Rubens

Peter Paul Rubens
Baroque painter & diplomat
born 1577 - died 1640
Born in: Belgium

Also known as: Pedro Pablo de Rubenes, Peter Paul Reubens, Pietro Paolo Rubbens, Pedro Pablo Rubenes, Peter Paul Rubenns, Paolo Rubens, Peeter Pauwel Rubens, Peter Paolo Rubens, Pierre Paul Rubens, Pieter Paul Rubens, Pietro Pauolo Rubens, Sir Peter Paul Rubens, Pietropaolo Rubenz, Petro Paulo Rubes, Peter Paul Ruuenes.

Teacher of: Sir Antony van Dyck (1599-1641), Lucas Vorsterman (1595-1675).
Assisted by: Theodoor Rombouts (1597-1637).
Worked with: Jan the elder Brueghel (1568-1625).

The Flemish baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens, b. June 28, 1577, d. May 30, 1640 was the most renowned northern European artist of his day, and is now widely recognized as one of the foremost painters in Western art history.
By completing the fusion of the realistic tradition of Flemish painting with the imaginative freedom and classical themes of Italian Renaissance painting, Peter Paul Rubens art fundamentally revitalized and redirected northern European painting.
his upbringing mirrored the intense religious strife of his age--a fact that was to be of crucial importance in his artistic career. His father, an ardently Calvinist Antwerp lawyer, fled in 1568 to Germany to escape religious persecution, but after his death (1587) the family moved back to Antwerp, where Peter Paul was raised a Roman Catholic and received his early training as an artist and a courtier. By the age of 21 Rubens was a master painter whose aesthetic and religious outlook led him to look to Italy as the place to complete his education. Upon arriving (1600) in Venice, he fell under the spell of the radiant color and majestic forms of Titian, whose work had a formative influence on his mature style. During his 8 years (1600-08) as court painter to the duke of Mantua, Rubens assimilated the lessons of the other Italian Renaissance masters and made (1603) a journey to Spain that had a profound impact on the development of Spanish baroque art. Peter Paul Rubens also spent a considerable amount of time in Rome, where he painted altarpieces for the churches of Santa Croce di Gerusalemme (1602; now in Hopital du Petit-Paris, Grasse, France) and the Chiesa Nuova (1607; now in Musee de Peinture et Sculpture, Grenoble, France), his first widely acknowledged masterpieces. His reputation established, Rubens returned (1608) to Antwerp following the death of his mother and quickly became the dominant artistic figure in the Spanish Netherlands. - oil painting from photo Netherlandish Rubens art.
In the mature phase of his career, Rubens either executed personally or supervised the execution of an enormous body of works that spanned all areas of painting and drawing. A devout Roman Catholic, Peter Paul Rubens imbued his many religious paintings with the emotional tenor of the Counter-Reformation. This aggressively religious stance, along with his deep involvement in public affairs, lent his work a conservative and public cast that contrasts sharply with the more private and secular paintings of his great Dutch contemporary, Rembrandt. But if his roots lay in Italian classical art and in Roman Catholic dogma, Rubens avoided sterile repetition of academic forms by injecting into his works a lusty exuberance and almost frenetic energy. Glowing color and light that flickers across limbs and draperies infuse spiraling compositions such as The Descent from the Cross (1611; Antwerp Cathedral) with a characteristically baroque sense of movement and tactile strength.

The titles of oil painting old master Peter Paul Rubens