Pieter Paul Rubens Biography
Rubens Pietro Paolo (Siegen, 1577 - Antwerp, 1640) Pietro Paolo Rubens was a Flemish painter. He received a humanist education in Antwerp and began an artistic apprenticeship with Tobias Verhaeght. In 1956 he created “Parnassus” and finished the “Battle of the Amazons” and “Original Sin”. In 1608 he moved to Italy, first to Venice, where he came into contact with the works of Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese and then to Mantua, where he was appointed court painter to the Gonzaga family and to Rome, where he discovered the works of Raphael, Michelangelo and Caravaggio. In 1608 he returned to his homeland, directing his artistic style towards luministic contrasts and Michelangelo-esque figures in groups. With the Catholic Counter-Reformation his works became lighter and with colder colours, while in 1621 he received the commission from Marie de' Medici to enrich the gallery of the Luxembourg Palace with some monumental paintings, following the canons of seventeenth-century painting . In the last years of his life he went to Spain to the court of Charles I of England where he worked, commissioned by the latter, on the creation of some works.
