Peter Paul Rubens (Pieter Paul Rubens; June 28, 1577, Siegen – May 30, 1640, Antwerp) – Flemish painter, the most brilliant representative of the Baroque period.
Rubens’s oeuvre features: wide genre range – Rubens wrote paintings on mythological, religious, historical subjects, as well as portraits and landscapes; equally important influence on Rubens’ painting had such different artists as Peter Bruegel the Elder and Titian – so in his paintings we find both attention to detail and masterful work with color; Rubens is extremely inventive in the compositional solutions of his paintings, masterfully depicts dramatic poses and gestures; he also went down in history as the author of his own ideal of beauty – the opulent “Rubensian forms”.
The icon of Rubens, which for centuries occupied a place of honor in the red corner of European art, in the 19th century noisily crashed, and critics quickly began to construct a caricature in its place: a businessman who created a painting enterprise, a royal favorite who forgot his vocation in the pursuit of honor. Of course, this caricature did not last long, faded and lost relevance – art historians and historians have finally found a portrait of the real Rubens, the artist who embodied the very spirit of the Baroque. Eclectic, ambiguous, full of contradictions and contrasts.