The Ideal of Rubens
Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), is a Flemish Baroque painter, a proponent of extravagant Baroque style that emphasized movement, color, and sensuality.
One element of his work that he is famous for, is the "Rubenesque" style of painting, a term coined in the early 1900's in regards to his paintings to describe plump, voluptuous, curvaceous women in a flattering way. The ideal image of women during Ruben's time were considered to be curvier, heavier set women, a sign of good health and wealth for women of the seventeenth century. He incorporated a lot of his female mythological figures as being Rubenesque or of an average-set body with natural, voluptuous curves.