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Item Number: 124359
Title: RUBENS, Velazquez, and the King of Spain
Author: Georgievska-Shine, Aneta ; Larry Silver
Price: Not Available
ISBN: 9781409462330
Description: Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014. 25cm., hardcover, 362pp., 48 color, 112 b&w illus. Summary: The subject of this study is the decorative ensemble of Torre de la Parada, the hunting lodge of King Philip IV of Spain, created in the late 1630s by a group of artists led by Peter Paul Rubens. The authors provide a new analysis of the overall intent of the program, arguing that the surviving paintings and sketches derive from rhetorical and poetic conventions of the period, as well as philosophical ideas about individual self-improvement through cultivation of prudence, which ultimately leads to good governance. The core of the project consisted of paintings on Ovidian subjects, designed by Rubens and executed largely by members of his studio after his own preparatory sketches. Before their final installation in Spain, Rubens’s inventions were complemented by a number of paintings created by Diego Velázquez: portraits of the royal principals, a quartet of court dwarfs, two rather untypical classical philosophers, and an equally eccentric rendering of the god of war, Mars. The cycle included numerous hunting scenes and other animal imagery by other Flemish painters. Rubens’s oils sketches for the mythological narratives included in this program are here published for the first time in color. This program is shown to draw on broader intellectual currents of the period in both Spanish Flanders and Spain. In addition, it is argued that the images from Torre de la Parada participate fully in a mock-heroic attitude towards the world of pagan gods expressed in both the visual and literary culture of the period. The study sheds new light on the dialogical nature of this ensemble, in which Rubens and Velázquez offer complementary voices on a variety of subjects-balanced between their respective contributions-ranging from the nature of classical gods to the role of art as a mirror of the prince. Along the way, it illuminates the manner in which the paintings by these two great masters and their assistants relate to one another in a variety of ways, and how they convey the overall allegorical theme of the struggle between the rational and the emotional self.
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