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.