Rubens

"Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) was a prodigious artist and one of the most extraordinary figures of the seventeenth century. He eventually became the dominant international painter of his generation, and this book traces his progress from hesitant beginnings in the late 1590s through to the first works made after his triumphant return to Antwerp in 1608. Most of the eight intervening years were spent in Italy, where he was inspired by classical sculpture, by the work of Renaissance masters - above all Michelangelo and Raphael - and by the revolutionary styles of Caravaggio and other…