Rubens and the bird of paradise. Painting natural knowledge in the early seventeenth century (original) (raw)
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Focusing on the period of Rubens’s most intensive involvement in diplomacy, between the spring and winter of 1629, this essay examines how the artist’s experience as a diplomatic emissary affected the evolution of his most celebrated works: the ‘Allegory or Peace and War’, now in the National Gallery, London. It identifies aspects of this work’s iconography that have previously gone unnoticed — particularly in the artist's use of colour — or which have been misconstrued; and it suggests that there was also a profoundly important literary dimension to the way in which Rubens expected this iconography to be ‘read’. With great specificity and directness, Rubens used painting as a source of diplomatic counsel in the highly factionalised court politics of the day. Finally, the essay suggests that the painter’s use of this classically-derived iconographic schema, rich in literary allusion, was intimately linked to his own self-assertion as a ‘pictor doctus’: an embodiment of the Renaissance ideal of the artist whose combination of skill and learning (‘ars et ingenium’) qualified him for gentle or even aristocratic rank.
Rubens’s encounter with natural philosophy and the ‘occult sciences’ in 17th century Italy
Rubens e la cultura italiana nella prima metà del XVII secolo, eds. C. Paolini and R. Morselli, 2020
Although Rubens's erudition and speculative ability have been largely acknowledged by his contemporaries as well as his first biographers, only a limited number of publications on selected aspects of Rubens's mind have been published. 1 Most of the existing literature on the artist has focused on the Rubens's reception of the antique and Renaissance painting, on studio practices (mainly on copying and attribution), on his painting technique and on the artist as a collector. While this line of research has been -and still is -highly valuable for the general reconstruction of his oeuvre, the scant quantity of scholarly contributions on Rubens's intellectual output represents a lack in the scholarship on the artist. Furthermore, these contributions have concentrated on specific areas of Rubens's encyclopedic mind, without harmonizing them with the rest of his thinking. They did not rely on a solid scholarly tradition, since interest in this field has started only in the beginning of our century, as a consequence of a renewed interest in the artist's Theo e ical no ebook. The latter consists in a booklet or, in Michael Ja é's words, a «vade mecum» in which the Flemish master registered and developed art theoretical insights based on hermetic and esoteric traditions. 2
A Counter-Reformation in Painting: Religious Artworks of Peter Paul Rubens in Antwerp
Often, across the landscape of art history, such assertions spring up with little root in qualifying support. 2 With Rubens and other 16 th and 17 th century Roman Catholic 3 painters, there seems a tradition of assuming without second guess, without nuance, their full artistic support of the "Counter-Reformation." Contrawise, recent historians beckon for reevaluation or abandonment of such "monolithic" categories, suggesting alternative descriptors like "Early Modern Catholic." 4 While heeding this plea for reassessment, my study ironically reveals confirmation of the traditional concept: Rubens, Counter-Reformation artist.
Ignis artificiosus. Images of God and the Universe in Rubens's Depiction of Antique Shields
Rubens’s intellectual pursuits are not new to art historians. Much ink has been flowed to illustrate how much and in which way both the classical heritage and Lipsius’s Neostoic thought influenced his artistic production. This article aligns with this scholarly tradition, by concentrating on a peculiar motif depicted by Rubens on antique shields between 1616 and 1618, and by showing how ancient ekphrasis and Lipsius’s natural philosophy, imbued with Platonic and Hermetic ideas, played a fundamental role in Rubens’s invention of this original and powerful image. The latter represents the embodiment of the laws of nature and God, bringing to mind the theological and philosophical discussions circulating among intellectuals at the beginning of the seventeenth-century.
On Painting the Unfathomable: Rubens and The Banquet of Tereus
The Primacy of the Image in Northern Art 1400-1700: Essays in Honor of Larry Silver, 2017
The Primacy of the Image in Northern Art 1400-1700: Essays in Honor of Larry Silver is an anthology of 42 essays written by distinguished scholars on current research and methodology in the art history of Northern Europe of the late medieval and early modern periods. Written in tribute to Larry Silver, Farquhar Professor of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, the topics are inspired by Professor Silver's renowned scholarship in these areas: Early Netherlandish Painting and Prints; Sixteenth-Century Netherlandish Painting; Manuscripts, Patrons, and Printed Books; Durer and the Power of Pictures; Prints and Printmaking; and Seventeenth-Century Painting. Studies of specific artists include Hans Memling, Albrecht Durer, Hans Baldung Grien, Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel, Hendrick Goltzius, and Rembrandt.
Early Modern Art: Visual Culture and Ideology, 1400-1700
Anchor Academic Publishing, 2016
The text considers the evolution of art theory reflected in major stylistic shifts as it developed over the course of the Renaissance and Baroque eras considering the wider connections and parallels between art theory, poetic theory, natural philosophy, and related epistemological matrices. Investigating the interdisciplinary reality of framing art-making and interpretation, this intellectual historical approach draws heavily from previously untranslated French and Italian texts. Rejecting the dominant synchronic approach to history and historiography, the treatment seeks to present anew a narrative that ties together various formal approaches, focusing intently on stylistic transformation in particular artist’s oeuvres – Michelangelo, Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni, and others- and the contemporary environments that facilitated them. Through the dual understanding of the art-theoretical concept of the Idea, an evolution will be revealed that illustrates the embittered battles over style and the overarching intellectual shifts in the period between art production and conceptualization based on Aristotelian and Platonic notions of creativity, beauty and the goal of art as an exercise in encapsulating the “divine” truth of nature.
Rubens and the "Smell of Stone": The Translation of the Antique and the Emulation of Michelangelo
Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, 2013
This paper focuses on a series of drawings that Peter Paul Rubens executed in Rome after the Belvedere Torso, the Laocoön, and Michelangelo’s Sibyls and Prophets from the Sistine Ceiling. I argue that these drawings are fundamentally connected to Rubens’s theoretical essay on artistic imitation, 'De Imitatione Statuarum', which he wrote shortly after his time in Rome. Indeed, I argue that the drawings in question are theoretical in nature. They give pictorial form to Rubens’s assessments of ancient and early modern culture, to his activities as a humanist reader, and to his own sense of his place in history. In short, the drawings express the same ideas in graphic form that Rubens later expressed in the humanist Latin.