Notes

• Accompanies an exhibition at the National Gallery, London from 26 October 2005 to 15 January 2006
• "Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) was a prodigious artist and one of the most extraordinary figures of the seventeenth century. He eventually became the dominant international painter of his generation, and this book traces his progress from hesitant beginnings in the late 1590s through to the first works made after his triumphant return to Antwerp in 1608. Most of the eight intervening years were spent in Italy, where he was inspired by classical sculpture, by the work of Renaissance masters - above all Michelangelo and Raphael - and by the revolutionary styles of Caravaggio and other contemporaries." "This book follows the artist’s creative engagement with these sources and others, exploring where Rubens went and, more importantly, what he saw. He studied and copied avidly, finally transforming his influences into a style that, in paintings such as The Fall of Plaeton (National Gallery of Art, Washington), Ecce Homo (State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg) and Samson and Delilah (The National Gallery, London) is entirely, breathtakingly, his own."–BOOK JACKET