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Excerpt from Rubens His Life, His Work, and His Time, Vol. 1 of 2
Rubens's history is well known. His correspondence, although only a portion of it has been preserved, is voluminous. And his con temporaries wrote of him in great detail. We owe much information concerning him to Sandrart, who knew him personally. After his death the facts he had collected were supplemented by the biographical notes furnished to Bellori and De Piles by Philip Rubens, the artist's nephew. But it is only in our own day that these various statements have been properly verified. A Dutch scholar, R. C. Bakhuizen van den Brink, was the first to penetrate the secret of the place of the artist's birth and of the mysterious events that determined it. For the Italian period, M. Armand Baschet's fortunate discoveries in the Archives of Mantua have enlightened us concerning the length of Rubens's visit to Italy, his life at Vincenzo Gonzaga's court, the varied means of instruction he found there and the first pictures he painted. To Cruzada Villaamil and to Justi we owe interesting details of his two missions to Spain, of which M. Gachard has given a careful account in his H z'stoz're Politz'que ot Dz'plomatz'que do Rubens. Several collections of Rubens's letters have been published, annotated by Em. Gachet, Carpenter, Sainsbury and Ad. Rosenberg. The recent publication of a fine edition of Peiresc's letters, with excellent notes by M. Tamizey de Larroque, throws much new light on Rubens's visits to France and on the friends there with whom he carried on a regular correspondence.
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