Rubens and Peiresc in Search of Agate: Materiality and Aesthetics in Early Modern Europe.

Agate was highly regarded in antiquity and through the early modern period; when sliced, images seemingly inscribed by nature could be identified on its surfaces, and its layered colours were exploited for cameo carving. However, agate is also widely recorded in the rough in contemporaneous natural history collections where the 'eye' that could be cut from the core was valued in Aristotelian medicine. Taking as its starting point the hitherto neglected 1622 correspondence about a piece of agate between Peter Paul Rubens and the French humanist Nicholas‐Claude Fabri de Peiresc, this essay brings together collecting, friendship and artistic production within a context of early mineralogy. Through an investigation of the material, tactile, aesthetic and para‐scientific attributes of agate, and drawing on further evidence from Rubens's life, I propose a sensibility shaped by a predilection for the lithic whose influence is discernible in the artist's work as more widely understood.