Aertsen, Rubens and the questye in early modern painting

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that the early modern intellectual culture in Early Modern Europe was basically a ‘culture of quaestio’ in which the ‘question’ played a fundamental role as an educational tool, a intellectual method and - as a consequence - as a line of reasoning. Using Peter Paul Rubens’s Double portrait of Seneca and Nero and Pieter Aertsen’s Jesus in the House of Mary and Martha as prime examples, I’ll argue that certain works of art – with artistic ambition – were conceived as quaestiones disputatae rather than self-confirmatory narratives, fully in line with the intellectual/pedagogical principles of quaestiones in the early modern Low Countries.