Rubens and the Dominican Church in Antwerp: Art and Political Economy in an Age of Religious Conflict

This thesis is about the Dominican Church in Antwerp, today the Sint-Pauluskerk and the role of the artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) in shaping its seventeenth-century paintings scheme. It is structured around three works of art, the Fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary cycle (in situ), Caravaggio’s Rosary Madonna (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) and Rubens’ high altarpiece Saints Dominic and Francis Saving the World from the Wrath of Christ (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon). All were acquired during the Twelve Years’ Truce (1609-1621) a period of intensive ecclesiastical regeneration in the Spanish Netherlands. Within the lifetime of Rubens the church and monastery were completely rebuilt, the choir having been demolished during the Calvinist Republic (1577-1585). The result was a church that was said to surpass many others in ‘beauty and majesty’ in northern Europe. This thesis reconceptualises sacred space as a theatre of political economy in which artworks indexed the social capital of their sponsors and creators. Using methodologies at the cutting edge of the humanities including cultural memory, object biography and network theory the place of the Dominican Church is restored to the crux of Antwerp’s mercantile and civic life. The monastery wanted paintings such as the Mysteries cycle for their didactic value but also to attract further investment from an affluent bourgeoisie. Meanwhile the Wrath of Christ was engineered to articulate the proselytising mission of the Dominican Order which in the early modern period acquired global outreach. The author advances an original approach to cultural production in a time of war. By incorporating a plethora of visual material in multi-media, by bringing new archival discoveries to light and by treating paintings as objects rather than images the author shows how meaning in religious art was produced exogenously in its architectural setting with the active participation of patrons and audiences.