This section of the Corpus Rubenianum is concerned with
Rubens’s remarkable study of Italian sixteenth-century art as
shown through his numerous copies and adaptations. Rubens’s
study of the Cinquecento lasted throughout his life and was not
just the focus of his early years in Antwerp when he learned his
craft. At that time he used secondary copies as models for pen
drawings or as a basis for enlarged painted adaptations such as his
famous version in Dresden after Michelangelo’s Leda.
Rubens’s most important full-size painted copies, however,
were made as late as 1628-30 when he had travelled to Madrid and
London and was in his fifties, a point when many artists would have
thought they no longer needed to study. He may have made these
copies because he could not buy the originals for his collection,
but the act of creating such detailed visual records shows how
attentive he was to the art of the past. This process culminated in
his large and very free adaptations of the 1630s, now in Stockholm,
after Titian’s Andrians and Worship of
Venus which are among the most famous copies in the history of
art.
Rubens made relatively few drawings from paintings while in
Italy between 1600 and 1608, although some survive after frescoes
by Pordenone that he saw in Treviso and there are also a number
that record Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine Chapel in
Rome. Most of the catalogue entries, however, discuss the Italian
copy drawings that Rubens bought during his travels and brought
home to Antwerp. It will be argued that these sheets were taken out
and retouched by him throughout his career. In total, this material
amounts to one of the largest collections of graphic art assembled
by a late Renaissance painter, and as a result it reveals
Rubens’s sophisticated and complex dialogue with Italian
art.
"Although the catalogue raisonné as on art-historical genre is no longer fashionable ...., there could be no better demonstration of its lasting value than the thorough assessment of the art of Rubens found in these volumes." (K. De Clippel, in: The Burlington Magazine, vol. 154, n° 1307, February 2012, p.126)
"Die Bände von Belkin und Wood erschliessen auf exemplarische Weise eine Gruppe von Werken, die für das Verständnis von Rubens, seiner Kreativität und seinier Bilderwelt von entscheidender Bedeutung sind. Sie belegen eindrucksvoll, wie im eigentlichen Sinne grundlegend und zugleich inspirierend Œuvrekataloge sein können. Arbeiten wie diese bleiben die unverzichtbare Basis kunsthistorischer Forschung." (C. T. Seifert, in: Sehepunkte, 12 (2012), Nr. 5, 15.05.2012)