Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Pages in great condition. Dustcover has wear and tear but book and pages are great. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> The thirty-nine ceiling paintings which Ru- bens painted in 1620-1621 for the newly-built Jesuit Church in Antwerp constituted the most extensive commission he had received up to that time. They perished by fire in 1718 and this loss as Professor Martin points out in his introduction must be considered the most serious of all the misfortunes that fate has inflicted on the master’s work. However many of Rubens’s spirited grisaille sketches and final oil sketches for the canvas paintings have sur- vived and they together with documents and with contemporary copies by other artists allow us to reconstruct not only the iconography and compositions of the paintings but also their style and the overall effect of the series. In this volume Professor J.R. Martin of Prin- ceton University discusses the building of the Jesuit Church and the terms of the commis- sion given to Rubens; next he deals with the fire of 1718 and the work of the copyists while the third chapter is a critical catalogue of the surviving sketches by Rubens and shows what information can be derived from the existing copies by draughtsmen and engravers. A concluding chapter is devoted to the icono- graphy of the ceiling paintings. (MP)