Copying Peter Paul Rubens: Religious painting after prints in Norway (1630-1650)

During the seventeenth century, Norway experienced great economic progress, and the population more than doubled. As a consequence, the market for immigrant painters grew and more than three hundred new church buildings were built. They included new interiors and altarpieces according to the latest Protestant requirements – often decorated with religious paintings after Dutch and Flemish engravings that reached Norway through well-developed trade relationships with places such as Amsterdam.This article explores the dominant practice of copying for the production of seventeenth-century Norwegian religious paintings. Two painters, Gottfried Hendtzschel (c.1600-c.1648) and Elias Fiigenschoug (d. c. 1660) decorated dozens of parish churches, especially altarpieces, using prints after Rubens’ compositions. Fiigenschoug, who exclusively copied prints after Rubens, practiced a collage-like method of composing scenes from different print sources. Hendtzschel reused the same prints as a template in a way that resembles a serial production-approach to painting.Neither their style nor designs can be seen as original or inventive. On the contrary, their artistic production reflects a standard working method of composing and repeating motifs by copying prints. Thanks to the medium of prints, local Norwegian painting production was able to develop and flourish. This article therefore contributes to our knowledge about the importance of prints for art historically marginalized regions, as well as to recent research on how a global visual culture was shaped by print culture in the seventeenth century.