Peter Paul Rubens and 17th-century Book Arts

We'd like to turn your attention to this excellent essay on Peter Paul Rubens by Maureen Mulvihill, a scholar who has published several essays of interest to us in the past (e.g., on Jane Austen, or Virginia Woolf). In it, she reviews an exhibition on Rubens currently at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida. The ILAB website provides this fine introduction (and a link directly to the essay in a PDF):

Specialists on 17th century books and book arts may enjoy viewing Maureen E. Mulvihill's illustrated exhibition review of the Rubens show at the Ringling Museum, Sarasota, Florida (February 17th-June 3rd, 2012). The review (12 pp, with a Gallery of Images from the installation) is published in Seventeenth-Century News (Spring-Summer, 2012). The Ringling's permanent collection includes five Rubens canvases (the Louvre, two). The show presents selections from Ringling's Rubens collection and many fine prints of the master's work (engravings, woodcuts) on loan from the Royal Museum of Fine Art, Antwerp.

In addition to the show's spectacular installation (4 large galleries) and its creative multimedia approach (visual art, printed books, electronic exhibit, original 'didactic' constructions), the show wisely brings attention to the painter's successful collaboration with book publishers in seventeenth-century Holland, most especially the Plantin Press at Antwerp, for which Rubens produced frontispieces, ornate title-pages, printers' devices, and other book arts. (Dr Mulvihill's essay includes embedded links on these subjects.) Likewise, the show highlights Rubens's (prescient) advocacy of intellectual property rights: he established a copyright for prints of his paintings which circulated in Holland, England, France, and Spain.