{"product_id":"the-making-of-rubens-9780300060102","title":"The Making of Rubens","description":"\u003cp\u003eRubens has long been considered a remarkably successful  prolific  and fleshly painter  a frequenter of the courts of the great. He is more admired than loved in our time  in contrast to the troubled figure of Rembrandt. This book takes up basic questions about Rubenss art and life  studies two of his bacchic paintings in detail  and discovers him in a less easy and more identifiably modern predicament. The first problem Alpers addresses is one of the relationship between making art and national consciousness. Why and how did Rubens paint the revelling Flemish peasants in the great Louvre Kermis? The circumstances  tone  and feeling of this picture are investigated and found to involve deep ambivalences that are political  social  and aesthetic. The second problem is that of art and its consumption. Beginning with Watteau  the making of a Rubensian art is traced in the taste for Rubens in the eighteenth century in France  where many of the pictures he had kept for his own collection had found their way. In the writings of Roger de Piles and in the work of the painters to follow  art is made out of the viewing and discussing of art. A binary system of taste emerged for Rubens as contrasted with Poussin  and critical distinctions came to be fashioned in the binary terms of gender. Finally  Alpers considers creativity itself and how  as a man and as a painter  Rubens could have viewed his own generative talent. An analysis of his Munich Silenus - fleshy  intoxicated  and  following Virgils account  disempowered as a condition of producing his songs - reveals a sense of the creative gift as humanly indeterminate and equivocal. Fully illustrated with many drawings and paintings in color  this book complicates and deepens the interest of Rubens and of his works.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45665841676341,"sku":"ByrdShop_0300060106","price":101.48,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780300060102.jpg?v=1782409719","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-making-of-rubens-9780300060102","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}