ABSTRACT
The turn of the seventeenth century represents a compelling moment in the history of drawing and style in northern Europe: one in which an ever-growing attention to the qualitative potential of style coincided with a rising historical consciousness and sense of the self, an interest in artistic “self-fashioning” and viewer consciousness, and a growing interest in drawings by a rising new breed of art collectors and connoisseurs called liefhebbers, including in Rubens’s Flanders. 1 At the turn of the seventeenth century, Rubens’s hometown of Antwerp – then called the “Crossroads of Europe” – was situated, like Paris at mid-century, at the heart of this renewed stylistic and rhetorical consciousness in the north, and Rubens was as close to its center as anyone. A great mercantile and port town on the Scheldt River, wealthy Antwerp prided itself on being a recently great (albeit already rapidly declining) center of European agricultural production and trade; it was also the center of Catholic, Spanish and Jesuit, influence in the north, and a key publishing city for humanist texts disseminated throughout Europe and beyond. The famed Plantin Press in Leiden and subsequent Plantin-Moretus Press in Antwerp, with which Justus Lipsius, Rubens, his brother Philip, and their mutual friend (and Christopher Plantin’s grandson) Balthasar I Moretus were all closely allied, played a key publishing role in this unique cultural moment by printing some of the most influential humanist and style tracts of the day, including a host of important volumes by Lipsius. 2
