Rubens and the World

In the autumn of 2027, marking 450 years since the birth of Peter Paul Rubens, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA) and the Rubenshuis will jointly present a major exhibition that offers a fresh perspective on the artist and his era. Rubens and the World draws on recent international research and examines Rubens and his milieu through the lens of early modern globalisation. This is the first time that this global dimension of his work has been showcased on such a scale in Rubens’s own city.

In the 17th century, Antwerp was a bustling port city where goods, ideas and people from all corners of the globe converged. Rubens and his contemporaries were introduced to exotic fabrics, animals and objects from distant lands, and came into contact with people from other cultures. They studied what they saw at close quarters and incorporated their impressions into their art. The exhibition shows how this exchange of materials, knowledge and images helped shape artistic practice in Antwerp, and how Rubens, in turn, developed an international visual language that spread across the world.

Through paintings, drawings and sculptures by Rubens and his contemporaries, in dialogue with textiles, natural history objects, maps, books and documents, a narrative of mobility and exchange unfolds. Visitors discover how trade networks, missionary work, colonial structures and scientific curiosity together shaped the visual universe of the early modern period. At the same time, it reveals how art and visual motifs from Antwerp travelled around the world and took on new meanings elsewhere.

The exhibition is structured around various forms of exchange: Antwerp as an international crossroads; portraits in foreign dress; works of art made from materials such as American silver and African ivory; the study of animals and plants in a rapidly expanding world; and the presence of people of African descent in 17th-century Antwerp. Each section demonstrates how artistic creation was intertwined with global networks and power dynamics.

Rubens and the World invites visitors to experience the early modern period as a dynamic network of connections, conflicts and cross-fertilisation. By placing iconic works in dialogue with objects and stories from different continents, the exhibition offers a multi-layered and surprisingly contemporary perspective on Rubens and the world he depicted — a world that is closer to our own than we might imagine.