The word Rubenesque conjures lush, sensual excess, yet the man behind it lived a life of extreme discipline as a clandestine agent, an international diplomat and a business mogul who ran what amounted to an art factory. This episode uncovers how Peter Paul Rubens, born in supervised exile after his father’s treasonous affair with the wife of William of Orange, became the most famous artist in 17th-century Europe and a knight of two kingdoms.

We trace the Rubens family’s flight from Antwerp during the Iconoclastic Fury, the 6,000-thaler bail that ruined them, his mother’s strategic return to Catholicism, his time as a court page, and the Pictor Doctus ideal instilled by Otto van Veen. We follow his eight years in Italy studying Titian, Michelangelo and Caravaggio, his unprecedented court-painter contract that let him stay in Antwerp, the three-tier studio system, his early copyright privilege, and the espionage woven into portrait sittings and art shipments. We cover his ennoblement by Philip IV, his knighthood by Charles I, his second marriage to sixteen-year-old Helena Fourment, his retirement to the Steen estate, and his death from gout-induced heart failure in 1640.

• How a childhood of scandal and financial anxiety forged an obsession with respectability and leverage
• The learned painter: why Rubens needed to be the intellectual equal of the kings who hired him
• Three price tiers, specialist collaborators like Frans Snyders, and mass-produced engravings
• Why a famous painter was the perfect spy: unquestioned access, free travel and crates for secret letters
• Rubenesque women, hyper-muscular men, and the final landscapes painted purely for himself