Ruben's Graphic Eclecticism: Style, Eloquence, and the Matter of Drawing, ca. 1600-1620

The drawings of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), as much or more than any other draftsman of the early modern period, exhibit a profound interest in the mastery and mobilization of various stylistic forms to achieve a range of expressive effects. This dissertation introduces the question of Rubens's commitment to graphic copia as a springboard for exploring his interest in achieving rhetorical eloquence in individual drawings, especially in the first decades of the seventeenth century. Sharing a Flemish, Neostoic concern for reuniting "matter" (form) with "substance" (content) through style, and creating a new "living" artistic language that would respond to the needs and tastes of his own time, Rubens took a flexible, eclectic approach to drawing as a way to reinvigorate art and restore the underlying artistic intelligence that he believed characterized the best models of the past. The introduction shows how a rhetorical model, especially the personal epistolary genre widely promoted in Rubens's humanistic circles, helps in understanding the nature and implications of his seemingly improvisational, eclectic approach to drawing. This dissertation then offers three extended case studies of individual sheets from this formative graphic period, with an eye to the qualitative and unusually self-conscious approach he took to the denotation and connotation of graphic form. The drawings under consideration include: A Kneeling Male Nude (Rotterdam, Boymans-van Beuningen Museum), Medea Fleeing with her Dead Children (Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum) and A Fallen Tree with Brambles (Chatsworth, Duke of Devonshire Collection). In each, Rubens argued eloquently for underlying concepts-respectively, ideal, male robustness, the pathetic, dual nature of a Senecan grande ame and the variety and regeneration of the Flemish landscape through a seemingly "after-life" motif through an "apt" use and transformation of a range of esteemed models. These studies demonstrate an inextricable relationship in Rubens's drawings between their facture and underlying content, arguing that judiciousness (judicio), innate wit (ingenium) and a desire for appropriate, decorous applications of graphic form (apte dicere ) often provided the underpinnings for Rubens's remarkable, indeed singular, variety of graphic approaches.