Speakers
- AffiliationPrinceton University | Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Universität BernPresentationPotosí in Antwerp, ca. 1635, or: Where does Mercury fly to when he leaves Antwerp in poverty and despair?
- AffiliationUniversity of MarylandPresentationThe Art of Peace – from the Adoration of the Magi to the Surrender of Breda
- Aaron M. HymanAffiliationJohns Hopkins UniversityPresentationWhere does Rubens End?
- AffiliationMuseum of Fine Arts, BostonPresentationPortraying an African King: The Afterlife of Rubens’s Portrait of Mulay Ahmad
- AffiliationUniversity of San FranciscoPresentationRubens, Leonardo, and the Edinburgh Hero and Leander Drawing: A Case Study in Conceptual Mining and Graphic Transformation
- AffiliationRubenshuis, AntwerpPresentationTout le monde pour ma patrie: Rubens and the World
- Adam SammutAffiliationUniversity of YorkPresentationThe man who sold to the world: Rubens’s portrait of Nicolas de Respaigne in Schloss Wilhelmshöhe, Kassel
- AffiliationScuola Normale Superiore, PisaPresentationRubens and Sculpture: Between Gender and Genres
Details
Peter Paul Rubens, The Stage of Mercury, oil on panel, 77 x 79 cm, St. Petersburg, The State Hermitage Museum, inv. no. 501.
Workshop description
The approaching completion of the Corpus Rubenianum, the definitive catalogue on the work of Peter Paul Rubens, and several exciting publications and exhibitions on various aspects of his art, its reception, and its historiography, make this an opportune moment to reflect on the possibilities and challenges of a (mostly) monographic approach to one of the classic old masters, and to explore different ways of situating his art within the shifting identities and ideologies of the period. For many of his contemporaries (as well as later generations), Rubens, with his multiple roles in the world of art and diplomacy, embodied the versatile persona frequently associated with the age of the Baroque, its scientific discoveries, colonial conquests, religious wars, and aesthetic and technological experimentation, but also growing skepticism about the reliability of authoritative claims.
This one-day workshop brings together a group of scholars from both academia and museums to consider new and old perspectives for approaching and understanding this key figure of seventeenth-century European art. Rather than aiming for definitive answers, this workshop is designed to provide a forum for discussion to generate and test approaches to writing about or exhibiting Rubens’s works, and the ways in which they themselves engage with an ever-expanding world and its different cultures of knowledge and material expertise.