Pleasure and Flesh in the Art of Rubens

Peter Paul Rubens created a new kind of fleshy body, turning folds and fat from signs of sin into vivid emblems of nature, nourishment, and joy. Moving from Bacchic revels, through intimate portraits of his wives and children, to the Allegory of Peace, Sara Benninga shows how Rubens shifts attention from early modern anxieties about illicit excess to a realm of licit pleasures where wine, marriage, family and civic concord are deeply intertwined. The study offers art and cultural historians as well as readers interested in the depiction of the body and emotions in art history new insights into Rubens's paintings, and an original understanding of how his early modern images made pleasure visible and reshaped the painted body.

Sara Benninga is an art historian and contemporary artist whose research focuses on early modern Northern European painting, with particular emphasis on Peter Paul Rubens, Dutch and Flemish visual culture, the history of the body, and the politics of pleasure. Benninga completed her PhD in art history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and lectures in the department of art history at Tel Aviv University and in the department of visual and material culture at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. Her research addresses Baroque allegory, the afterlives of classical mythology, and the body and the senses in early modern art, often combining close visual analysis with intellectual and cultural history.