1st Edition

Rubens and the Archaeology of Myth, 1610–1620 Visual and Poetic Memory

By Aneta Georgievska-Shine Copyright 2009
242 Pages
by Routledge

242 Pages
by Routledge

Focusing on four Rubens paintings created between 1610 and 1620 - Prometheus Bound, The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, Juno and Argus, and The Finding of Erichthonius - this book re-examines the artist's approach to classical mythology. These theoretically-informed readings provide a fuller understanding of the dynamics of Rubens's copious visual language, and can serve as methodological... Read more
Contents: Preface; Introduction: Rubens and the historical sense of ancient myths; The revolt of the imagination and the reason of history in Prometheus Bound; The Daughters of Leucippus and the exemplarity of a rape; The Eyes of Argus and the eloquence of hieroglyphs; Erichthonius, or the serious joke of fables; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

Biography

Aneta Georgievska-Shine is an independent scholar in Washington D.C., who teaches part-time in the Departments of Art History and Fine Arts at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her publications include articles in journals such as Artibus et Historiae, Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, The Art Bulletin, Word and Image, and Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, as well as essays in several anthologies and exhibition catalogues.

'Aneta Georgievska-Shine properly situates Rubens and his erudite mythological paintings of the teens within a late Renaissance culture, steeped in both classical literature, especially as a source of myths and imagery, and contemporary artistic theory.' Larry Silver, University of Pennsylvania, USA

'...the argument grows richer and more absorbing as its layers build and their interconnections come to light ... Using an essay approach to focus so intensely on four great, but underappreciated, masterpieces keeps the author's encompassing ideas about meta-narrative and semantic polyvalence well grounded and ultimately, I believe, incontrovertible.' David R. Smith, University of New Hampshire, USA