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 thr ...