The Age of Rubens

by R. Malcolm Smuts

This thoroughly interdisciplinary collection of essays explores the multi-faceted relationship between international politics, diplomacy and the visual arts that developed during the early seventeenth century. Several chapters provide major re-evaluations of the career of Peter Paul Rubens as an artistdiplomat, based on previously neglected manuscript sources and a deepened analysis of the social and political environments in which he operated. Other contributors focus on Rubens<U+2019>s contemporary court artists, such as Anthony van Dyck, Guido Reni and Diego Velázquez. In addition to...