Rubens: Passion, Faith, Sensuality and the Art of the Baroque

His legacy consists of over two thousand pictures - an imposing and contradictory life's work, with which Rubens, the disciplined artist and diplomat, educated in the humanist tradition, transposed the achievements of Renaissance painting into the Baroque age and built a bridge between north and south, between Italian and Flemish art. The film interprets the great altar paintings, the portraits and self portraits and the famous mythological and historical portrayals: In his mythological pictures Rubens incorporated his experiences of human passions and the dynamics of nature. In the Medici cycle for the Queen of France the painter's baroque feeling for life is expressed with the greatest clarity: political activity appears as the Atrum Mundi, as a portrayal of a sensibly ordered world. Life can succeed, evil can be overcome: this is Rubens' message which he expressed in his art.