Rubens: technique, workshop and artistic inquiry

In artistic creation, an artist draws on both practical knowledge and aesthetics, that is, on technical skill and personal research. To understand how a work comes into being, it helps to appreciate the possibilities and constraints that the practice and techniques of painting impose on the artist.

European painters of the Early Modern age worked in workshops, known in Spanish as obradores, and relied on numerous collaborators. One of the most prolific and successful was that of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640). Paintings at the time were executed in phases, built up by superimposing successive layers, with each layer shaping the effect of the next. This method made it possible to divide the labour: one artist could paint certain layers before another took over. A consequence was that a single workshop could produce works of differing quality, sold at different prices. Although every painting that left Rubens’s studio bore the stamp of his “brand,” both he and his contemporaries prized the works entirely from his own hand above those produced by his assistants, much as the products of certain fashion houses or architecture studios are valued today. This will be one of the questions at the heart of Alejandro’s talk.

Another will be the idea that the fundamental tool of art is language, and that it is there that its essence is found. Alejandro will explain what this maxim means in the case of Rubens’s painting.

Additional information

Limited places are available and will be assigned by registration only.

Speaker

Alejandro Vergara is Head of the Flemish Painting and Northern Schools Collection at the Museo Nacional del Prado. He holds a degree in Art History from the Complutense University of Madrid and a PhD in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, with a doctoral thesis on Rubens’s relationship with Spain. He has taught art history at the University of California, San Diego, and Columbia University, New York, before joining the Museo del Prado as a curator in 1999. A specialist in the painting of Rubens and 17th-century Flemish painting, he has also researched 16th- and 17th-century Dutch painting. At the Museo del Prado he has curated several exhibitions, including the recent “El taller de Rubens” (2024).