Rubens Talk Series - The Women in Rubens's Life

Rubens’s diplomatic and artistic career was very closely linked to the women who were influential in the political arena both at home and abroad, including the Archduchess Isabella, governor of the Spanish Netherlands, and Marie de‘ Medicis, regent queen of France. They had a taste for daring and spectacular art works that celebrated their religion, family, achievements, and authority. Their commissions gave Rubens opportunities and immense challenges, perhaps the greatest of his entire career. Equally, Rubens’s two wives, Isabella Brant and Helena Fourment, contributed to his success in the world of art and politics. They helped to network Rubens within the urban patrician class in Antwerp, and their literacy in luxury and fashion brought to his domestic and intimate life the unique flavour of urban upper-class chic.

Rubens is known as the painter of voluptuous, fleshy women, but did moral etiquette in Catholic Antwerp actually allow a painter to study female anatomy from life? If Catholicism did not permit women to act as models and yet placed the Virgin Mary at the centre of religious devotion, then how did Rubens’s interest in the anatomy and sensuality of the female body inform his paintings of the Virgin? If Rubens’s wives did not pose for him in the nude, how can we trace their presence in his art?

In conversation, Nils Büttner and Cordula van Wyhe will reveal how Rubens’s work and life were deeply dependent on women as sovereigns, patrons, wives, and divinities.