Rubens Drawings


Book Description

A generous selection of Rubens' best drawings, chiefly portraits and religious and mythical scenes, that fully reveal his supreme artistic gifts. Publisher's note.




Rubens


Book Description

The first study devoted to classical art’s vital creative impact on the work of the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens. For the great Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), the classical past afforded lifelong creative stimulus and the camaraderie of humanist friends. A formidable scholar, Rubens ingeniously transmitted the physical ideals of ancient sculptors, visualized the spectacle of imperial occasions, rendered the intricacies of mythological tales, and delineated the character of gods and heroes in his drawings, paintings, and designs for tapestries. His passion for antiquity profoundly informed every aspect of his art and life. Including 170 color illustrations, this volume addresses the creative impact of Rubens’s remarkable knowledge of the art and literature of antiquity through the consideration of key themes. The book’s lively interpretive essays explore the formal and thematic relationships between ancient sources and Baroque expressions: the significance of neo-Stoic philosophy, the compositional and iconographic inspiration provided by exquisite carved gems, Rubens’s study of Roman marble sculpture, and his inventive translation of ancient sources into new subjects made vivid by his dynamic painting style. This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Villa from November 10, 2021, to January 24, 2022.




Rubens’s Spirit


Book Description

Peter Paul Rubens was the most inventive and prolific northern European artist of his age. This book discusses his life and work in relation to three interrelated themes: spirit, ingenuity, and genius. It argues that Rubens and his reception were pivotal in the transformation of early modern ingenuity into Romantic genius. Ranging across the artist’s entire career, it explores Rubens’s engagement with these themes in his art and life. Alexander Marr looks at Rubens’s forays into altarpiece painting in Italy as well as his collaborations with fellow artists in his hometown of Antwerp, and his complex relationship with the spirit of pleasure. It concludes with his late landscapes in connection to genius loci, the spirit of the place.




Rubens in Private


Book Description

Michelangelo regarded portraiture as a trivial genre, and Peter Paul Rubens did not instantly develop a preference for it either. Yet Rubens succeeded, as none other, in endowing his portraits with an almost palpable sense of immediacy, and was to become one of the greatest portraitists of all time. His most beautiful and surprising portraits are those of his immediate family. These intimate pictures were not intended for public display and are therefore considerably freer and more experimental than the likenesses he painted of influential patrons. Nothing about these private images seems idealized. They are uncommonly honest and veracious and at the same time expressive of great tenderness. While the hundreds of letters he wrote reveal very little about his emotional life, Rubens s portraits of family members testify in a special way to the affection he felt for his first and second wives, his brother and his children.




Rubens


Book Description

The Flemish baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens, born on June 28, 1577, died May 30, 1640 was the most renowned northern European artist of his day, and is now widely recognised as one of the foremost painters in Western art history. This title looks at his work.




From Titian to Rubens


Book Description

From 5th September until 1st March 2020 the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, in conjunction with the City of Antwerp, VisitFlanders and the Flemish Community, presents 'From Titian to Rubens. Masterpieces from Antwerp and other Flemish Collections', an exhibition curated by Ben Van Beneden, director of Rubenshuis in Antwerp. The Doge's apartments will be transformed into veritable 'constkamers', rooms filled with exquisite art demonstrating the riches of Flemish collections. Featuring artists including Titian, Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck and Michiel Sweerts, the exhibition offers an array of works. Three icons of Venetian painting return to their hometown of Venice: Titian's Jacopo Pesaro presenting Saint Peter to Pope Alexander VI, the altarpiece of the former San Geminiano church, covered by the press worldwide as David Bowie's Tintoretto', and Titian's Portrait of a Lady and her Daughter (thought to be a depiction of Titian's mistress Milia and their daughter Emilia). A special section of the exhibition will be devoted to Flemish composer Adriaan Willaert who settled permanently in 'la Serenissima' to become Maestro di Cappella of the Basilica di San Marco in 1527. It was Willaert who founded the Venetian School of music that was to instruct, among others, Giovanni Gabrieli and Claudio Monteverdi.




The Drunken Silenus


Book Description

The Drunken Silenus is a book that is as hard to categorize as it is to put down--an enlightening and mesmerizing blend of philosophy, history, and art criticism. Morgan Meis begins simply enough, with a painting by the Baroque master Peter Paul Rubens of the figure from Greek mythology who is mentor to Dionysus, god of wine and excess of every kind. We learn who this obscure, minor god is--why he must attend on the god who dies and must be re-born and educated all over again--and why Rubens depicted him not as a character out of a farce, but as one whose plight evokes pity and compassion. The narrative spirals out from there, taking in the history of Antwerp, bloody seventeenth-century religious wars, tales of Rubens's father's near-execution for sleeping with William of Orange's wife, Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and the impossibility of there being any meaning to human life, and the destruction of all civilization by nefarious forces within ourselves. All of this is conveyed in language that crackles with intelligence, wit, and dark humor--a voice that at times sounds a bit tipsy and garrulous, but which ultimately asks us to confront the deepest questions of meaning, purpose, and hope in the face of death and tragedy.




Rubens


Book Description

Of the nearly 500 oil sketches executed by Rubens over the course of his career, this exhibition includes 73 loaned from leading institutions world-wide, including the Louvre, the Hermitage, the National Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum, and also from the collections of the Prado and the Boijmans (which have two of the largest holdings of this type). On display for four months in Room C of the Jerónimos Building, the sketches are shown alongside a number of prints, drawings and paintings by Rubens which provide a context for them, bringing the total number of works on display to 93.00Exhibition: Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain (10.04.-05.08.2018) / Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands (08.09.2018-13.01.2019).




Early Rubens


Book Description