The Stoic Baroque
Rubens Painting his Theory
Paperback (Forthcoming)
(November 2026)
ISBN: 9782503602554
Price: $100.00
Rubens is known as a painter; he should also be known as an art theorist. The energized style that he developed draws on the classical Stoic theories that shaped his ethos and worldview.
How is it possible that the seventeenth-century Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, who painted in an intense style, with sensual subject matter, was a Stoic? At the core of the Early Modern artistic project is the issue of how style conveys meaning. Baroque style can connote art theory, and for Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens, this theory included classical Stoic philosophical concepts. While Rubens’s commitment to Stoicism can be traced in his subject matter, the author investigates it in his style, using a Baxandalian inferential critical method. Rubens’s formal choices, his varied brushwork, and his skilful creation of the vibrant picture plane indicate his facility with Stoic philosophical models. The artist’s library yields further evidence of the humanist-artist building upon classical philosophical texts, methods, and styles. The topics of Ethics, Logic, and Physics structure this study. Classical interest in viewer/reader response informed Baroque artists’ use of style to target viewers’ personal transformation. Stoic Logic privileged the investigation of existing reality, and it consequently engendered a classical rhetorical style that was complex and nuanced. This commitment to complexity underpins the Early Modern fascination with copia, including Rubens’s painterly method, or Abundant Style. The Early Modern artistic interest in the unified visual field can be linked to Stoic Natural Philosophy. The Stoics defined the natural world as eternally moving and mixing; with force fields, energy, and elements in interconnected relationships of cause and effect, and these qualities can be seen in Rubens’s characteristic use of copious brushwork to build up a resonating picture plane.
Other Titles in this Series
Le langage des mains dans l’art
Histoire, significations et usages des chirogrammes picturaux aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles
Volume 9
Light and Shade in Dutch and Flemish Art
A History of Chiaroscuro in Art Theory and Artistic Practice in the Netherlands of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Volume 7
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