A Source for Rubens's Modello of the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin in Leningrad: A Case Study in the Response to Images

One of the standard art-historical exercises is the search for the pictorial sources of individual works of art. The purpose of this article is to suggest that this exercise need not constitute an end in itself, as it usually does, but that it can yield valuable information about the status of an image in a given social context and about the response it evokes. Rubens's modello of The Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin in Leningrad raises a number of iconographic problems; these in turn are largely resolved by the discovery of an important pictorial source for the work. That source and it... Mehr ...