Rubens’s Spirit: From Ingenuity to Genius

A Flemish Baroque painter so distinctive in style that "Rubenesque" figures bear his name, Peter Paul Rubens helped shape notions of beauty and aesthetics with his highly sensual masterworks. This book explores the entirety of his extraordinary career.

Peter Paul Rubens was the most inventive and prolific northern European artist of his age. This book discusses his life and work in relation to three interrelated themes: spirit, ingenuity, and genius. It argues that Rubens and his reception were pivotal in the transformation of early modern ingenuity into Romantic genius. Ranging across the artist’s entire career, it explores Rubens’s engagement with these themes in his art and life. Alexander Marr looks at Rubens’s forays into altarpiece painting in Italy as well as his collaborations with fellow artists in his hometown of Antwerp, and his complex relationship with the spirit of pleasure. It concludes with his late landscapes in connection to genius loci, the spirit of the place.

By Alexander Marr
256 pages
Published by Reaktion Books, 2021
Hardcover
5.5 x 0.8 x 8.5 inches