Hey dear community, to begin with I would like to welcome you all to my new post and hope you had a great start to the new week! In this article I would like to talk about art history and hope you are able to expand your knowledge a bit.
To be seen here are two masterpieces of the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubbens (1577 - 1640) who can be counted among one of the best-known representatives of the Baroque and he was considered a very diverse personality who was not only artistically active himself but also supported other artists and had a large art collection himself. His exact birthplace has often left many questions unanswered in the past, but today it is assumed that he was born in the city of Siegen which is located in today's Germany and he comes from a wealth family who had a high social status and he himself learned in a workshop in an Antwerp and learned a lot about old masters of the Dutch school and later he also became a member of a painters guild in Antwerp. After his education, he traveled to Italy where he was strongly influenced by old Italian painters such as Titian and he began to deal with the culture and mythology there, which should strongly influence his later works and here he also copied works by Italian painters. He also spent some time in Spain and his travels were important for his development as an artist and he was mainly active as a freelance painter during this time and already made a name for himself as an artist and later when he returned to the Netherlands, he got more and more orders from rulers and these contacts opened some doors for him and he later even became diplomatically active and gained a foothold in the ruling sector. He expressed the experiences he gained as a diplomat in his works and so you can see that he liked to choose war or peace as a theme and also some some of his works are based on mythology and he has developed his own style and no matter whether he has just painted landscapes, portraits or mythological scenes, his works have a very unique style that convinces through dynamics, colors or authenticity. It is difficult to describe his style exactly because everyone sees something different, but it is clear that he is considered one of the most influential artists of his time and in this one of these works you can see how he represents the occult scenario of a hell and the other is a portrait of Countess of Arunde together with her companions.
Thanks for stopping by and I hope you could learn something new about art history! I captured these pictures with my Camera Sony Alpha 6000 plus 55-210 mm lens.