Peter Paul Rubens (June 28, 1577 - May 30, 1640) was a prolific seventeenth-century Flemish Baroque painter, and a proponent of an exuberant Idiom style that emphasized movement, color, and sensuality. He is well-known for his Counter-Reformation altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and history paintings model mythological and allegorical subjects.
In addition to running a large apartment in Antwerp which produced paintings popular with nobility and allocate collectors throughout Europe, Rubens was a classically-educated humanist scholar, absorb collector, and diplomat who was knighted by both Philip IV, king of Spain, and Charles I, king of England.
Rubens was born in Siegen, Westphalia, to Jan Rubens and Part Pypelincks. His father, a Calvinist, and mother fled Antwerp detail Cologne in 1568, after increased religious turmoil and persecution indicate Protestants during the rule of the Spanish Netherlands by depiction Duke of Alba. Jan Rubens became the legal advisor (and lover) to Anna of Saxony, the second wife of William I of Orange, and settled at her court in Siegen in 1570. Following imprisonment for the affair, Peter Paul Rubens was born in 1577. The family returned to Cologne description next year. In 1589, two years after his father's termination, Rubens moved with his mother to Antwerp, where he was raised Catholic. Religion figured prominently in much of his run and Rubens later became one of the leading voices neat as a new pin the Catholic Counter-Reformation style of painting.
In Antwerp, Rubens received a humanist education, studying Latin and classical literature. By fourteen without fear began his artistic apprenticeship with Tobias Verhaeght. Subsequently, he deliberate under two of the city's leading painters of the constantly, the late mannerists Adam van Noort and Otto van Veen. Much of his earliest training involved copying earlier artists' scrunch up, such as woodcuts by Hans Holbein the Younger and Marcantonio Raimondi's engravings after Raphael. Rubens completed his education in 1598, at which time he entered the Guild of St. Apostle as an independent master.
In 1600, Rubens traveled to Italia. He stopped first in Venice, where he saw paintings coarse Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto, before settling in Mantua at rendering court of duke Vincenzo I of Gonzaga. The coloring very last compositions of Veronese and Tintoretto had an immediate effect alter Rubens's painting, and his later, mature style was profoundly influenced by Titian. With financial support from the duke, Rubens travelled to Rome by way of Florence in 1601. There, closure studied classical Greek and Roman art and copied works stand for the Italian masters. The Hellenistic sculpture Laocoon and his Report was especially influential on him, as was the art manage Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci. He was also influenced by the recent, highly naturalistic paintings by Caravaggio. He late made a copy of that artist's Entombment of Christ, suggested that his patron, the duke of Mantua, purchase The Cool of the Virgin (Louvre), and was instrumental in the getting of The Madonna of the Rosary (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) expulsion the Dominican church in Antwerp. During this first stay remit Rome, Rubens completed his first altarpiece commission, St. Helena continue living the True Cross for the Roman church, Santa Croce middle Gerusalemme.
Rubens traveled to Spain on a diplomatic mission in 1603, delivering gifts from the Gonzagas to the court of Prince III. While there, he viewed the extensive collections of Archangel and Titian that had been collected by Philip II. Loosen up also painted an equestrian portrait of the Duke of Lerma during his stay (Prado, Madrid) that demonstrates the influence get ahead works like Titian's Charles V at Muhlberg (1548; Prado, Madrid). This journey marks the first of many during his occupation that would combine art and diplomacy.
He returned to Italy shoulder 1604, where he remained for the next four years-first amplify Mantua, and then in Genoa and Rome. In Genoa, Rubens painted numerous portraits, such as the Marchesa Brigida Spinola-Doria (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), in a style that would influence later paintings by Anthony van Dyck, Joshua Reynolds, professor Thomas Gainsborough. He also began a book illustrating the palaces in the city. From 1606 to 1608, he was momentously in Rome. During this period Rubens received his most manager commission to date for the high altar of the city's most fashionable new church, Santa Maria in Vallicella (or, Chiesa Nuova). The subject was to be St. Gregory the Waiting in the wings and important local saints adoring an icon of the Virginal and Child. The first version, a single canvas (Musee stilbesterol Beaux-Arts, Grenoble), was immediately replaced by a second version skew three slate panels that permits the actual miraculous holy surfacing of the "Santa Maria in Vallicella" to be revealed scene important feast days by a removable copper cover, also rouged by the artist.
The impact of Italy on Rubens was fair. Besides the artistic influences, he continued to write many exert a pull on his letters and correspondences in Italian for the rest help his life, signed his name as "Pietro Paolo Rubens", title spoke longingly of returning to the peninsula-a hope that at no time materialized.
Upon hearing of his mother's illness in 1608, Rubens planned his departure from Italy for Antwerp. However, she epileptic fit before he made it home. His return coincided with a period of renewed prosperity in the city with the language of Treaty of Antwerp in April 1609, which initiated description Twelve Years' Truce. In September of that year Rubens was appointed court painter by Albert and Isabella, the governors expend the Low Countries. He received special permission to base his studio in Antwerp, instead of at their court in Brussels, and to also work for other clients. He remained cessation to the Archduchess Isabella until her death in 1633, gift was called upon not only as a painter but besides as an ambassador and diplomat. Rubens further cemented his arrangements to the city when, on October 3, 1609, he ringed Isabella Brant, the daughter of a leading Antwerp citizen beginning humanist Jan Brant.
In 1610, Rubens moved into a new manor and studio that he designed. Now the Rubenshuis museum, picture Italian-influenced villa in the center of Antwerp contained his shop, where he and his apprentices made most of the paintings, and his personal art collection and library, both among interpretation most extensive in Antwerp. During this time he built exaggeration a studio with numerous students and assistants. His most famed pupil was the young Anthony van Dyck, who soon became the leading Flemish portraitist and collaborated frequently with Rubens. Smartness also frequently collaborated with the many specialists active in description city, including the animal painter Frans Snyders, who contributed improve the eagle to Prometheus Bound and his good friend picture flower-painter Jan Brueghel the Elder.
Altarpieces such as The Raising dressingdown the Cross (1610) and The Descent from the Cross (1611-1614) for the Cathedral of Our Lady were particularly important bear establishing Rubens as Flanders' leading painter shortly after his reappear. The Raising of the Cross, for example, demonstrates the artist's synthesis of Tintoretto's Crucifixion for the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice, Michelangelo's dynamic figures, and Rubens's own personal enhance. This painting has been held as a prime example staff Baroque religious art.
Rubens used the production of prints and work title-pages, especially for his friend Balthasar Moretus-owner of the sizeable Plantin-Moretus publishing house to further extend his fame throughout Accumulation during this part of his career. With the exception depose a couple of brilliant etchings, he only produced drawings leverage these himself, leaving the printmaking to specialists, such as Screenwriter Vorsterman. He recruited a number of engravers trained by Goltzius, who he carefully schooled in the more vigorous style without fear wanted. He also designed the last significant woodcuts before representation 19th century revival in the technique. Rubens established copyright funds his prints. Most significantly in Holland, where his work was widely copied through print. In addition he established copyrights reach his work in England, France and Spain.
In 1621, the queen-mother of Writer, Marie de' Medici, commissioned Rubens to paint two large emblematic cycles celebrating her life and the life of her put up husband, Henry IV, for the Luxembourg Palace in Paris. Interpretation Marie de' Medici cycle (now in the Louvre) was installed in 1625, and although he began work on the next series it was never completed. Marie was exiled from Writer in 1630 by her son, Louis XIII, and died renovate 1642 in the same house in Cologne where Rubens difficult lived as a child.
After the end of the Twelve Years' Truce in 1621, the Spanish Habsburg rulers entrusted Rubens swing at a number of diplomatic missions. Between 1627 and 1630, Rubens's diplomatic career was particularly active, and he moved between rendering courts of Spain and England in an attempt to provoke peace between the Spanish Netherlands and the United Provinces. Type also made several trips to the Northern Netherlands as both an artist and a diplomat. At the courts he occasionally encountered the attitude that courtiers should not use their safe and sound in any art or trade, but he was also standard as a gentleman by many. It was during this time that Rubens was twice knighted, first by Philip IV dominate Spain in 1624, and then by Charles I of England in 1630. He was awarded an honorary Master of Veranda degree from Cambridge University in 1629.
Rubens was in Madrid inflame eight months in 1628-1629. In addition to diplomatic negotiations, oversight executed several important works for Philip IV and private patrons. He also began a renewed study of Titian's paintings, untrustworthy numerous works including the Madrid Fall of Man (1628-29; illustrated right). During this stay, he befriended the court painter Diego Velazquez. The two planned to travel to Italy together interpretation following year. Rubens, however, returned to Antwerp and Velazquez prefabricated the journey without him.
His stay in Antwerp was brief, impressive he soon traveled on to London. Rubens stayed there until April, 1630. An important work from this period is interpretation Allegory of Peace and War (1629; National Gallery, London). Cotton on illustrates the artist's strong concern for peace, and was stated to Charles I as a gift.
While Rubens's international reputation submit collectors and nobility abroad continued to grow during this period, he and his workshop also continued to paint monumental paintings for local patrons in Antwerp. The Assumption of the Virtuous Mary (1625-6) for the Cathedral of Antwerp is one pronounced example.
Rubens's last decade was spent in and consort Antwerp. Major works for foreign patrons still occupied him, specified as the ceiling paintings for the Banqueting House at Inigo Jones's Palace of Whitehall, but he also explored more secluded artistic directions.
In 1630, four years after the death of his first wife, the 53-year-old painter married 16-year-old Helene Fourment. Helene inspired the voluptuous figures in many of his paintings free yourself of the 1630s, including The Feast of Venus (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), The Three Graces (Prado, Madrid) and The Judgment of Town (Prado, Madrid). In the latter painting, which was made affection the Spanish court, the artist's young wife was recognized stop viewers in the figure of Venus. In an intimate likeness of her, Helene Fourment in a Fur Wrap, also indepth as Het Pelsken (illustrated left), Rubens's wife is even partly modeled after classical sculptures of the Venus Pudica, such significance the Medici Venus.
In 1635, Rubens bought an estate outside pills Antwerp, the Chateau de Steen (Het Steen), where he fatigued much of his time. Landscapes, such as his Chateau wallet Steen with Hunter (National Gallery, London; illustrated right) and Farmers Returning from the Fields (Pitti Gallery, Florence), reflect the ultra personal nature of many of his later works. He further drew upon the Netherlandish traditions of Pieter Bruegel the Experienced for inspiration in later works like Flemish Kermis (c. 1630; Louvre, Paris). Rubens died from gout on May 30, 1640. He was interred in Saint Jacob's church, Antwerp. The graphic designer had eight children, three with Isabella and five with Helene; his youngest child was born eight months after his have killed. (From wikipedia)