Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue
- Introduction
- 1 Samson and Dilemma: Rubens Confronts the Woman on Top
- 2 Making Assumptions: Marian Tropes after Italy
- 3 Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia
- 4 Peace Embraces Plenty: Queering Female Virtue at Whitehall
- 5 All That Depends on Color: Feminizing Rubens in the Seventeenth Century
- Epilogue
- About the Author
- Index
1 - Samson and Dilemma: Rubens Confronts the Woman on Top
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue
- Introduction
- 1 Samson and Dilemma: Rubens Confronts the Woman on Top
- 2 Making Assumptions: Marian Tropes after Italy
- 3 Maria de’ Medici and Isabel Clara Eugenia
- 4 Peace Embraces Plenty: Queering Female Virtue at Whitehall
- 5 All That Depends on Color: Feminizing Rubens in the Seventeenth Century
- Epilogue
- About the Author
- Index
Summary
Abstract
This chapter proposes two of Rubens's early dyadic couples—the Ovidian characters Hercules and Omphale (c.1606) and the Old Testament figures Samson and Delilah (1609)—as iconographical and compositional keys to his well-known Self-Portrait with Isabella Brant (1609), one of the early seventeenth century's rare life-size depictions of a husband and wife within the same frame. Paying particular attention to such aspects of the paintings as Rubens's placement of the women in relation to the men, the role of drapery and (cross-)dress, and the biblical topoi to which all three images gesture, this chapter reveals the Self-Portrait's potential ambiguity, perhaps a mirror of Rubens's own shifting notions of sex difference.
Keywords: Rubens; gender; marriage portrait; Samson and Delilah; Hercules and Omphale; Isabella Brant; woman on top
And thus Sampsons inordinate affection towards a wicked woman caused him to loose Gods excellent giftes, and became a slaue vnto them, whom hee should haue ruled. Where wee see howe dangerous a thing it is, for any man or woman to giue place too much to our affections, for if we doe, without doubt we shall be sure to be destroyed, as Sampson was by Dalila, who thus by wicked daliance betraid him to the Philistines for money. Iudg. 16.4. &c
‒ Thomas Bentley, The Sixth Lamp of Virginitie (1582)The reclining anti-heroine of Rubens's Samson and Delilah (Fig. 1.1), painted around 1609, is widely believed to derive from Michelangelo's sculpted Night (Fig. 1.2), of which he made a chalk drawing. As an elaboration on the endlessly popular Renaissance topos of the sleeping nymph or reclining Venus, Rubens's Delilah appealed to the same tradition Michelangelo helped re-establish. Yet compositional changes introduced by Rubens, such as the transformation of the somnolent Night's inward and melancholic closure into the falsely tender openness of cunning Delilah, underscore the moral message of the biblical story: illicit sexual encounters only hasten one's undoing; for men and women alike, coming together can mean coming apart. Thus whereas the androgynous Night is formally, narratively, and ontologically sufficient, Delilah is only Delilah with Samson in the picture.
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- Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens , pp. 37 - 78Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020