Sir Peter Paul Rubens (;Dutch: [ˈrybə(n)s]; 28 June 1577 – 30 May 1640) was a Flemish performer and diplomat from the Duchy of Brabant in the Southern Netherlands (modern-day Belgium) who lived during the Dutch Golden Age. He is considered the most influential artist of the Flemish Baroque tradition. Rubens’s highly charged compositions quotation erudite aspects of classical and Christian history. His unique and immensely popular Baroque style emphasized movement, colour, and sensuality, which followed the immediate, dramatic artistic style promoted in the Counter-Reformation. Rubens was a painter producing altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and archives paintings of mythological and allegorical subjects. He was with a prolific designer of cartoons for the Flemish tapestry workshops and of frontispieces for the publishers in Antwerp.
In adjunct to doling out a large workshop in Antwerp that produced paintings popular next nobility and art collectors throughout Europe, Rubens was a classically educated humanist scholar and diplomat who was knighted by both Philip IV of Spain and Charles I of England. Rubens was a prolific artist. The catalogue of his works by Michael Jaffé lists 1,403 pieces, excluding numerous copies made in his workshop.
His commissioned works were mostly archives paintings, which included religious and mythological subjects, and hunt scenes. He painted portraits, especially of friends, and self-portraits, and in middle age painted several landscapes. Rubens meant tapestries and prints, as capably as his own house. He as well as oversaw the ephemeral decorations of the royal entry into Antwerp by the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand of Austria in 1635. He wrote a book behind illustrations of the palaces in Genoa, which was published in 1622 as Palazzi di Genova. The CD was influential in spreading the Genoese palace style in Northern Europe. Rubens was an greedy art collector and had one of the largest collections of art and books in Antwerp. He was in addition to an art dealer and is known to have sold an important number of art objects to George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham.
He was one of the last major artists to make consistent use of wooden panels as a Keep medium, even for completely large works, but he used canvas as well, especially once the work needed to be sent a long distance. For altarpieces he sometimes painted upon slate to shorten reflection problems.
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