Acts of violence: Rubens and the hunt

This dissertation examines the representation of the hunt in baroque Flemish painting, and investigates the reasons why violent images of the chase became compelling for artists and viewers in seventeenth-century Europe. The fashion for such works was begun by Peter Paul Rubens, who departed from the tradition of representing the chase as a courtly pastime and instead portrayed the hunt as an agonizingly bloody combat between men and beasts. By subjecting the body to extremes of physical danger and psychological stress, Rubens' hunting scenes continue his exploration of human potential, more commonly associated with his celebrations of buoyantly corporeal heroes and heroines from history and mythology. Moving from Rubens' own artistic trajectory to the densely layered culture of the sport, Flemish hunting scenes deployed a potent metaphor of power through the representation of the killing of a bestial prey by a heroic hunter. This project situates Flemish hunting scenes in three distinct arenas where the sport figured the exercise of authority through acts of violence. At the most literal level, first of all, the noble chase endowed the hunter with the right to kill certain animals. Both visual and verbal representations portray the moment of the animal's death as the manifestation of the hunter's supreme authority. Second, in the realm of humanist rhetoric, hunting was celebrated both in texts and pictures as ideal training for war. In Flemish hunting scenes, the nostalgic ideal of noble self-sacrifice in battle compensated for the undermining of that ideal in contemporary military discourse. Finally, at the baroque court, hunting was a carefully stage-managed performance of royal authority. A case study of images of the chase in Philip IV's Madrid analyzes the role hunting played in fashioning the bureaucratic king as the nation's chief warrior. Working from the assumption that Flemish hunting scenes were embedded in a complex cultural discourse of authority and agency, this dissertation demonstrates the different ways in which these strikingly violent works provided a visual model for seventeenth-century viewers to conceptualize their roles as independent actors in situations of conflict.