Prado Museum recreates workshop of the prolific baroque painter Rubens

Madrid. In contemporary art, mass production of works of art is common, although this formula had already been used, although on a smaller scale, in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. One of the best exponents of this form of artisanal work, but with an industrial touch, was Pedro Pablo Rubens (1577-1640), the Baroque painter of the Flemish school who became one of the court artists par excellence.

The Prado Museum decided to recreate its workshop u workshop to understand the creative and production process of one of the most prolific artists of his time, of whom up to 1,500 paintings have been identified, of which 91 are in the Madrid art gallery, making it the largest collection in the world. world of the painter.

He taller by Rubens is a project that began two years ago and was based on the original idea of ​​one of the main bastions of the Madrid museum, the historian Alejandro Vergara, head of conservation of Flemish painting.

The idea was to recreate that workshopwith its usual disorder and dirt, to emulate a chance work meeting between Rubens, his collaborators and the public, since the Flemish artist had an essential production system to be able to attend to the numerous commissions he received, most of them from European royal houses. of the time.

This is how the exhibition was born Rubens’ workshopwhich is located in the rooms of the Permanent Collection and is distinguished by its installation, in the style of a baroque installation, and because as soon as you enter the room you can smell a penetrating smell of turmantine, one of the most present in the ancient workshops and that it was vital for the paintings to achieve the bright and authentic colors that were then captured on the canvases. The exhibition is made up of 30 works that include paintings made by Rubens himself alone, some painted by his assistants and others are the result to different degrees of collaboration between the artist and his assistants.

Next to the paintings, a staging of the workshop was installed, which includes all the tools necessary for his work, as well as some elements that evoke the artist’s corporality, such as a cape, a sword and a hat.

The exhibition seeks to explain that although all the paintings that left Rubens’s workshop bore his stamp, his contemporaries and he himself valued those painted entirely by the master more, as was common among European artists of the Modern Age.

With works like the print Olive color, of Johannes Stradanus, and the allegory of painting, by Jan Brueghel the Younger, shows how there were teams of artists dedicated to different tasks, from preparing the supports, brushes and colors to painting the paintings. These were the workshops where painters carried out their craft and created their works in series.

There is an evocation of Rubens the person but, above all, of Rubens the painter. The proposal is a way to delve into one of the most important questions that an art museum can address, which is the artist’s creation process, who are the actors, what is the physical space, the social and economic conditions and what is the result, dealing with two fundamental concepts such as authorship and qualityexplained the director of the Prado Museum, Miguel Falomir.

An example of the nature of the sample is the comparison between two pieces, the Saturn devouring a sonwhich was commissioned by King Philip IV and is one of the great jewels of the museum, with another painting designed by Rubens, but which was made in the workshop, with hardly any of his participation.

It was the time when Rubens felt old and tired and had no time to paint, but the king was obsessed with his painting and commissioned an enormous number of paintings from him. That is where you can see a big difference between the wonderful works that Rubens created and others that are much weaker, even mediocre, that his assistants created. It’s a way to discover great art and everything else. The paintings are made at the same time and come from the same place. That’s the paradoxVergara explained.

The exhibition will be open to the public from today until February 16.