Mannerism, which he would soon unfurl and set free. They also show his ability to combine torsion, grace, weight, and weightlessness within a single figure. His “Copy after the ‘Belvedere Torso'” (1601-2) gave him sculptural solidity, as did his many drawings after antique models. His later “Studies of Women” (1628), after

Titian, a sheet of a nude and several heads, in red, black, and white chalk, shows the kinship between the two painters: It shows us the Rubens Rubens himself discovered in Titian, just as (later) Renoir would discover “Renoir” in Rubens – that quivering contour, Venetian light, and magically glowing flesh the three artists share.

Titian said that a great painter needs only three colors: red, black, and white. Rubens, like Titian, could do miracles with that limited palette, and it is demonstrated over and over again in this show. It is not the colors but how they are handled, and Rubens’s touch – at times fearless, potent, sweeping, and uninhibited, roiling like an angry sea; at others wispy, soft, and whispered on, applied like blush – is about as far-ranging as can be imagined. Rubens had as many modes as necessary. He could be lyric, romantic, and epic all within a single drawing.

It is with his details that Rubens does the unbelievable. Eyes are moist and filled with longing; or they are oddly large and questioning. His portrait heads of children, though tender, are never sappy or condescending; they always convey complete personalities. Hair in Rubens can be demure or as wild as wrestling serpents. His lions and lionesses have almost human faces, and their oversized heads loom dangerously forward on the page.

Rubens can make a figure taut as a pulled bow, as in “Crouching Man Seen from the Back” (c. 1610), a study for a figure in his “The Raising of the Cross”; he can apply touches of red and white chalk to a woman’s face, as in a number of portrait studies for saints, to give them a shimmering, rosy heat that appears to rise from within and dance through and across their skin. In two studies of “Nicolas Trigault in Chinese Costume” (both 1617) and “Korean Man” (1617), Rubens seems as deft as Ingres or Raphael, giving cloth a crisp, silken rustle and flicker.

Some of the greatest drawings on view are heavily worked and reworked mixed-media images that combine elements of chalk, pen, ink, gouache, watercolor, or wash. They often glow with a silvery blue light, which feels as if it were being stirred into turbulent, swelling volumes. “Hercules and Minerva Fighting Mars” (c. 1632-5) is windswept, fresh, and grand; it appears to be rushing past. The swirling compositional study “Assumption of the Virgin” (1612-5), in which the Virgin ascends on rolling clouds, accompanied by numerous putti, is glorious, as is the fully realized “Assumption of the Virgin” (c. 1624), in which the Virgin’s tomb has seemingly collapsed in on itself, springing her upward to the waiting hands of God the Father. The amazing “Garden of Love (left half)” and “Garden of Love (right half)” (both c. 1633-5) are French in feel and based on Rubens’s painting by the same title.

Rubens only got better as he got older. In the last two galleries we see masterpieces such as “Study of a Seated Woman, Turned to the Right” (c. 1633-5). The drawing, of a nude edged in red and black chalk with white highlights, is barely suggested between her contours. Yet she is as full and “Rubensesque” as any of his women. In “Venus Admonishing the Fettered Cupid” (c. 1633-5), Cupid’s tied hands flutter like butterfly wings.

I have only one real complaint about this otherwise spectacular show: wall color. Half the galleries are painted blue or green, which is not that troublesome. The other half are either a deep red or a mushroom gray. The gray washes out the cream-colored paper, and the red, a cool maroon, clashes horribly with the warm, red chalk used by Rubens in many of his drawings. The works in this show are themselves so astonishing that any attempt to accent or accessorize only distracts. Rubens’s work requires neutral surroundings: Only then can we feel the full impact of his pen, chalk, and brush.

Until April 3 (1000 Fifth Avenue, at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).