ABSTRACT
Peter Paul Rubens was arguably the quintessential northern humanist artist of his age, and drawing had formed the basis of a humanist artist's training since the early Renaissance in Italy. He collected and documented a wide range of antiquarian coins, sculpture, and texts and used countless works of classical and classically inspired art, often known through sculptures, engravings, and paintings he saw on his travels or collected in his studio, as emulative models for his own practice. Like the classical Roman artists he often emulated as a master draftsman and painter, Rubens often exploited the power of visual rhetoric to persuade viewers not only of fundamental ideas and values, but also, by extension, his own humanist, artistic superiority and exceptional erudition. Rubens also fashioned himself as a particularly eloquent humanist artist, a fact that holds significant repercussions for a better understanding of his unusually eclectic approach to drawing and the functional role these works played in his wider enterprise.
