Lore of the Studio: Van Dyck, Rubens, and the Status of Portraiture

This dissertation offers a new interpretation of Anthony van Dyck’s art and career, taking as its point of departure a body of contemporary anecdotes, poems, and art theoretical texts that all responded to Van Dyck’s portrait sittings. It makes a decisive break with previous scholarship that explained Van Dyck’s focus on portraiture in terms of an intellectual deficit or a pathological fixation on status. Instead, I argue that throughout his career, Van Dyck consciously made the interaction between painter and sitter a central theme of his art. Offering an alternate account of Van Dyck’s relat... Mehr ...