Alpha Book

Just as books were a means
of multiplying, cheapening, and disseminating ideas, so engravings on
copper or wood were the means of multiplying, cheapening, and
disseminating pictures which gave vividness to the ideas, or served in
place of books for those who could not read.
The impetus afforded by this extraordinary development of painting
continued to affect the sixteenth century and a greater part of the
seventeenth. The scene shifted, however, from Italy to the Spanish
possessions. And Spanish kings, the successors of Philip II, patronized
such men as Rubens (1577-1640) and Van Dyck (1599-1641) in the Belgian
Netherlands, or Velasquez (1590-1660) and Murillo (1617-1682) in Spain
itself.
[Sidenote: Rubens and Van Dyck]
If the work of Rubens displayed little of the earlier Italian grace and
refinement, it at any rate attained to distinction in the purely
fanciful pictures which he painted in bewildering numbers, many of
which, commissioned by Marie de' Medici and King Louis XIII of France,
are now to be seen in the Louvre galleries in Paris.


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