‘He thought it was fun’: how Rubens painted over an old master to give it life

Hi-tech imaging reveals the artist tinkered with Herri met de Bles’s painting to improve the composition of figuresOne benefit of being among history’s greatest artists is that if you don’t much like a painting done by someone else, you can just improve it. The Dutch master Sir Peter Paul Rubens certainly knew how to paint people; Rubenesque is still used to describe a curvaceous, ample body. So when he noticed the inferior quality of the religious figures depicted on an otherw