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The Triumph of Rubens
One of the most accomplished painters of the 17th century, Peter Paul Rubens had a deep interest in the ancient world, expressed through the power of the paintbrush, but also the written word. Lucia Marchini speaks to Anne Woollett to find out more about the artist’s engagement with Greece and Rome – from discussing cameos to staging spectacular triumphal processions.
In 1621, the Danish royal physician Otto Sperling visited an artist’s studio in Antwerp, in what is now Belgium. The great painter he encountered there, he wrote, was not only working while someone read the Roman historian Tacitus to him, but he also dictated a letter and answered his visitors’ questions all at the same time, before sending them off on a tour of his antiquities with his servants. This somewhat over-the-top account gives us an idea of the powerful impression the artist in question, Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), and his erudition made on his contemporaries.
Over the course of his illustrious career, Rubens produced altarpieces for the cathedral in Antwerp, rich, mythol
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