Politician, playboy, and painter, Rubens imbued his home city of Antwerp with a cosmopolitan verve that David Yaffe finds has endured to this day

Rubens's stately mansion in Antwerp is open to the public, and visiting it is like entering a new reality TV show—call it The Fabulous Life of Rubens. The Rubenshuis is, of course, prime real estate, located on a meticulously preserved seventeenth-century square called the Wapper and minutes away from the Grote Markt, the historic center of Antwerp, where groups line up for guided "Rubens Walks" in the master's footsteps along a maze of cobblestoned streets. Just as viewers of MTV's Cribs might salivate over R. Kelly's car collection or J.Lo's shoe closet, throngs of tourists chez Rubens continue to gawk at his collection of cameos, intaglios, and naughty paintings, open to the public since 1946. Rubens's own collection of Roman antiquity and Flemish Renaissance contemporaries is on display all year long. Among the artifacts in his personal curatorial habitat is a self-portrait dating from between 1628 and 1630. There you see the bearded 50-something painter at the pinnacle of his artistic powers, plotting his next career move as diplomat par excellence. Just as Steven Spielberg could assume financial control over his work only by becoming a studio mogul, it was in Rubens's best interest to manipulate the statesmen he served. Like everything else he did, he did it extravagantly.

Here is a chance to peek into the private life of someone both at the center of Renaissance art and politics and a bona fide star—and his is a star power that shows no signs of fading. His rediscovered painting Massacre of the Innocents fetched a cool $76.7 million at Sotheby's in 2002, putting Peter Paul's numbers in Van Gogh's stratosphere. The year 2004 has been called the Rubens Year, and the flurry of Rubens retrospectives in Antwerp, Madrid, Genoa, the United States, and Lille and Arras, France, as well as the recent revelations about his life as a double agent, have the art world debating what, exactly, his star power means in the age of Access Hollywood. Paul Oppenheimer, author of the brilliant Rubens: A Portrait, insists that the painter's celebrity stock has never been higher. "Despite unending attempts by certain artists and critics to dismiss Rubens and his fabulous accomplishments," says Oppenheimer, "he resurfaces as a celebrity year after year, and his paintings command the highest prices and interest because he and they are so contemporary." Everyone, it seems, still wants a piece of the Flemish master.