page_title: Justus Lipsius
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Justus Lipsius / Early life
caption_attribution_description: from left to right: Philippus Rubens (the painter's brother), Peter Rubens, Justus Lipsius and Jan van der Wouwere
context_page_description: Justus Lipsius was a Flemish philologist, philosopher and humanist. Lipsius wrote a series of works designed to revive ancient Stoicism in a form that would be compatible with Christianity. The most famous of these is De Constantia. His form of Stoicism influenced a number of contemporary thinkers, creating the intellectual movement of Neostoicism. He taught at the universities in Jena, Leiden and Leuven.
context_section_description: Lipsius was born in Overijse, Brabant (in modern Belgium). His parents sent him early to the Jesuit college in Cologne, but they feared that he might become a member of the Society of Jesus, so when he was sixteen they removed him to the University of Leuven in Leuven.
  The publication of his Variarum Lectionum Libri Tres (1567), which he dedicated to Cardinal Granvelle, earned him an appointment as a Latin secretary, and a visit to Rome in the retinue of the cardinal. Here Lipsius remained for two years, devoting his spare time to the study of the Latin classics, collecting inscriptions and examining manuscripts in the Vatican. After he returned from Rome, he published a second volume of miscellaneous criticism (Antiquarum Lectionum Libri Quinque, 1575); compared with the Variae Lectiones of eight years earlier, it shows that he had advanced from the notion of purely conjectural emendation to that of emending by collation.
caption: The Four Philosophers (c. 1615. Oil on panel; 167 x 143 cm, Pitti Palace, Florence). One of Lipsius's students was Philip Rubens, the brother of the painter Peter Paul Rubens. In his friendship portrait of about 1615, the painter depicted himself, his brother, Lipsius and Jan van den Wouwer, another pupil of Lipsius, (left to right) along with Lipsius' dog Mopsulus. A bust of Seneca behind the philosopher references his work, while the ruins of Rome's Palatine Hill in the background further commemorate the classical influences. Rubens painted a similar friendship portrait while in Mantua around 1602 (now in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne) that also includes Lipsius.
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