Using the career of Peter Paul Rubens as an organizing thread, this conference proceeding examines the complex relationships between diplomacy, dynastic politics and the visual arts during the early part of the Thirty Years War. What role did exchanges of art and artists play in the diplomacy of this period? How did these exchanges contribute to the development of international formulas for the visual representation of power and glory? To what extent had dynastic alliances and diplomacy created a shared visual language of power and authority throughout much of Europe, as opposed to distinctive national, dynastic or even personal formulas favored by particular patrons? What similarities and dissimilarities can we detect by comparing the relationship between high politics and the visual arts in different European courts? By addressing these and other related questions, ot only Rubens’s own work is illuminated but also the interplay between international dynastic politics and the visual language of power more generally during a critical fifteen year period.