Follower of Pieter Paul Rubens

Follower of PIETER PAUL RUBENS (Siegen, Germany, 1577 - Antwerp, Belgium, 1640).
"The triumph of divine love".
Oil on copper.
It presents restorations on the pictorial surface.
It has a XIX century frame with faults.
Measurements: 69 x 87 cm; 77 x 94 cm (frame).

In this copper the author shows a composition based on the Triumph of divine love, although it varies in some details. Following the words of the Prado Museum "In 1625 the archduchess Isabel Clara Eugenia commissioned Rubens to design a series of twenty tapestries for the Monastery of the Descalzas in Madrid. They deal with the theme of the Eucharist, the main dogma of Catholicism that the princess defended as sovereign princess of the southern Netherlands. The scenes were conceived by Rubens as triumphal parades, pretending to be canvases hanging from baroque architectures, which provoked a dramatic doubt between reality and artistic image. In the case of this painting, a woman representing Divine Love is standing on a triumphal chariot. She is surrounded by child angels. The bird feeding her children with blood drawn from her own breast was used since the Middle Ages as a symbol of Christ's sacrifice and also of the Eucharist. One of the angels tries to burn two intertwined serpents, which probably symbolize sin. The luminous realm we contemplate in this image is a reflection of Christ's love, communicated by the mystery of the Eucharist."
Peter Paul Rubens was a painter of the Flemish school who, nevertheless, competed on equal terms with contemporary Italian artists, and enjoyed a very important international transcendence, given that his influence was also key in other schools, as is the case of the passage to the full Baroque in Spain. Although born in Westphalia, Rubens grew up in Antwerp, where his family originated.Rubens had three teachers, the first being Tobias Verhaecht, a painter of precise and meticulous technique who had traveled to Italy, and who instilled in the young painter the first artistic rudiments. It is also possible that Rubens traveled to Italy influenced by this first master. The second was Adam van Noort, a Romanist painter also oriented towards the Italian influence, with a language still Mannerist, and who must also have influenced the young man to visit Italy. Finally, his third teacher was Otto van Veen, the most outstanding and the last of them. After his training, Rubens joined the Antwerp painters' guild in 1598. Only two years later he made a trip to Italy, where he remained between 1600 and 1608, and in 1609 he returned to the Netherlands, in the service of the governors of Flanders, Archduke Albert and the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia. In addition to being a chamber painter, Rubens will exercise diplomatic tasks for the court that will take him to visit Spain, London and Paris. In 1609 he married Isabel Brant in Antwerp and organized his workshop, hiring excellent collaborators, with whom he worked side by side, many of them being specialist painters (Frans Snyders, Jan Brueghel de Velours...). He will also take on disciples and create an excellent workshop of engravers, who will work from drawings in his own hand, and under his supervision.