Rubens Biography

(born June 28, 1577, Siegen, Nassau, Westphalia [Germany]—died May 30, 1640, Antwerp, Spanish Netherlands [now in Belgium]) Flemish painter who was the greatest exponent of Baroque painting's dynamism, vitality, and sensuous exuberance. Though his masterpieces include portraits and landscapes, Rubens is perhaps best known for his religious and mythological compositions. As the impresario of vast decorative programs, he presided over the most famous painter's studio in Europe. His powers of invention were matched by extraordinary energy and versatility.

Education and early career.

Rubens was born in the German town of Siegen, in Westphalia. His father, Jan Rubens, a lawyer and alderman of Antwerp, had fled the Spanish Netherlands (present-day Belgium) in 1568 with his wife, Maria Pypelinckx, and four children to escape religious persecution for his Calvinist beliefs. After Jan's death in 1587, the family returned to Antwerp, where young Peter Paul, raised in his mother's Roman Catholic faith, received a classical education. His artistic training began in 1591 with his apprenticeship to Tobias Verhaecht, a kinsman and landscape painter of modest talent. A year later he moved on to the studio of Adam van Noort, where he remained for four years until being apprenticed to Antwerp's leading artist, Otto van Veen, dean of the painters' guild of St. Luke. Van Veen imbued Rubens with a lively sense of painting as a lofty humanistic profession.

Most of Rubens' youthful works have disappeared or remain unidentified. The “Portrait of a Young Man” (1597; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City) is his earliest dated work. In 1598 Rubens was admitted into the painters' guild in Antwerp. He probably continued to work in van Veen's studio before setting off on a sojourn in Italy in May 1600. In Venice he absorbed the luminosity and dramatic expressiveness of the Renaissance masterpieces of Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. Hired by Vincenzo I Gonzaga, duke of Mantua, Rubens proceeded to Mantua, where his chief duties were to make copies of Renaissance paintings, mainly portraits of court beauties. In October 1600 Rubens accompanied the duke to Florence to attend the marriage-by-proxy of Gonzaga's sister-in-law Marie de Médicis to King Henry IV of France, a scene Rubens was to re-create a quarter-century later for the queen. By the end of the first year he had traveled throughout Italy, sketchbook in hand. The copies he made of Renaissance paintings offer a rich survey of the achievements of 16th-century Italian art.