Rubens und die Immanenz des Bildes

Taking Peter Paul Rubens’ *Battle of the Amazons* (1617/1618) as his starting point, Maximilian Geiger explores in this study the development of early modern history painting in the Netherlands. He examines the religious, economic, and empirical factors, as well as the aesthetic and epistemological aspects, that shaped this development since the Quattrocento. Rubens’ works, created at the turn of a new political and economic era, demonstrate a transformed understanding of the image, in which the pictorial concepts of Leon Battista Alberti and the Catholic Reformation were reflected upon and modified. Maximilian Geiger demonstrates that the narrative structures of painting are rooted in various perceptual spaces and modes of representation, and that the materiality of the images is an integral part of a new form of visual perception. He illustrates that Rubens contributed to a new way of apprehending reality through his painting. Innovative research on 17th-century theories of perception and spaceVisual storytelling as a methodological challengeExemplary study on key aspects of early modern image theory