The complete edition of the works of Rubens (1577-1640) discusses and reproduces all his paintings, sketches and drawings, as well as the works designed by him (tapestries, sculpture, architecture...).

The Corpus is based on the material assembled over several decades by the scholar Ludwig Burchard (1886-1960). This documentation was handed over to the city of Antwerp after his death in 1960. It has been considerably enlarged by the joined efforts of the Centrum voor de Vlaamse Kunst van de 16de en de 17de Eeuw and the Rubenianum.

The Corpus consists of 29 parts, each of which deals with a particular commission or group of subjects. Each part is written by a well-known Rubens scholar and incorporates the material accumulated by Ludwig Burchard combined with the result of his or her own studies.

The Corpus aims in this way to embody all present-day knowledge of the works of Rubens. Some fifty volumes are scheduled. More than half of them are already published. The work should be finished by 2020.

Rubens after Titian

The part on Rubens after Titian fits in the larger framework of Rubens's copies and adaptations from Italian art. This part of the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard focuses on Rubens's extensive study of Renaissance art of the sixteenth century.

When Rubens was a student in Antwerp during the 1590s, he relied mostly on engravings as reference material to make enlarged painted adaptations from Raphael and Michelangelo.

The core of Rubens's painted copies were made in the late 1620s, when he was in Madrid and London and wanted records of Italian works, that he could not buy for his own collection. The work of Titian was a beloved theme.The bulk of the catalogue entries in this volume of the Corpus Rubenianum, however, deals with Italian drawings that Rubens bought during his travels and which, it will be argued, were kept and retouched by him throughout his career. This material documents Rubens's extensive knowledge and interest in the work of Raphael, Giulio Romano, and Polidoro da Caravaggio.

Among artists closer to his own time were the Zuccari and the Carracci. Moreover these retouched drawings allow to reconstruct one of the earliest and largest collections of graphic art assembled by a late Renaissance painter, and reveal Rubens's sophisticated and complex dialogue with Italian art.