“The Calydonian Boar Hunt” is one of Peter Paul Rubens’s works that will be on display. (photo courtesy of The J. Paul Getty Museum)

A J. Paul Getty Museum exhibition will highlight Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens’s passion for classical from Nov. 10 through Jan. 24.

The exhibition is the first to focus on Rubens’ fascination with the art and literature of ancient Greece and Rome.

Rubens was one of the most scholarly artists of the seventeenth century. Throughout his life he read classical literature in the original languages, studied the physical remains of ancient civilization, collected marble sculptures and carved gems and conducted lively correspondence with fellow antiquarians across Europe.

“This important exhibition examines how Rubens’s fascination with ancient Roman antiquities inspired his many classicizing paintings, which are among the most erudite and sophisticated images in European art,” said Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “Rubens had an extraordinary ability to translate ancient sculptures and gems into dynamic and colorful compositions, adopting the classical attributes of robust strength and idealized beauty as hallmarks of his own art.”

In 1600, Rubens traveled to Italy and was employed as a court artist by Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga in Mantua. During his next eight years in Italy, Rubens studied a variety of ancient marble sculptures and reliefs.

Rubens took an innovative approach to drawing classical sources. He studied individual sculptures over and over again, copying them from many unusual points of view, with painstaking attention to their overall composition and specific details.

“He sought to convey a sense of flesh and blood in these figures, depicting them with dynamism, pathos, and drama,” said Davide Gasparotto, senior curator of paintings and chair of curatorial affairs at the Getty Museum and co-curator of the exhibition. “These qualities became the distinguishing traits of Rubens’ own art.”

On display are chalk drawings that show Rubens’s process of studying well-known and celebrated ancient sculptures, his oil sketches for the Stage of Welcome and major international loans, including the ancient statue “Silenus with a Wineskin” from Dresden, shown with Rubens’s chalk drawing and oil painting of the Drunken Silenus.

Getty curators will also discuss Ruben’s activities as a collector of ancient works and how his knowledge of the classical past shaped his creative process during an online panel at 4 p.m. on Nov. 18.

For more information, visit getty.edu.