Rubens : Copies and Adaptations from Renaissance and Later Artists. Italian Artists

The present volume is the second of three devoted to the many copies and adaptations that Rubens made from Italian art, and it is dominated by his interest in the work of artists active in Venice during the sixteenth century. Rubens, when a mature master, decided to make a number of full-size painted replicas of works by Titian that he saw on his travels to Madrid and London. Perhaps surprisingly, he made far fewer copies after the works of Titian’s contemporaries, Tintoretto and Veronese, but, in addition, the volume examines his interest in the work of other masters active in North Italy at this time, notably Andrea Mantegna, Antonio da Correggio, and Girolamo Francesco Parmigianino. It is Rubens’s interest in Titian, however, that has been seen as crucial for art in the Early Modern period, a topic that has attracted the attention of critics and art historians from the seventeenth century to the present day.