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Rubens, Peter Paul If the Baroque style is thought of as powerful, exuberant, sensuous, and even explosive, Peter Paul Rubens is its perfect example in painting. He was able to infuse his own astounding vitality into his religious or mythological paintings, portraits, and landscapes. Rubens was a painter of illimitable resource in invention, and he organized his complex compositions in vivid, dynamic designs. Limitations of form and contour are discounted in favour of a constant flow of movement. His voluptuous women may not be to the taste of a less vigorous age, but are related to the full and opulent forms that were the ideal of womanhood and life in general for both Rubens and the Baroque period. By courtesy of the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Vienna Rubens, self-portrait, oil painting, c. 1640. In the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. One of the most prolific geniuses of painting, Rubens was a great Humanist scholar and an important diplomat, as well as an artist. Although he came to live the life of a wealthy bourgeois, his art shows strong roots in the robust life of the Flemish people. Rubens' laborious life was well ordered; the creator of so many delightful pagan mythological feasts went to mass each morning before proceeding to his studio, where he worked all day. He is one of the best examples of the well-balanced genius, who combined passion and science, ardour and reflection. Rubens studied to emulate the works of Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, and Correggio, as well as those of his contemporaries the Carracci and Caravaggio. All these influences were fused in his own highly personal and dramatic style. By no means all of the canvases attributed to Rubens were painted by him. He established a huge workshop employing on occasion a great number of assistants and apprentices. But the original inventive designs underlying his paintings are his own. Although Rubens' father, Jan, was born a Roman Catholic, his name had appeared on a list of Calvinists as early as 1566. This accounted for the Rubens' family exile to Germany, where Peter Paul was born on June 28, 1577. Victims of the hysterical religious persecution following the decapitation in 1568 in Brussels of the freedom-seeking Counts of Egmond and Horn, the Rubens family fled the wrath of the Spanish rulers of their native Flanders. Jan Rubens became a diplomatic agent and adviser to the Protestant Princess Anna of Saxony (d. 1577), second wife of the latitudinarian Catholic William the Silent, who led the resistance to Spanish rule of the Netherlands. An unfortunate pregnancy revealed the intimate extent of the relationship between this princess of the house of Orange-Nassau and Rubens' father. She obtained clemency from her husband for Jan, but he and his family were placed under house arrest at Siegen, a Nassau stronghold in Westphalia. Here Peter Paul Early was born, as well as his brother Philip. The Rubens chil- life in dren were grounded in the classics by their exiled father, exile who was a doctor of both civil and canon law. Jan died in 1587, after he had been allowed to leave Siegen and go to the German city of Cologne. Rubens' mother then thought it prudent to take her four surviving children to Antwerp, where their father had been an alderman. Antwerp training. At the age of ten, Peter Paul was sent with Philip to a Latin school in Antwerp. There the future painter befriended a contemporary, Balthasar Moretus, who was to be a future patron and head of the leading Flemish publishing house, thé Plantin Press. In 1590, shortage of money and the need to provide a dowry for his sister Blandina forced Rubens' mother to break off his formal education and make him a page to the Countess of Lalaing. Soon tired of courtly life, he was allowed to become a painter. He was sent first to his kinsman Tobias Verhaecht, a minor painter of Mannerist landscapes in the tradition of the more important Antwerp painter Joos de Momper. Having quickly learned the rudiments of his profession, he was apprenticed for four years to an abler master, Adam van Noort, and subsequently to Otto van Veen, one of the most distinguished of the Antwerp Romanists, a group of Flemish artists who had gone to Rome to study the art of antiquity and the Italian Renaissance. Vaenius, or Venius, as van Veen called himself, had been in Italy an active admirer of the proto-Baroque painter from Urbino, Federico Barocci, as well as of the great masters of the Florentine-Roman tradition of Renaissance art such as Michelangelo and Raphael. His culture and vision impressed Rubens, whose earliest independent works are reputed to have resembled his style. Italian Period. In May 1600, with two years' seniority as a master in the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke, Rubens set out with Deodatus del Monte, his constant travelling companion and first pupil, for the visual and spiritual adventure of Italy. Reaching Venice in about a month, he had the good fortune to meet a gentleman in the service of Vincenzo I Gonzaga, duke of Mantua. He was offered employment in Mantua, which duchy held one of the largest and finest collections outside the Vatican of works by Italian artists. Moreover, Mantua was ideally located for sightseeing in the northern Italian provinces of Lombardy, Emilia, and the Veneto. During the eight years that Rubens was to call Vincenzo his lord, he had unmatched opportunities of fulfilling his expressed intention "to study at close quarters the works of the ancient and modern masters, and to improve himself by their example in painting." The Early Renaissance painter Andrea