The Neapolitan Lives and Careers of Netherlandish Immigrant Painters (1575–1655). Marije Osnabrugge. Amsterdam Studies in the Dutch Golden Age. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019. 382 pp. €119.
manners of execution, under Lusheck’s probing, attentive eye both yield rich rhetorical and moral meanings in the mold of Neo-Stoic notions of virtue. In the sheet with sketches of Medea and Her Children (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles), Rubens transforms his diverse figural sources so as to challenge the viewer’s capacities to see the tragically murderous mother with both moral outrage and human empathy. The seeming naturalism of the Kneeling Male Nude (Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam) is a “façade” (181)—the metaphor deliberately invokes Vitruvius’s understanding of the correspondence between architectural and human proportions—upon the construction of the male nude as an ideal figure, capable of powerful, virtuous action. The sensitive and erudite close looking that grounds Luscheck’s thorough unpacking of these drawings’ philosophical and rhetorical content rewards the reader even as her analyses introduce some redundancies to the text. Rubens and the Eloquence of Drawing is a significant addition to the literature on Rubens and an effective model of “a more expansive approach to drawing and its functions” (27) in early modern Europe. Lusheck’s lucid prose and the generous quantity of illustrations enable the reader to fully engage with the drawings as repositories of Rubens’s learned and complex thought.