Christine Göttler: “Igneous Art: Rubens on Metamorphic Matter”

co-sponsored by the Program in Early Modern Studies, the Italian Studies Department, and the History of Art Department

Stories of elemental beginnings and endings were of crucial importance for Rubens’s art as he explored the power of natural and supernatural forces to create and destroy matter and life in many of his paintings. At the center of my talk is Rubens’s so-called Fall of the Damned (Munich, ca. 1620), showing the universal conflagration just before the world ceases to exist and time turns into eternity. How did Rubens translate biblical and natural philosophical accounts of disasters into his own medium of paint? My interest focuses, on the one hand, on the widely shared and growing preoccupation with the physical substance of the heavens in the age of telescopic observation and, on the other, on Rubens’s use of cosmic and meteorological extremes to reflect on the metamorphic and mutable nature of his own work.