Rubens und die Immanenz des Bildes

Peter Paul Rubens’ large-format painting of the Battle of the Amazons dating from 1617/1618 is the focal subject of Maximilian Geiger’s study. Examining the development of early modern history painting, this book discusses the painting’s diverse aesthetic, religious, epistemological, empirical and economic aspects. Rubens’ work was created at the dawn of a new political and economic era, combining the pictorial concepts of both Leon Battista Alberti and the Catholic Reformation. The author reveals how the narrative structures of painting were differentiated into various perceptual spaces and modes of representation, and the way in which a painting’s material factors became part of a novel form of visual perception. Rubens’ painting, created on the eve of the Thirty Years' War, contributed to a new understanding of reality. Innovative research on 17th-century theories of perception and spaceVisual storytelling as a methodological challengeExemplary study on key aspects of early modern image theory