Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue
- Introduction
- 1 Samson and Dilemma: Rubens Confronts the Woman on Top
- 2 Making Assumptions: Marian Tropes after Italy
- 3 Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia
- 4 Peace Embraces Plenty: Queering Female Virtue at Whitehall
- 5 All That Depends on Color: Feminizing Rubens in the Seventeenth Century
- Epilogue
- About the Author
- Index
5 - All That Depends on Color: Feminizing Rubens in the Seventeenth Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue
- Introduction
- 1 Samson and Dilemma: Rubens Confronts the Woman on Top
- 2 Making Assumptions: Marian Tropes after Italy
- 3 Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia
- 4 Peace Embraces Plenty: Queering Female Virtue at Whitehall
- 5 All That Depends on Color: Feminizing Rubens in the Seventeenth Century
- Epilogue
- About the Author
- Index
Summary
Abstract
This chapter analyzes the coded and continuously reappropriated stylistic binaries that subtend seventeenth-century constructions of a Flemish painter and Spanish colonial subject as a consummate practitioner of Venetian colorito. Through close readings of Rubens's early critical reception, it shows the various ways in which early modern writers mobilized dichotomously gendered, regionalist taxonomies of painting in order to reassign the artist from the ranks of the foreign-born naturalist painters considered as Caravaggisti to the company of the purportedly (even) less cerebral, graphically unskilled followers of Titian. If Bolognese such as the Carracci were regarded as falling conveniently outside the longstanding binary of masculine Tuscan design and feminine Venetian coloring, Rubens, who rightly saw himself as highly capable in both arenas, remains underappreciated for what might be viewed as a longawaited synthesis of the two rival, regional approaches to painting.
Keywords: Rubens; Roger de Piles; feminism; queer; trans; Titian
The eighteenth century's feminized view of Rubens, was not, it turns out, so wrong.
‒ Svetlana Alpers, The Making of Rubens (1995)This final chapter considers the feminized artistic production we have been examining in relation to the critical gendering of Rubens beginning in the years shortly after his death. I analyze the coded, recycled stylistic binaries used by seventeenth-century art writers to construct Rubens's artistic identity as a Flemish painter and Spanish subject who was a consummate practitioner of Venetian colorito. More specifically, through a selective examination of Rubens's early critical reception, I show the various ways in which early modern writers used oppositionally gendered, regionalist taxonomies of painting in order to reassign the artist from the ranks of the boldly indecorous, foreign-born naturalist painters considered as Caravaggisti to the company of the purportedly less cerebral and graphically skilled followers of Titian. If Bolognese such as the Carracci were regarded as falling conveniently outside the Vasarian binary of masculine Tuscan design and feminine Venetian coloring, Rubens, who rightly saw himself as highly capable in both arenas, went largely underappreciated by his contemporaries for what might be viewed as a long-awaited synthesis of the two rival, regional styles of painting.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens , pp. 209 - 238Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020