Starting out from Peter Paul Rubens’ The Battle of the Amazons (1617/1618), in this study Maximilian Geiger researches the development of early-modern history painting in the Netherlands. He examines religious, economic and empirical factors, as well as aesthetic and epistemological aspects that have influenced this development since the quattrocento. Rubens’ works, created at the dawn of a new political and economic era, reveal a transformed understanding of the image, reflecting upon and modifying the pictorial concepts of Leon Battista Alberti and the Catholic Reformation. Geiger shows that the narrative structures of painting have their roots in different perceptual spaces and modes of representation, demonstrating how the images’ materiality became integral to an innovative form of visual perception. He illustrates the way in which, through his painting, Rubens contributed to a new understanding of reality. Innovative research on 17th-century theories of perception and spaceVisual storytelling as a methodological challengeExemplary study on key aspects of early modern image theory
