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Rubens travelled to Spain on a diplomatic mission in 1603, delivering gifts from the Gonzagas to the court of Philip III. [22] While there, he studied the extensive collections of Raphael and Titian that had been collected by Philip II. [23]
- Overview
- Education and early career
- Return to Antwerp
Peter Paul Rubens is famous for his inventive and dynamic paintings of religious and mythological subjects, though he also painted portraits and landscapes. He is regarded as one of the greatest painters of the 17th-century Baroque period.
Who influenced Peter Paul Rubens?
Peter Paul Rubens was taught by Tobias Verhaecht and Otto van Veen. On a trip to Italy in 1600, he learned from paintings by Titian, Tintoretto, and Paolo Veronese in Venice. When he arrived in Rome the next year, he was influenced by the Baroque paintings of Annibale Carraci and Caravaggio.
Peter Paul Rubens (born June 28, 1577, Siegen, Nassau, Westphalia [Germany]—died May 30, 1640, Antwerp, Spanish Netherlands [now in Belgium]) Flemish painter who was the greatest exponent of Baroque painting’s dynamism, vitality, and sensuous exuberance. Though his masterpieces include portraits and landscapes, Rubens is perhaps best known for his religious and mythological compositions. As the impresario of vast decorative programs, he presided over the most famous painter’s studio in Europe. His powers of invention were matched by extraordinary energy and versatility.
Rubens was born in the German town of Siegen, in Westphalia. His father, Jan Rubens, a lawyer and alderman of Antwerp, had fled the Spanish Netherlands (present-day Belgium) in 1568 with his wife, Maria Pypelinckx, and four children to escape religious persecution for his Calvinist beliefs. After Jan’s death in 1587, the family returned to Antwerp, where young Peter Paul, raised in his mother’s Roman Catholic faith, received a Classical education. His artistic training began in 1591 with his apprenticeship to Tobias Verhaecht, a kinsman and landscape painter of modest talent. A year later he moved on to the studio of Adam van Noort, where he remained for four years until being apprenticed to Antwerp’s leading artist, Otto van Veen, dean of the painters’ guild of St. Luke. Van Veen imbued Rubens with a lively sense of painting as a lofty humanistic profession.
Most of Rubens’s youthful works have disappeared or remain unidentified. The Portrait of a Young Man (1597) is his earliest dated work. In 1598 Rubens was admitted into the painters’ guild in Antwerp. He probably continued to work in van Veen’s studio before setting off on a sojourn in Italy in May 1600. In Venice he absorbed the luminosity and dramatic expressiveness of the Renaissance masterpieces of Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. Hired by Vincenzo I Gonzaga, duke of Mantua, Rubens proceeded to Mantua, where his chief duties were to make copies of Renaissance paintings, mainly portraits of court beauties. In October 1600 Rubens accompanied the duke to Florence to attend the marriage-by-proxy of Gonzaga’s sister-in-law Marie de Médicis to King Henry IV of France, a scene Rubens was to re-create a quarter-century later for the queen. By the end of the first year he had traveled throughout Italy, sketchbook in hand. The copies he made of Renaissance paintings offer a rich survey of the achievements of 16th-century Italian art.
In August 1601 Rubens arrived in Rome. There the new Baroque style heralded by Annibale Carracci and Caravaggio—a bold naturalism coupled with a revival of the heroically idealized forms of Michelangelo and Raphael—was quickly assimilated by Rubens. His first major Roman commission was for three large paintings (1601–02) for the crypt chapel of St. Helena in the Basilica of Santa Croce. In 1603 Gonzaga sent him on his first diplomatic assignment to Spain to present a shipment of paintings to King Philip III. For Philip’s prime minister, the duke of Lerma, Rubens painted his first major equestrian portrait (1603), which took the Venetian tradition of Titian and Tintoretto a giant step forward in the conveyance of physical power and psychological confrontation.
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Toward the end of 1605 Rubens made his second trip to Rome. With his brother Philip he undertook an intensive study of ancient art and philology and began to amass a sizable collection of Roman sculpture, reliefs, portrait busts, and ancient coins. In 1606 he received his crowning commission in Rome: the painting over the high altar of the Chiesa Nuova (Church of Santa Maria in Vallicella), whose precious icon Rubens enshrined in an apotheosis borne aloft by a host of putti—a quintessentially Baroque conceit that was later adapted in sculpture by Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
In October 1608, having received news that his mother was gravely ill, Rubens rushed home to Antwerp—but too late. Yet despite his personal loss, his arrival was otherwise timely. His brother Philip had been appointed secretary of Antwerp. More important, negotiations for the Twelve Years’ Truce (1609–21) were being concluded between the Dutch separatists and Spain, which raised the prospects of peace and economic recovery for war-torn Flanders. Rubens was commissioned to paint for the Antwerp Town Hall a celebratory Adoration of the Magi (1609), which quickly established his fame at home. Though he still yearned for Italy, the Spanish Habsburg regents of Flanders, Archduke Albert and Archduchess Isabella, made him an offer too good to refuse. As their new court painter, Rubens was exempted from all taxes, guild restrictions, and official duties in Brussels. He could remain in Antwerp and organize his own studio. In October 1609 Rubens married the 19-year-old Isabella Brant, and he celebrated their happy union in his Rubens und Isabella Brant in der Geißblattlaube (1609/10; “Rubens and Isabella Brant in the Honeysuckle Arbor”). In 1610 Rubens bought a magnificent townhouse to which he annexed a palatial studio, Classical portico, and garden pavilion—an Italian villa transplanted to Antwerp.
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The Twelve Years’ Truce prompted a major refurbishing of Flemish churches. The first of Rubens’s two great Antwerp triptychs, The Elevation of the Cross (1609–10), combined Italianate reflections of Tintoretto and Caravaggio with Flemish realism in a heroic affirmation of redemptive suffering. His second triptych for Antwerp’s cathedral, Descent from the Cross (1611–14), is more Classical and restrained in keeping with its subject. This work reflected Rubens’s vigorous renewal of the early Netherlandish tradition of Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling, and Rogier van der Weyden. Its widespread fame was ensured by the publication of an engraving; among its future admirers was the young Rembrandt.
The decade from 1610 to 1620 witnessed an enormous production of altarpieces for Roman Catholic churches—powerful, emotive images of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the saints—as Rubens became the chief artistic proponent of Counter-Reformation spirituality in northern Europe. Among his more important religious compositions from this period are The Last Judgment (c. 1616) and Christ on the Cross (also called Le Coup de Lance, 1620). Yet during this same decade Rubens also produced many paintings on secular themes—mythological, historical, and allegorical subjects, hunting scenes, and portraits. Among the finest of his mythological paintings is the Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (c. 1617–18), while Jagd auf Nilpferd und Krokodil (“Hunt for Hippopotamus and Crocodile”; c. 1616) typifies his vision of wild animal hunts.
Rubens was able to maintain this tremendous output owing to his large studio of assistants, apprentices, collaborators, and engravers. A major painting would often begin as a modello—i.e., an oil sketch painted by Rubens on a small panel, after which he would make preparatory drawings of individual figures within the composition. The execution of the full-scale work would often be entrusted to assistants, though Rubens would usually paint key areas and thoroughly retouch the finished painting. Many of Rubens’s paintings were then reproduced in engravings, thereby guaranteeing the wide dissemination of his compositions throughout Europe.
- Charles Scribner
Rubens was called upon to negotiate in France and England on behalf of Isabella as the representative of the Spanish Netherlands. Because painters often had reason to travel to foreign courts, he was well placed to carry out secret or delicate visits without his presence arousing suspicion.
A Landscape with a Shepherd and his Flock- A Lion Hunt
- A Roman Triumph
- A Shepherd with his Flock in a Woody Landscape
- A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning
- A Wagon fording a Stream
- Aurora abducting Cephalus
- Oil Sketch for High Altarpiece, St Bavo, Ghent
- Portrait of Ludovicus Nonnius
- Samson and Delilah
- The Apotheosis of the Duke of Buckingham
- The Birth of Venus
- The Brazen Serpent
- The Miraculous Draught of Fishes
The first regards the narrative content of the painting cycle, which includes 63 mythological scenes designed by Rubens and executed by him and his associates. Following the arrival of these paintings in Spain in 1638-39, Velázquez supervised their installation and contributed 11 paintings of his own.
Rubens traveled to Spain on a diplomatic mission in 1603, delivering gifts from the Gonzagas to the court of Philip III. While there, he viewed the extensive collections of Raphael and Titian that had been collected by Philip II.
Rubens was born on June 28, 1577 in Siegen, in the German province of Westfalia, where his Cavinist Flemish family had fled to escape religious persecution in Antwerp. In 1578, they moved to Cologne, where the artist lived until his definitive return to Antwerp in 1589.
In addition to running a large workshop in Antwerp that produced paintings popular with nobility and art collectors throughout Europe, Rubens was a classically educated humanist scholar and diplomat who was knighted by both Philip IV of Spain and Charles I of England.
