On The Origin of the Milky Way by Peter Paul Rubens: Astronomy, Astrology and Mythology in Early Modern Europe*

Painted in the final decade of his life, Rubens’s autograph work The Origin of the Milky Way defies interpretation. The artist was a contemporary of Galileo though attempts to evidence a meeting have so far failed. He had already painted a series of night skies and had many recent books on astronomy/astrology, as well as ancient texts, in his library. This is a painting full of plausible stellar bodies none of which quite fits into a recognised constellation. Nor does the image accurately accord with any mythological narrative. So, is the Milky Way here simply a pretext to depict Juno as Queen of the heavens? I propose that Rubens was a learned eclectic for whom Aristotelian views of the cosmos could meld both with contemporary earth-centred arguments about a providential universe and with new Copernican theories. Uniting his interest in pictorial space with newfound possibilities for understanding the cosmos, Rubens draws on the ancient Roman concept of sparsio, or abundance, with which he would have been familiar through his friendship with Hugo Grotius. Executed a few years after the fifty-three-year-old artist had married his fecund second wife, then aged sixteen, The Origin of the Milky Way constitutes a witty and profound meditation on female generosity within a framework of universal laws.

Matter as an Artist: Rubens’s Myths of Spontaneous Generation

Three works by Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) entail mythologized scenes of spontaneous generation, or the creation of species from nature’s raw matter: Head of Medusa (ca. 1613–1618), The Discovery of Erichthonius (ca. 1616), and the oil sketch Deucalion and Pyrrha (ca. 1636). In these works Rubens naturalizes the life of painting within its materials, implying matter—paint, with its pigments and mediating liquids—as an intrinsic, animating quality of his images and even as a counterpart to or collaborator with the artist. This essay explores these ideas to show how Rubens’s technical and artisanal understanding of painting and its materials could have informed his interpretation of ancient myths.

Li Pittori Parlano con l’Opere: Visualizing Poetry in Practice in Early Modern Italian Art

The relative sophistication of artists in the early modern era is contested, especially with regards to their educational backgrounds. On one hand, Dempsey-esque intellectual history is vested in touting the structured, literary curricula in art-educational institutions; while on the other, a complete rejection of the “artist-philosopher” as historical fiction seeks to undermine this hegemonic construct. This study argues that the lack of early formal education in the cases of artist like Annibale Carracci and Nicolas Poussin, who, unlike Peter Paul Rubens, did not have a firm foundation in the classics and languages that would allow them to engage directly with source material, would later be supplemented through their relationships with literary figures in the circles of Torquato Tasso, Giambattista Marino, and the Accademia dei Gelati. In addition to such relationships, informal exchanges, gatherings, and supplemental materials like Giovanni Paolo Gallucci’s Della Simmetria could be called upon when treating poetic subjects. With intimate knowledge of vernacular poetry, literati themselves participating in lectures and studio visits, and, finally, quick reference guides for subject matter, these artists were able to produce works that spoke to both poetic and artistic theory of the day, as one naturally informed the other.

Locus genii

Over the course of the early modern period, genius was transformed in criticism from a commonplace of ‘inclination’ into a powerful tool of aesthetic classification, signalling heightened creativity in a person or work of art. This chapter argues that genius as a concept emerges with particular strength in the writings of the Roger de Piles, specifically in his accounts of Peter Paul Rubens. Investigating the language, conceptual, and formal properties that de Piles associates with esprit and génie, it concludes that in his hands early modern ‘ingenuity’ was transformed into ‘genius’.

The Conversion of Saint Paul Series at the Courtauld: Rubens's Artistic Process Revealed by New Technical Discoveries

The Courtauld Gallery has three works by Peter Paul Rubens depicting the Conversion of Saint Paul, all dated to ca. 1610–1612: a compositional drawing, an oil sketch, and a finished painting. The serendipitous survival of these works provides insight into Rubens’s creative process and has long been a topic of discussion for art historians. Recent technical study and improved imaging techniques have highlighted Rubens’s extremely fluid approach to the development of the design and revealed complex reworkings of all three compositions. These findings suggest a much longer gestation of these ideas than the 1610–1612 date proposed, and they cast light on Rubens’s broader working practice and his ceaseless striving for aesthetic perfection, combined with a pragmatic approach to the reuse and reworking of his compositions. Building on research done by E. Melanie Gifford, the complex changes revealed by X-ray; by infrared, transmitted, and raking light; and by microscopic examination can be explored using enhanced image tools and navigation. Readers can compare works of art with each other and with their technical images using the “IIIF multi-mode viewer” to better understand Rubens’s artistic exploration of ideas and aid their own research.

Inspired by Rubens: Antwerp Baroque Books Stored in the Russian State Library

The article is devoted to the history of Antwerp printed books, which, in the first half of the 17th century, underwent a profound transformation caused by the influence of the Baroque style emerging in the Netherlands, with its characteristic contrast, dynamism and intensity of images, and combination of reality and illusion. The author demonstrates the Baroque book development by the example of the sources that she first introduces into scientific circulation: books stored in the Research Department of Rare Books (Book Museum) of the Russian State Library (RSL). The article gives examples of the formation of a new allegorical thinking of the Baroque, in which allegory became the norm of artistic vocabulary. The new allegorical imagery is noted in the title pages and illustrations of books that characterize the printing of that period. The Antwerp printer Balthazar Moretus (1574—1641) was an excellent master of this new Baroque book. By using leading artists to design his books, he took an important step in the development of book design. There are well known publications by B. Moretus featuring beautiful title pages designed by his friend Peter Paul Rubens (1577—1640). The typical appearance of text sheets is also the result of the use of elegant fonts, rich design and abundance of decorative elements. The article analyzes the influence of Rubens on the Baroque book formation in Antwerp.

About the image of mother with child in fine arts. Part II. Renaissance

The article highlights aspects of the topic a mother and a child in fine arts of the Renaissance. Paintings by Dutch artists Robert Campen and Jan Van Eyck, Italian paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Sandro Botticelli, Raphael, as well as paintings by Diego de Silva y Velazquez, Peter Paul Rubens and Rembrandt are presented.

Peter Paul Rubens

Peter Paul Rubens (b. 1577–d. 1640) was an extraordinary figure who inhabited, effected, and even defined many aspects of the early modern European world. Far more than just a hugely successful painter, he was a scholar and a diplomat, a person who could produce allegorical images of the same peace treaties he was negotiating, or who carefully interpreted both material and textual sources—in original languages—when creating a mythological scene. He worked on a political level with the same powerful patrons for whom he painted, spending substantial time in courts and urban centers of the Southern and Northern Netherlands, Italy, Spain, France, and England; in every place he absorbed local culture and left his mark on it. Prints after his works traveled to the New World and helped mold its visual culture. Rubens’s relationship to the art of the past was transformative, for he knew and absorbed works both famous and obscure; he redefined the canon, through the lens of his own art, for generations to come. His work spanned painting, printmaking, architecture, sculpture, book illustration, tapestry design, and décor for political pageantry. He executed important works on every kind of subject matter: mythologies, political allegories, portraits, landscapes, hunting scenes. And he was the painter of the Catholic Reformation, filling churches across the continent with devotional imagery and illustrating theological texts. If he did not work in a given genre himself, he collaborated with colleagues who did. The sheer volume of his work in so many media is astonishing, the effect of a tireless inventive mind aided by a workshop so large that it occupied most of the artistic space in Antwerp, employing painters who, in other circumstances, might have been competitors. Internationally famous in his own day, Rubens’s prestige has never faltered. He was the subject of debates in early art academies; his works found homes in Europe’s elite collections; his letters about art, diplomacy, and scholarship were preserved and published. To the primary source material, an immense amount of academic study has been added. Serious overviews of his life and work are relatively rare, however, for Rubens is hard to encompass between the covers of a single book. The attempt to produce a catalogue of all of Rubens’s work, divided into forty-four volumes and multivolume sets, each with its own author(s), has been in progress for fifty years and is not yet complete. The bibliography below is exceptionally long because that is the nature of Rubens studies: immense, diffuse, complicated, and collaborative.

The Changing Perception of the Five Senses

This article examines the changing approach towards the representation of the senses in 17th-century Flemish painting. These changes are related to the cultural politics and courtly culture of the Spanish sovereigns of the Southern Netherlands, the Archdukes Albert and Isabella. The 1617–18 painting-series of the Five Senses by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens as well as the pendant paintings on the subject are analyzed in relation to the iconography of the five senses, and in regard to Flemish genre themes. In this context, the excess of objects, paintings, scientific instruments, animals, and plants in the Five Senses are read as an expansion of the iconography of the senses as well as a reference to the courtly material culture of the Archdukes. Framing the senses as part of a cultural web of artifacts, Brueghel and Rubens refer both to elite lived experience and traditional iconography. The article examines the continuity between the iconography of the senses from 1600 onwards, as developed by Georg Pencz, Frans Floris, and Maerten de Vos, and the representation of the senses in the series. In addition, the article shows how certain elements in the paintings are influenced by genre paintings of the courtly company and collector’s cabinet, by Frans Francken, Lucas van Valckenborch and Louis de Caullery. Through the synthesis of these two traditions the subject of the five senses is reinvented in a courtly context

Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens

Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens argues that the Baroque painter, propagandist, and diplomat, Peter Paul Rubens, was not only aware of rapidly shifting religious and cultural attitudes toward women, but actively engaged in shaping them. Today, Rubens’s paintings continue to be used -- and abused -- to prescribe and proscribe certain forms of femininity. Repositioning some of the artist’s best-known works within seventeenth-century Catholic theology and female court culture, this book provides a feminist corrective to a body of art historical scholarship in which studies of gender and religion are often mutually exclusive. Moving chronologically through Rubens’s lengthy career, the author shows that, in relation to the powerful women in his life, Rubens figured the female form as a transhistorical carrier of meaning whose devotional and rhetorical efficacy was heightened rather than diminished by notions of female difference and particularity.