![]() Historical sources reveal very different materials: Besides paper, silk, ivory or velvet we find jeweled metal containers that made it possible to fix the portrait on one’s own body. ![]() In particular the article focuses on the envelopes in which English Renaissance portrait miniatures – like human bodies – were protected. This paper examines a group of artifacts that are paradigmatic for images worn on the body: the portrait jewel. By focusing on Rubens’s interest in traditional lapidary matters as well as in nascent scientific enquiry, and by attending to pictorial detail, I aim to shed light on how the artist not only acquired and valued minerals but how precious stones were thematised in portraits and subjects from mythology and the Bible. During the first two decades of the seventeenth century at which time Rubens was a visitor, Rome was a centre for the development of mineralogical science and collecting, not least through the Accademia dei Lincei with whose members Rubens was associated. There is evidence that the artist not only owned raw stones but dealt in diamonds. Antwerp, the artist’s home city, was a major centre for global trade in precious stones. By focusing on material I address an aspect of Rubens’s life and work that has by comparison been largely ignored. ![]() ![]() Unsurprisingly the main focus of Rubens scholarship has been iconographical. ![]() Rubens has been recognised as an artist of extraordinary erudition as well as a collector, diplomat and linguist. ![]()
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