Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens 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, this book 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.
- Cover
- Title
- Copyrights Page
- Table of Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue
- The Triumph of Thomas Aquinas
- Works Cited
- Introduction
- Figura versus Allegory
- Ways of Proceeding: Frameworks and Formal Concerns
- Works Cited
- 1. Samson and Dilemma
- Rubens Confronts the Woman on Top
- Isabella Brant: Marrying Up
- Rubens in Love
- Early Modern Marriage and the Subjection of Women
- Painting, Man, and Wife
- Formal Matters: The Man on Top
- Until Death
- Works Cited
- 2. Making Assumptions
- Marian Tropes after Italy
- Cross-Dressing
- Assumptions
- The Figure of the Madonna
- Expression and Lactation
- Juno and the Peacock
- Caught Between
- Works Cited
- 3. Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia
- Part 1: Recycling Sovereignty—Maria de’ Medici
- A Task for Two Cities
- Staging Success: Themes and Settings
- Paintings for the Palace: Rubens in Paris
- Embodying the Christian Prince
- Part 2: Figuring Faith and Female Power—Isabel Clara Eugenia
- The Isabelline Image
- Pious ‘Captaine’: Isabel’s Image-Making after Breda
- Doctoring the Church: Isabel and the Defenders of the Eucharist
- Isabel’s Canonical Image
- Beyond Madrid: Patronage, Prints, and Posterity
- Works Cited
- 4. Peace Embraces Plenty
- Queering Female Virtue at Whitehall
- A Flemish Catholic in the Caroline Court
- Rubens’s Yale Oil Sketch
- Virtues ‘Compact Together’
- Veronese and the Daughters of God
- Ripa, Rubens, Rubsters
- Glory, Laud, and the New Jerusalem
- Works Cited
- 5. All That Depends on Color
- Feminizing Rubens in the Seventeenth Century*
- Rubens, Painting, Gender
- Style Makes the Man
- Practicing Venice
- Rubens and Italian Criticism after Caravaggio
- Good Venetian Color: Seventeenth-Century Critics and Rubens’s Second Manner
- Something Wanting in his Nature: Rubens and Bellori
- Everything that Depends on Coloring
- Works Cited
- Epilogue
- About the Author
- Index
- Back Cover
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