Rubens'sConversatie à la Mode:Garden of Leisure, Fashion, and Gallantry

Abstract

Rubens's Conuersatie à la Mode (ca. 1632-34), rather than being a moral-philosophical allegory, as scholars have claimed, is the most important conversation picture of its time and shares iconographic components with contemporaneous society paintings and fashion plates. Its original title betrays its meaning — a modish group of people in fashionable social interaction. It expresses the ideals, manners, and leisure-time pursuits of good society, as they are documented in courtesy books. Its pictorial imagery relates to Baroque poetic conventions which compare the woman's beauty to that of flowers and goddesses, and it evokes the poetic topoi of the garden as a metaphor for the lady's radiance and of the“ amorous grove,” a backdrop for courtship and dalliance.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.