Review: Joseph Connors: Art, Music and Spectacle in the Age of Rubens: The Pompa Introitus Ferdinand (original) (raw)
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Caa.reviews, 2019
The Early Rubens exhibition organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) is surely a visual feast to behold. With works drawn from a dizzying oeuvre that, given its prodigiousness and complexity, demands serious distilling, the exhibition succeeds in tackling key aspects of the monumental artistic output of Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) during his early mature period in a strikingly condensed and accessible manner. Surely, this is no small feat; for to paraphrase the erudite Rubens, one of the artist's greatest ambitions was to provide future historians, and apparently future audiences too, with an overwhelming wealth of material to consider.
2021
Travels with Rubens’ Last Judgement
2010
This paper focuses on three practical issues which are of major relevance for large format paintings: handling, transportation and presentation. Peter Paul Rubens’ Last Judgement is an excellent example with respect to the implications of large size and heavy weight. Wherever this painting has been in its c.400-year history, the difficulties with its handling and transportation have caused damage. Indeed, projected locations for presentation had to be changed. Taking Neuburg as an example, numerous newly discussed documentary sources such as travel or annual reports illustrate these processes. For the first time, the work’s historical presentation at the Neuburg Jesuit court church is discussed by means of a photomontage. The paper exemplifies that careful study of documentary sources in the actual historic and topographic context will add valuable information to conventional art-technological studies. Moreover, it recalls the painting’s other, often neglected, history of its life b...
Renaissance Quarterly, 2019
an art historical publication operating within the constraints of a particular interdisciplinary series. From the title of the book, Rubens is the star of the show-the one who was able to realize the order's ambitions over time for one of their new saints. How this actually plays out is a different matter. It takes until chapter 4 for the artist truly to arrive on the stage. While Noyes endeavors to signpost what lies ahead in relation to what was previously covered, the intense examination of the three preparatory chapters, especially the running and productive threads of prints and imprinting which necessarily brings in multiple actors (clergy, curia, patrons, artists, publishers, objects, spaces, etc.), dominate the reader's purview. Noyes is countering previous approaches by not deploying Rubens too early, but this stalling has its own consequences. The book marshals an impressive range of sources and theories, which will be of interest to specialists of the Oratorians and Counter-Reformation visual culture. Noyes treads her way carefully through the substantial scholarship in all its permutations, and as a result is extremely generous in her acknowledgements and citations. Her repositions and challenges to received wisdom are valuable, and there is no doubt that this case study of propaganda and censorship is worth a close eye.