Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Mythological Subjects, Paris to Venus: Volume I: Text, Volume II: Illustrations

Mythological Subjects, Paris to Venus: Volume I: Text, Volume II: Illustrations

Gruber, Gerlinde
Martin, Gregory
Jonckheere, Koenraad

Hardcover

Art HistoryEuropean Art

ISBN10: 1915487633
ISBN13: 9781915487636
Publisher: Harvey Miller
Published: Dec 31 2025
Pages: 976
Weight: 7.75
Height: 2.84 Width: 7.18 Depth: 10.48
Language: English
One remarkable feature of European culture as it developed in the Renaissance was the accommodation it made with ancient paganism. The classical gods and their legends were allegorised, transformed into symbolic figures or emblematic scenes that might accord with Christian morality. At the same time there emerged a new, secular, genre of art devoted to the depiction of the most popular myths, above all the love stories recounted by the ancient poets. These stories were not only attractive in themselves; they offered the opportunity to depict nude figures in narrative action, which the example of antiquity held forth as the highest goal for painting. Rubens was one of the greatest creators of classical allegory; he was also a supreme interpreter of the classical stories. No painter was so at home in the literature of the Greeks and Romans. When he painted for pleasure, which, increasingly in the course of his life, he felt able to do, he used pagan myth to express and celebrate themes of love, beauty and the creative forces of nature, often in wonderfully idiosyncratic ways. Still, as a Christian committed to the ideals of the Catholic Reformation, Rubens respected the restrictions generally placed on the depiction of pagan tales. Most of his mythological paintings were made for private settings, for display within houses (including his own) or in the galleries of princes, noblemen and prelates. It is a happy accident of history that so many of these splendid paintings are now widely visible in the great museums of the world.

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