The Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) and the Italian sculptor and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini were two of the most important artists of the Baroque era. Throughout their long careers Rubens and Bernini dominated their respective mediums and set styles that were followed by many other artists. Although there are numerous differences between the two men, they had a great deal in common in their lives and in their art. Both men achieved an unusually high social standing for artists and both men served the interests of the Catholic Church in the Counter-Reformation with their elaborate, theatrical art.
Rubens was born in Siegen, Germany where his parents had fled from Antwerp. They were Calvinists who were escaping religious persecution. They later moved to Cologne and, when Rubens' father was dying in 1587, the whole family converted to Catholicism--once again to escape persecution. Had the family not converted Rubens' career would have been very different since he became "a Catholic painter par excellence" and his principal inspiration was the art of the High Renaissance in Italy (Belkin 18).
Rubens' most important teacher was the Antwerp painter Otto Van Veen, one of the Antwerp "Romanists," "a group of Flemish artists who had studied in Italy and whose work was imbued with the Humanist learning of the Renaissance" (Belkin 27). Rubens arrived in Italy himself in 1601 and the experience allowed him to study at first hand the works that would influence him most strongly. Rome was "the nerve centre of the Counter Reformation," the movement to restore the authority of the Catholic Church, which had been so badly damaged by the Protestant movements (Belkin 63).
The new artistic style, the Baroque, became associated with the Counter Reformation and "reflected its dynamism with a sense of movement and drama--sometimes verging on propagandistic theatricality" (Belkin 63). This was the style that was to reach...