Guided Pathway

The sequence of oil paintings from Rubens through van Haecht, Moeyaert, and Rembrandt tells a story about the difficult terrain a “true” Baroque had to traverse on its way to a position of leadership in the “north’s” successfully inheritance of antiquity’s “pathos formulae.” These three non-oil images, all of which served as conduits between a more or less corrupt, because merely monumental (Italian) Baroque, and its northern successor, comment on just how complex this task of mediation was. They include two print etchings – the first by Dutch printmaker Pieter Claez Soutman (d. 1657) after Rubens’ “Rape of Proserpina” (c. 1640) (#4) and the second by Italian Antonio Tempesta (1555-1630) (#2.3) (1606), which also served as the print frontispiece of a 1634 edition of a “Rape of Proserpina”-opera, Ontschakingh van Proserpina, by Jacob Struys (d. 1630) (#2.1, #2.2, and #14 are also from the Struys opera and also presumably by Tempesta), and one of only two drawings in the panel, namely the German Christopher Schwarz’s “Abduction of Proserpina” (#5 - second half of the 16th century).