Copies and Adaptations from Renaissance and later Artists. German and Netherlandish Artists

Rubens studied his own artistic heritage. In bis early youth he copied German illustrated books, such as Holbeins Dance of Death, Tobias Stimmers Bible (1576), Jost Ammans Flavius Josephus (1580) and the immensely popular Petrarch edi-tion with woodcuts attributed to Hans Weiditz (1532). He also made drawings after engravings by Hendrick Goltzius (1596-97) and Johannes Stradanus (1589). These copies fall into Rubenss youth or the years immedi-ately following his return to Antwerp. In later years, he oc-casionally copied from the paintings of his predecessors and compatriots, but he preferred to retain their compositions and designs by collecting and retouching their works.
He reworked drawings by German masters such as Hans Holbein the Younger, Hans Sùss von Kulmbach and several artists from the school of Dùrer. Sheets of Netherlandish masters were retouched by Rubens: Cornelis Bos, Bernard van Orley, Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Michiel Coxcie, Aertgen and Lucas van Leyden, Jan Swart van Groningen and Marten van Heemskerck. He also paintcd copies from works by artists such as Hans Holbein, Quinten Massys, Willem Key, Joos van Cleve, Jan Vermeyen and Adam Elsheimer.

Although no direct copies by Rubens after Pieter Bruegel the Elder are known, his late landscapes and genre scenes betray a profound influence frorn this great Flemish predecessor. He owned a number of drawings and paintings of peasant festivities with their accompanying scenes of drunkenness and brawls. It is in this category of works that we encounter ali but one of the surviving Northern paintings retouched by Rubens. Among the Netherlandish paintings retouched by Rubens listed in seventeenth-century Antwerp inventories but no longer identifìable, at least one is also of a low-life subject: a Brothel Scene, possibly by Marten van Cleve.