In the early 1630s Peter Paul Rubens produced nine large canvases for the ceiling of the Whitehall Palace Banqueting House in London (plate 1). The bustling composition known as the Peaceful Reign of ...King James I (plate 2) would have hung directly over the enthroned monarch, Rubens's patron, Charles I. Thus the two Stuart sovereigns, past and present, appeared to visitors from a distance as they entered the cavernous rectangular Stateroom, or Presence Chamber, for an audience with the king.2 Within the Peaceful Reign the two embracing female figures at left have long been recognized as keys to the proper interpretation of both the scene in which they appear and Rubens's animated allegorical programme as a whole. That these sensual female personifications should be portrayed in so intimate a coupling has been explained, and explained away, by means of a popular figuration of paired 'Christian' virtues found in the Old Testament. Susan B. Shapiro was evidently the first to suggest a specific textual source for the women's affectionate encounter. Referring in 1967 to the remarkable Yale oil sketch on which the figures are based (plate 3), Shapiro observed that the arrangement of Peace and Plenty 'clearly paraphrases the passage "righteousness and peace have kissed each other" in the 85th Psalm, a passage often illustrated in similar terms'.3 Yet despite the fact that Rubens's painted women appear not (yet) to have kissed nor, more importantly, do they embody the precise combination of virtues named by the Psalmist, scholars have generally accepted this as the most likely reason for their presence at Whitehall.4
Anthony van Dyck's early paintings of Saint Sebastian allowed the painter to propose an analogy between the martyrdom of the saint and the practice of posing models in the studio. He used disguised ...self-portraiture to identify not with the artist but, rather, with the model. On the one hand, Van Dyck's Sebastian paintings declare the young painter's commitment to life study. On the other, his self-depiction as both martyr and model allowed him to allegorize his specific position within the studio of Peter Paul Rubens.
During my Fellowship I completed a monograph, The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: a Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions, with two co-authors, Daniel ...Margocsy and Stephen Joffe. Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica is the foundational work of anatomy. First published in 1543, the Fabrica single-handedly revised the Galenic orthodoxy on human physiology, turned this previously mostly text-based discipline into a visual enterprise, and enriched it with countless observations. The book's influence is powerful and ubiquitous. The Fabrica was pirated, plagiarized and translated from the start. Its famous illustrations, once attributed to Titian, were circulated separately and copied in works including Petrus Paaw's Succenturiatus anatomicus and Helkiah Crooke's popular Mikrokosmographia. Hermann Boerhaave republished the whole Fabrica as late as 1728, and, before perishing in World War II, the original woodblocks were used for a reprint edition (the renowned Icones anatomicae) in 1934.
Rubens Maria Varshavskaya; Xenia Yegorova
03/2014
eBook
Universally celebrated for his rosy and concupiscent nudes, Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) was an artist whose first concern was sensuality in all its forms. This Baroque master devoted himself to a ...lifelong celebration of the joys and wonders of the physical realm. He felt that the human body was as lovely and natural as the many natural landscapes he painted as a young man. In a lushly illustrated text, Maria Varshavskaya and Xenia Yegorova explore the master at work, bringing a unique focus to Ruben's life and work
Rubens Calosse, Jp. A; Suarez-Rojas, Alberto
2011., 2006, 2011-12-22
eBook
La obra de Rubens irradia energía y manifiesta una percepción vertiginosa de los placeres de la vida. Sus colores brillantes e inagotable imaginación glorifican el mundo en todo su esplendor. Rubens ...ejerció una fuerte influencia en posteriores pintores: sus idilios heroicos se reflejan en las escenas caballerosas de Antoine Watteau y las escenas de caza en la obra de Eugène Delacroix, mientras que sus pinturas encomiásticas de la belleza opulenta de la figura femenina evocan inmediatamente los desnudos de Auguste Renoir.
Peter Paul Rubens and the Crisis of the Beati moderni takes up the question of the issues involved in the formation of recent saints—or Beati moderni (modern Blesseds) as they were called—by the ...Jesuits and Oratorians in the new environment of increased strictures and censorship that developed after the Council of Trent with respect to legal canonization procedures and cultic devotion to the saints. Ruth Noyes focuses particularly on how the new regulations pertained to the creation of emerging cults of those not yet canonized, the so-called Beati moderni, such as Jesuit founders Francis Xavier and Ignatius Loyola, and Filippo Neri, founder of the Oratorians. Centrally involved in the book is the question of the fate and meaning of the two altarpiece paintings commissioned by the Oratorians from Peter Paul Rubens. The Congregation rejected his first altarpiece because it too specifically identified Filippo Neri as a cult figure to be venerated (before his actual canonization) and thus was caught up in the politics of cult formation and the papacy’s desire to control such pre-canonization cults. The book demonstrates that Rubens’ second altarpiece, although less overtly depicting Neri as a saint, was if anything more radical in the claims it made for him. Peter Paul Rubens and the Crisis of the Beati moderni offers the first comparative study of Jesuit and Oratorian images of their respective would-be saints, and the controversy they ignited across Church hierarchies. It is also the first work to examine provocative Philippine imagery and demonstrate how its bold promotion specifically triggered the first wave of curial censure in 1602.
Kolfin details how the team of Peter Paul Rubens and Albrect Durer took up the challenge of engraving the black skin. The first artist who seems to have been dissatisfied with the ethnically ...ambiguous features of the third Magus was Albrecht Durer. In his first woodcut of the Adoration, of c. 1503, he gave the African Magus short curly hair and consciously rendered him in profile to bring out the flat nose, full lips and high forehead to depict as clearly as possible what he considered to be typically African features. That Durer considered the profile view the best way to distinguish between Europeans and Africans is apparent in his writings. Also, more than anything Rubens wanted his prints to be accurate renderings of his paintings, with a correct balance of tone. The Africans in them therefore had to be black. Luckily he found Lucas Vorsterman who was able to come up with new solutions for this old problem. Together they changed the image of the black in print forever.
Although historians of architecture commonly utilize emergent technologies of modeling and rendering to catalogue and describe the patterns of illumination that characterize a particular site, these ...techniques have yet to be adapted to the study of pictures or decorative assemblages within a given space. This case study considers the relationship between light and illusion in three altarpieces by Peter Paul Rubens, showing how the artist developed an artistic vocabulary for integrating light into his pictures after one of his first major commissions was rejected by its patrons. Subsequent analysis shows that these same concerns fueled early modern experiments in measuring and describing light; in this way, the finely tuned stagecraft of the Baroque altar can be understood as a material prehistory of photometric science.
Pierre Paul Rubens Varshavskaya, Maria; Yegorova, Xenia
2012., 2012-01-17
eBook
Mondialement celebre pour ses nus sensuels, aux formes genereuses, Pierre Paul Rubens (1577-1640), etait un artiste dont la preoccupation premiere etait la sensualite. Ce maitre baroque, celebrera ...toute sa vie les plaisirs et l'emerveillement que procure le corps. Il estimait que le corps humain etait tout aussi naturel que les nombreux paysages qu'il peignait lorsqu'il etait jeune. Dans ce texte brillamment illustre, Maria Varshavskaya et Xenia Yegorova observent le maitre au travail, mettant l'accent de maniere unique sur la vie et l'A uvre de Rubens.
