What is it about?
In this chapter I offer a new interpretation of Rubens’s most intriguing eschatological work, the large painting of The Fall of the Damned of about 1621, now in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Its curious iconography still puzzles art historians today. I argue that the most striking feature of Rubens’s painting, the unusually dynamic depiction of the world’s fiery end, is related to the powerful prophecy of the fiery dissolution of the cosmos, as described in the Second Epistle of Peter (2 Peter 3:10–13). As I show, this biblical passage became crucially relevant in the debates about the nature of the heavens, which intensified with the new astronomical discoveries of the 1610s and, especially, the appearance of the three comets in the autumn of 1618, the very first ones to be observed through the telescope. By focusing on the moment when time and space dissolve into eternity, Rubens created a powerful apocalyptic narrative that responded to the eschatological anxieties of his time and the general awareness that the world had grown old.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
My chapter demonstrates that, in early modern period, cosmological and eschatological views of world transformation were closely interrelated. The heavenly phenomena that telescopes had now made visible to the human eye were understood, on the one hand, as indications that the old Aristotelian world order could no longer be upheld, and on the other hand, as supernatural spectacles orchestrated by God.
Perspectives
This chapter has given me the opportunity to examine Rubens’s eschatological imagination in the context of a broader preoccupation with the world’s final moments at a time of cultural, religious, and geopolitical crisis, when different cosmological and confessional views were competing against each other. I was able to show that , at the turn of the seventeenth century, the physical nature of the heavens as compared with that of the earth became a question of central importance, passionately debated by religious professionals, philosophers, astronomers, and artists alike, regardless of the world system to which they adhered. Was the supralunar world indeed perfect and unchanging, as Aristotle and Christian doctrine had taught for centuries until the recent past, or was it, like the mutable and corrupt terrestrial sphere, subject to an endless cycle of generation and decay? And, if the latter, how did this affect the ways in which intellectuals Imagined their own futures and how artists viewed their own works?
Christine Göttler
Universitat Bern
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Depicting the Universal Conflagration: Time, Space, and Artifice in Peter Paul Rubens’s Fall of the Damned, October 2024, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004688247_003.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
