Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard XXVI (2), 2
Copies and Adaptations from Renaissance and Later Artist: Italian Artists.
II. Titian and North Italian Artists
Jeremy Wood
Turnhout: Brepols, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-905375-40-0
680 p., ill.
Rubens after Titian
This study belongs to the volume of the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard that deals with Rubens’s copies and adaptations of Italian art. Its primary focus is the Renaissance art of the 16th century, which Rubens studied in depth throughout his life. During his apprenticeship years in Antwerp in the 1590s he mainly used prints as models for large paintings after Raphael and Michelangelo.
Most of Rubens’s painted copies were made in the late 1620s, when he spent time in Madrid and London and wanted images of Italian works that he was unable to acquire for his own collection. He had a particular fondness for the works of Titian in that period.
Most of the catalogue notes in this part describe Italian drawings that Rubens purchased on his travels and that he kept close to him throughout his life, as the text makes clear, constantly modifying them to a greater or lesser extent. This material reveals his profound knowledge of, and keen interest in, the work of artists including Raphael, Giulio Romano, and Polidoro da Caravaggio. Artists he favored from the more recent past included Zuccari and De Carracci. The study of these reworked drawings illustrates Rubens’s subtle and complex dialogue with Italian art, and makes it possible to reconstruct one of the earliest and largest collections of drawings by late Renaissance artists.
The study of all these Italian copies and adaptations culminated in a bulky section of the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard. The author, Jeremy Wood, therefore divided this section 26:2 of the Corpus into three parts, each one comprising two or three volumes. Together they contain approximately 300 entries.