ABSTRACT
In the Italian Renaissance tradition, master artists had long pushed pupils to learn to draw and paint first through copying good visual models in the studio, and eventually learning the master's graphic style. In the Italian Renaissance workshop, learning the style of a great model, especially one's master, thus held the promise of improving one's own work. Contemporary early modern sources also contributed in important ways to Peter Paul Rubens' ideas of eloquence and rhetorical excellence, especially those circulating in the context of newly revived personal epistles, essays, and Attic prose in the larger sphere of Lipsian influence. In brief, Rubens enjoyed his own keen eye for style, content, and the persuasive power of eloquence stripped bare, as earlier promoted by L. Annaei Seneca and Justus Lipsius, in the intimate realm of personal letter writing. Some of Lipsius's and Rubens's most important rhetorical strategies in the epistolary sphere also appear in a cognate, graphic form in Rubens's early drawings.
