Bruegel To Rubens

Everyone is familiar with the Golden Age of Dutch art; this is an opportunity to explore its no less glorious Flemish counterpart. It is said that much of the greatest art is produced during periods of strife. In the mid-16th century, Flanders - the United Provinces in the north (modern Holland) and the Spanish Netherlands in the south (modern Belgium) - was the most sophisticated society in Europe, but its learning and luxury industries were all but annihilated by the so-called Dutch Revolt and by the Eighty Years War that followed (1568-1648). Two-thirds of the works discussed here were painted during this turbulent period, including Pieter Bruegel's ' Massacre of the Innocents of 1567 .' During the Renaissance the Low Countries attained a flawless technique of painting and the highest standards of craftsmanship. This tradition survived during even the worst years of the war.

Truly collaborative paintings, that is, not simply mechanical but also conceptual co-productions, are rare in the history of art. This gorgeously illustrated catalogue explores just such an extraordinary partnership between Antwerp's most eminent painters of the early seventeenth century, Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) and Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625). Rubens and Brueghel executed approximately twenty-five works together between around 1597 and Brueghel's death in 1625. Highly prized and sought after by collectors throughout Europe, the collaborative works of Rubens and Brueghel were distinguished by an extremely high level of quality, further enhanced by the status of the artists themselves. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the Getty Museum to be held July 5 to September 24, 2006, the catalogue features twenty-six color plates of such Rubens/Brueghel paintings as The Return from War, The Feast of Achelo�s, and Madonna and Child in a Garland of Flowers, along with Rubens and Brueghel's collaborations with important contemporaries such as Frans Snyders and Hendrick van Balen. This is the first such publication to fully address and reproduce these works in depth.

" ... offers a chronological account of political engagement in works by early modern Northern European painters Jan van Eyck, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens, and Frans Snyders."--Page 4 of cover.

This superb book presents 100 notable examples from the Harvard Art Museums’ distinguished collection of Dutch, Flemish, and Netherlandish drawings from the 16th to 18th century. Featuring such masters as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens, and Rembrandt van Rijn, the volume showcases beautiful color illustrations accompanied by insightful commentary on prevalent styles and techniques. Genres that define this artistic period—landscape, scenes of everyday life, portraiture, and still life—are explored in detail. The book also presents the results of new conservation and technical study, including infrared analysis and scientific examinations of drawing materials. This revelatory new research has allowed previously illegible underdrawings and inscriptions in many of the artworks to surface for the first time, shedding light on longstanding mysteries of production and provenance.

* Many of the drawings coming from Antwerp are registered on the Flemish Government's Masterpieces List and will not be shown again for the next five to ten years to protect them from fading* Highlights will include a sketchbook in which a young Rubens has copied Holbein's Dance of Death woodcuts, intricate pen and ink drawings by Pieter Bruegel, meticulously drawn miniatures by Joris Hoefnagel, portrait studies by Anthony van Dyck, and a rare survival of a friendship album containing numerous drawings and poems dedicated to its owner* Two recently discovered drawings by Rubens will also be included, a design for a book-illustration on optics and an anatomical study of three legsThis catalogue will accompany the Bruegel to Rubens exhibition held at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford between 22 March and 23 June 2024. Through a selection of over 100 world-class drawings created by Flemish artists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an insightful and comprehensive overview will be given into how these drawn sheets were used as part of artistic practice, within or beyond the artist's studio. By revealing the drawings' function, rather than on their attribution or iconography, these sheets will become more fully understood through the eyes of contemporary readers. Identifying how and why these sheets were created will render these artworks more accessible to a wider audience. The three main essays will each deal with one of the principal functions of drawings at the time: studies (copies and sketches), designs for other artworks (paintings, prints, tapestries, metalwork, stained glass, sculpture and architecture), and finally the independent drawings. Each essay will discuss the relevant works within their functional context and compared with other related objects. Introductory chapters will focus on what precisely can be considered a drawing, including its materials, media and techniques, in addition to an attempt to explain the notion of Flanders and Flemish art. Emphasis will be placed throughout the catalogue on how Flemish artists collaborated in creating the most astonishing artworks of their time, unveiling their networks and friendships, as well as their travels across Europe, revealing their international importance. The exhibition is a partnership with the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp and will bring together for the first time the most stunning drawings from both the Ashmolean and the Plantin-Moretus collections, in addition to further loans from renowned Antwerp and Oxford institutions like the Rubenshuis and Christ Church Picture Gallery. Many of the sheets coming from Antwerp are registered on the Flemish Government's Masterpieces List and will not be shown again for the next five to ten years to protect them from fading. Prominent artists featured in this catalogue include Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, and Jacques Jordaens, among many others. Highlights will include a sketchbook in which a young Rubens has copied Holbein's Dance of Death woodcuts, intricate pen and ink drawings by Pieter Bruegel, meticulously drawn miniatures by Joris Hoefnagel, portrait studies by Anthony van Dyck, and a rare survival of a friendship album containing numerous drawings and poems dedicated to its owner. Two recently discovered sheets by Rubens will also be included, a design for a book-illustration on optics and an anatomical study of three legs.

"The Albertina owns one of the world's most important collections of Netherlandish drawings dating from the period 1430 to 1650, including outstanding individual specimens from the circles around Jan van Eyck, Petrus Christus, or Dirk Bouts. Works by Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel the Elder form one of the first highlights of this select collection. The rest of the sixteenth century is exemplified by masterful drawings by artists such as Jan Gossaert, Maarten van Heemskerck, and Hendrick Goltzius. The focus of the collection, however, is Holland's "Golden Age," the seventeenth century, with important works by Rembrandt van Rijn and his school. The southern Netherlands, once dominated by the House of Hapsburg, is represented by the most famous Flemish masters of the age: Peter Paul Rubens, Anton van Dyck, and Jacob Jordaens."--Publisher's website.

In this first comprehensive full length study in English on the art of Jan Brueghel the Elder, Leopoldine Prosperetti discloses the nature of the philosophical culture of Antwerp at the time, show its importance in the lives of cultivated citizens, and reveals the patterns of thought and visual stratagems by which his landscapes underwrite the pursuit of wisdom. The book presents a new model for the interpretation of a range of visual genres, including various types of landscape, that were popular in the Antwerp picture trade.

This book examines the reception in Latin America of prints designed by the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, showing how colonial artists used such designs to create all manner of artworks and, in the process, forged new frameworks for artistic creativity. Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) never crossed the Atlantic himself, but his impact in colonial Latin America was profound. Prints made after the Flemish artist’s designs were routinely sent from Europe to the Spanish Americas, where artists used them to make all manner of objects. Rubens in Repeat is the first comprehensive study of this transatlantic phenomenon, despite broad recognition that it was one of the most important forces to shape the artistic landscapes of the region. Copying, particularly in colonial contexts, has traditionally held negative implications that have discouraged its serious exploration. Yet analyzing the interpretation of printed sources and recontextualizing the resulting works within period discourse and their original spaces of display allow a new critical reassessment of this broad category of art produced in colonial Latin America—art that has all too easily been dismissed as derivative and thus unworthy of sustained interest and investigation. This book takes a new approach to the paradigms of artistic authorship that emerged alongside these complex creative responses, focusing on the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that the use of European prints was an essential component of the very framework in which colonial artists forged ideas about what it meant to be a creator.