Rubens’s Spirit

This lively, erudite overview of Rubens's powerful creativity includes much information about Rubens's friendships, major paintings, patronage, and personal philosophy of art. Attitudes toward Rubens demonstrate how the making of art in the long Renaissance evolved into the concept of genius in the Romantic period . . . Rubens is a difficult subject to present in a relatively short volume, but here his multivalenced art is explained well, with regard to a selection of his major religious and secular paintings. The tension between the physical and the spiritual is examined in early altarpieces and late Bacchic paintings, with portraits of philosophers and family, and with Ovidian myths that involve both lust and tenderness. The author is deft in bringing into the discussion the guiding forces in Rubens's life of the Jesuits and neo-Stoicism, and his intellectual circle, which included rulers, merchants, and artists in Antwerp and Europe. Recommended. * Choice *
Though modest in format and written with an eye towards broader readership, this study is also packed with original insights that can prompt further scholarly discussion . . . Given the uncertain future of academic publishing, one should commend the editors of this series for including so many high-quality images of the works that Marr refers to in his discussion . . . it is the writing itself that counts the most – and which makes this book enjoyable from cover to cover, even for readers like myself, who have spent years thinking and writing about Rubens. * Historians of Netherlandish Art Reviews *
Rubens’s Spirit is a beautifully written, subtle analysis of the prodigious creativity that informed and permeated the work of this most versatile artist, from the large altarpieces and mythologies to the portraits, genre scenes and, finally, the late landscapes. Marr’s exploration of the multiple expressions of Rubens’s spirited art sheds new light on the notion of ingenuity, a key term of the period that would finally, in its modified form as genius, dominate aesthetic theory up to the modern day. * Christine Göttler, Professor emerita of Art History, University of Bern *
“Genius”, “ingenuity”, “spirit” – these are broad terms to apply to any artist, but with great wit and erudition Alex Marr shows how their specific seventeenth-century use enlarges our view of Rubens and his art . . . Few introductory texts to Rubens have presented so much original research, and none move with such ease from subjects like seventeenth-century dietetics and optical theory to the implications of Rubens’s representations of male and female figures for issues of gender. A moving and beautifully written account of the astonishingly diverse aspects of Rubens’s art and life. * David Freedberg, Pierre Matisse Professor of the History of Art, Columbia University *