L’italiano di Pieter Paul Rubens in qualità di “secretario” di Jan Brueghel dei Velluti

This paper offers a new contribution about Pieter Paul Rubens’ competence with the Italian language, well known since 80’s at least. It’s focused on about thirty letters Rubens wrote for the painter Jan Brueghel The Elder, one of his friends and art-partners, who was able to write in Italian himself, but with many difficulties. For this reason Brueghel often asked Rubens, polyglot and perfectly able to speak and to write in Italian, to write in his place to his most important Italian customers: the Cardinal Federico Borromeo and the Milanese collector Ercole Bianchi. All Brueghel’s letters, included those written by Rubens, are conserved by the Ambrosiana Library of Milan and they were published in 1868 by Giovanni Crivelli.