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Rubens: The Garden of Love As Conversatie a LA Mode (Oculi : Studies in the Arts of the Low Countries, Vol.4)
Rubens The Garden of Love As Conversatie a LA Mode - Oculi : Studies in the Arts of the Low Countries, Vol.4 Author:Elise Goodman A comprehensive, interdisciplinary study of Rubens's celebrated painting in the Prado, popularly known as the "Garden of Love", but more properly termed "Conversatie a la Mode" or "Conversatie van Joffrs" (young women), as it was designated in 17th-century documents. The picture depicts a "conversation" in the contemporaneous sense of the term: ... more »a modish company engaging in agreeable interchange or discourse, with women as the presiders and the centre of interest. Goodman demonstrates that the "Conversatie" embodies ideas on manners, patterns of courtship and general social interaction of polite society, of which Rubens was a conscious and prominent member. This society looked to Paris as the capital of fashion, "conspicuous leisure" and civilizing play in the 1630s, when Rubens painted the "Conversatie". The picture reflects Rubens's taste for gallantry, honnetete and la mode, concepts propagated in Parisian salons, the courtesy literature generated by them, and tracts on fashion. It also mirrors the painter's personal interest in French avant-garde writers, such as Theophile de Viau, Tristan l'Hermite, and Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac, whose amatory themes, metaphorical language and natural settings parallel the "Conversatie". As a "Conversatie van Joffrs", the painting uses images and conventions analogous to those in love lyrics and tracts on female beauty. It also shares iconographic and compositional motifs with French society, amatory and fashion prints of the period, which Rubens was familiar with. Specifically, Rubens draws on an international convention of the iconography of beautiful women conceived in Franco-Flemish popular prints of the 1630s: many of these and other society engravings are reproduced here for the first time. This new reading of the "Conversatie a la Mode" in its artistic, social, cultural and literary framework should appeal not only to Rubens specialists and art historians, but also to students of 17th-century society and culture at large.« less