This book, one of four devoted to Rubens's portraiture, contains a
catalogue of all the portraits of unidentified individuals attributed by
Ludwig Burchard or by the authors to Rubens and executed in Antwerp. The
volume thus complements the catalogue of all the portraits of known
persons painted by Rubens in Antwerp, published in the Corpus Rubenianum
Ludwig Burchard as Part XIX.2 in 1987. A decade earlier the volume on
the portraits painted by Rubens outside Antwerp (XIX. 1) had inaugurated
the series on Rubens's portraits. In 2016, the book dealing with
Portraits after Existing Prototypes (XIX. 4) also appeared, so that now
the cataloguing of Rubens' entire oeuvre in the field of portraiture is
complete. Not all the works discussed in the present book (XIX. 3) are,
however, portraits of unidentified sitters - initially the volume's
title. Recent scholarly research has not only allowed insights into
sitters previously unrecognised, but has indeed made it possible to give
an identity to a number of persons portrayed in works that were not
included in the second volume (XIX.2). Among these sitters are members
of Rubens's own family, as well as his contemporaries, including
significant figures in the political, economic or religious life of the
period.
