Flemish Baroque
In the Catholic, Spanish Netherlands Peter Paul Rubens made Antwerp one of the art centres of Europe. With Anthony van Dyck, Jacob Jordaens and Frans Snyders the Baroque took on a Flemish character full of movement, flesh and colour.
After the division of 1585 Antwerp had lost its trade, but the church and the court needed art. The iconoclasm had emptied the churches, and the Counter-Reformation wanted to fill them again with large altarpieces that could move the faithful. Under the Archdukes Albert and Isabella, who ruled from Brussels, and during the truce with the north in 1609–1621, a new flowering came.
Peter Paul Rubens returned in 1608 from eight years in Italy and became court painter to the archdukes. With The Elevation of the Cross and The Descent from the Cross in Antwerp Cathedral he showed how Italian grandeur and Flemish colour could be combined. His workshop delivered altarpieces, mythologies, portraits and designs for tapestries and books to courts and churches all over Europe.
A whole generation worked around Rubens. Anthony van Dyck became one of the foremost portrait painters of the age, first in Genoa and then at the court of Charles I in London. Jacob Jordaens painted fat, boisterous feasts, Frans Snyders animals and still lifes, and Jan Brueghel the Elder flowers and small landscapes. David Teniers the Younger and Adriaen Brouwer depicted peasants and taverns.