Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens

Download or read book Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens written by J. Vanessa Lyon and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-08 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that the Baroque painter, propagandist, and diplomat, Peter Paul Rubens, was not only aware of rapidly shifting religious and cultural attitudes toward women, but actively engaged in shaping them. Today, Rubens's paintings continue to be used-and abused-to prescribe and proscribe certain forms of femininity. Repositioning some of the artist's best-known works within seventeenth-century Catholic theology and female court culture provides a feminist corrective to a body of art historical scholarship in which studies of gender and religion are often mutually exclusive. Moving chronologically through Rubens's lengthy career, the author shows that, in relation to the powerful women in his life, Rubens figured the female form as a transhistorical carrier of meaning whose devotional and rhetorical efficacy was heightened rather than diminished by notions of female difference and particularity.