Peter Paul Rubens

Welcome to Is It The Podcast? From Rembrandt to Rubens, from Van Dyck to Van Eyck, each episode examines an artwork with an uncertain authorship in dialogue with a leading guest expert.

We'll tell the story of the artist we suspect created the work, of the work in question, and then we reveal the results of a cutting-edge AI authentication analysis performed by the Swiss firm Art Recognition.

I'm your host, Professor Noah Charney.

And this is, I keep saying all the mysterious things about Giorgione, if only he'd written a few letters, we'd know what he was thinking.

As you say, the religious story is almost incidental, as if he wanted to paint the landscape.

Of course, we know that later on, Peter Paul Rubens did exactly that.

He only wanted to paint landscapes, and he did in his later life.

Maybe Giorgione was like this.

A century after his death, the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini captured his Saint Theresa in the same rapture, with her head thrown back and her lips parted.

And Peter Paul Rubens painted bodies in which Correggio's soft, vibrant manner of painting lives on.

That is why Jupiter and Io is now regarded as a precursor to the Baroque.

The Rococo, too, the playful art of the 18th century, owes him a great deal.

Yeah, yeah, well, now it is, you are right.

But I think, and then, of course, I would be fascinated by Rembrandt and Velázquez and Rubens, you know, like all those, Leonardo da Vinci, of course.

And you studied fine art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.

Presumably then you were exposed to all these people.

Who doesn't love a memento from a trip? You can visit the museum and you can learn all about it.

One of the Flemish masters, Rubens, he painted beautiful Baroque masterpieces in Antwerp.

And you can also visit his museum in Antwerp called Rubenshus.

The first skyscraper in Europe was built in Antwerp in 1929.

Antwerp has a medieval heart, as I said, and many of the buildings are low rise so that the Cathedral of Our Lady can be, you know, dominating the skyline.

And its 16th century Gothic belfry is also featured in UNESCO's belfries of Belgium and France.

The cathedral took over 169 years to be built and inside the cathedral you can see Rubens' four paintings and they include the Elevation of the Cross, the Resurrection of Christ, the Descent from the Cross, and the Assumption of Mary.

There are small-sized streets around the cathedral, cafes and bars.

Well, this question of composition brings us to your next choice of creative influence for this cultural life.

It's the 17th century Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens.

How did he help you develop this sense of composition of

the image? Well, when I was in art school and studying art history and everything, of course, he was part of that time.

yeah i really like that and i really like that um this painting has so many it's so open and so like interpreted in so many different ways that it makes it really interesting to study.

And I wanted to also give another example that I think makes this painting even more interesting to me is another artist named Peter Paul Rubens painted this myth also, but he paints it in such a different way.

We see in... saturn devouring his son by goya uh saturn is like twisted he has like weird proportions he has a gross like stare his hair is like unkempt and then in ruben's painting there's like a quality of like being calculated in your decision i think his painting kind of shows a respect for power or like a thin respect for people who do evil things to keep their power.

Kind of like a celebration, but not really.