Together with Stephany Schrader (Getty Institute), Tine L. Meganck will formulate the Closing Remarks to the two-day international Conference Rubens and the World on 6 May 2025 at Rubenshuis in Antwerp.
Have a look at the full two-day programme here.
A man of the world
Peter Paul Rubens’ visual ideas spread astoundingly far from his home in Antwerp both during and after his lifetime. In the seventeenth century his paintings arrived at destinations throughout Europe, and dealers shipped painted copies and titanic quantities of engravings after his designs even farther afield, reaching Cuzco, Isfahan, Jingdezhen, and many other places.
He saw himself as a man of the world, as he wrote in a letter to a friend in 1625: “I regard the whole world as my country, and I believe that I should be very welcome everywhere.” The world also came to Rubens, whether in the form of models of African descent who feature in his head studies and finished compositions; Asian costume and dress that appear in his drawings and paintings; or Indian architecture and sculpture for which he showed a keen interest. An impressive swath of the world also passed through Antwerp, both people and things, and Rubens took note.
Understudied
His staggering output has elicited a tremendous amount of scholarship, which has often sought to identify original works by Rubens’s hand and/or workshop, working outward from these to trace “copies.” The Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard (CRLB), currently approaching completion, has offered a paradigm for this approach. Indeed, in the field of early modern art more broadly, recent attention has been paid to how the canonical giants of the period, when pushed to the side, may offer useful lenses through which to view understudied historical actors and objects. Numerous exhibitions and thematic volumes in the past few decades have focused on intersections between Low Countries art and particular regions.
As the CRLB draws to a close and as the Rubenshuis collaborates with Antwerp’s Royal Museum of Fine Arts (KMSKA) for a Global Rubens exhibition in 2027, the moment is ripe to convene a group of scholars whose subjects intersect with Rubens’s art and/or career and who engage this material in methodologically diverse and innovative ways. For the conference, Tout le monde pour ma patrie: Rubens and the World, the Rubenshuis, in partnership with the KMSKA, brings together scholars whose work situates Rubens on a global stage: Rubens as artistic personality and generator of images and ideas but also as foil and at times incidental character in narratives focused elsewhere and on other matters.
De-center Rubens
In scope and framework, this conference aspires to achieve diversity, in terms of the kinds of objects of study, the sources employed, the methodologies and writing styles deployed, and indeed the extent to which Rubens himself and his oeuvre figure in any given aspect of the project. Contributions will examine source material from around the world that, in one way or another, touches on Rubens’s oeuvre. The hope is that the conference – while bringing together a broad range of material, methods, and perspectives – will add to the discourse on the early modern global but with a sustained thematic focus on its intersection with one artist’s career and oeuvre.
Methodologically, one goal is exploratory: to open up the field of Rubens studies and see what new insights can be gained about Rubens’s art when scholars de-center so central a figure as Rubens. Empirically, the study of artistic cultures distantly removed from Rubens but which engaged his oeuvre can reinvigorate Rubens studies by bringing new and relevant material to the fore.