The Virago and the Prince of Orange in Salomon de Bray's Jael, Deborah, and Barak: Insights on the Image of the Dutch Republic around 1630.

Brown, Peter Scott

Loss of context and decay of significance over time fades the power of images. What once was dangerous, darkly funny, sly and subversive is now mostly lost on observers of an unusual and overlooked painting of the biblical heroine, Jael, the prophetess Deborah, and the Hebrew champion, Barak (fig. 1). Seventeenth-century Dutch artist Salomon de Bray's painting of this subject is dissonant, incongruous, at odds with its narrative source and iconographic tradition. Its protagonist, Jael, is sensually and morally ambiguous, seductive yet fierce and threatening as she glares out of the canvas at the viewer. Her dress is unexpected--swooping decolletage and chaotic, disarranged turban. The figures depicted in the composition are crowded together yet do not interact and seem unaware of each other. Strangely, in scripture, the figures depicted in de Bray's painting are never together at all. The work's disharmonies have not passed unnoticed, merely unexplained. (1)

Representations of Jael in early modern painting are quite common, and the subject possessed a well-established narrative formula by the time de Bray turned his attention to it. (2) De Bray made two identical copies of the Jael subject, the first executed in 1630, the second in 1635. (3) The patrons and early provenance history of both copies are unknown. De Bray's reinterpretation of the subject is devoid of action. It stands strongly against the painted tradition and aligns his unique work with depictions of Jael in allegorical prints, in which narrative is also usually absent or insignificant. De Bray's perplexing composition also pushes his painting of Jael out of the tradition of history painting and makes use of conventions from genre painting. In several important ways, he presents the viewer not with well-known Biblical characters but with character types drawn from contemporary culture. Indeed, he intentionally subverts his Biblical subjects' known and accepted qualities in the process. Jael transforms from a heroic and humble servant of God into a lusty-looking termagant, half harridan, half virago with a man-eating stare. In De Bray's vision, Barak, the champion, is emasculated and shrinking, and Deborah, who is young, vigorous, and strong elsewhere, appears toothless, wrinkled, and aged. These figures, at odds with their scriptural identities, play more or less obviously on a set of easily recognizable character types who were widely deployed in Dutch genre painting: the predatory and sexual young woman, the pompous yet feckless young man, and the wizened crone. (4) Together, in this specific combination, these characters almost always evoke the figures of the prostitute, her male client, and the procuress. In fact, I will show, one of the best-known paintings of this latter subject, the 1621 canvas by Dirck van Baburen, served as a likely model for De Bray's Jael.

The transformations that De Bray produced in his rendering of Jael are unexpected and shocking and demand explanation. De Bray's Jael occupies simultaneously many different spheres: allegory, history, and genre painting; the sacred and the profane; and the gendered spaces of the battle of the sexes in early modern culture. His painting's most important dimension, however, is political. In the seventeenth-century, in the "Hebraic self-image" of the Dutch Republic, as articulated by Simon Schama, Deborah and Barak played significant roles as models of wise, strong, divinely guided leadership in a time of crisis and war. (5) The two of them, who led a small army of Hebrews in victory against the powerful forces of their Moabite or Philistine tyrants, were perfect role models for the tiny young Dutch Republic, struggling against the odds for freedom from the Goliath of Spain and the Hapsburgs. Indeed, De Bray's Barak, armored, whiskered, and wearing a red-orange sash fastened with a golden clasp, looks much like a contemporary Dutch knight or nobleman. He recalls portraits of the princes of Orange, and, in fact, his doppelganger appears decades later in another painting by De Bray in the Oranjezaal at Huis ten Bosch, which commemorated the life and victories of the Prince of Orange and stadholder, Frederick Henry. In this composition (fig. 8), the double of Barak appears at the head of the triumphal parade celebrating the Prince's victory over the Spanish.

De Bray's Jael, Deborah, and Barak, painted much earlier in 1630, evokes a very different princely figure: a coward who concedes his authority to a woman, to Jael. At the time that De Bray composed his work, the young Republic was passing through harrowing political waters. A transition in 1625 from the Stadholder Prince Maurice to his younger brother Frederick Henry produced internal political strife in the Republic, as the Netherlands' competing Arminian and Counter-Remonstrant religious factions vied for influence over the new stadholder. The Dutch suffered demoralizing military defeats, in particular the Spanish siege and capture of Breda in 1625. These complicated political factors led Frederick Henry to negotiate a peace with Spain in 1629, a move that was profoundly unpopular among the dominant Counter-Remonstrant party and was rejected by the assemblies of the States General when it became known. In the context of this political crisis, the pacificating Frederick, the man who would be king and champion of this Netherlands-Israel, seemed to shrink from the fight, politically henpecked by the "womanly" Republic, a form of government invariably thought of and portrayed in early modern culture as feminine, in contrast to the masculine image of monarchy. Frederick Henry finds his mirror in De Bray's painting in the princely image of Barak, and the Republic finds hers in the virago, Jael. Jael, clad in a dress of white trimmed with red and blue, is girded discretely in a tricolor sash of red, white, and blue, visually recalling the tricolor flag of the Dutch Republic, the first and at that time only such flag in Europe.

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In the unique iconography of De Bray's composition, Jael appears as a personification of the Dutch state, heretofore unrecognized, girded in the Republic's flag. Yet this would be Hollandse-heroine is analogized in DeBray's painting to a harlot. Her role in the composition plays visually on the prostitute's role in the popular genre theme of the procuress. The painting's significance is recovered in this most surprising confluence of characters, who populate De Bray's misogynist allegory of a vicious and prostituted Dutch Republic. De Bray's strikingly original painting undermines established biblical iconography with dissonant conventions from Dutch genre painting in order to exploit negative attitudes toward women in power and, thereby, to suggest the promiscuous and untrustworthy nature of republican government.

Salomon de Bray as Peintre-Philosophe

Salomon de Bray, a painter and architect, was erudite, intellectual, idealistic, and ambitious. (6) He spent his adult life in Haarlem, where he studied painting under the influential Mannerist artists, Hendrik Goltzius and Cornelis van Haarlem. (7) De Bray was a leader of the Haarlem school during the mid-seventeenth-century and was considered by some worthy contemporary critics to be among the foremost Netherlandish painters of his time, but his inclinations and motives as an artist are today not well understood. (8) In this, he is not alone but suffers along with many of the other Dutch Classicists, elite history painters of the period including Govert Flinck, Cesar van Everdingen, and Pieter de Grebber, among others, artists who like De Bray have acquired a modern reputation as conservatives in an age of dynamic artistic innovators like Rembrandt. (9)

Salomon, a Catholic, was born in 1597 in Amsterdam, to which his father had emigrated from Lier, southwest of Antwerp in the southern Netherlands. (10) It seems likely that the father's move came about during the mass exodus of Antwerp's financial, intellectual, and cultural elite following the Siege of Antwerp in 1585. Despite the repression of Catholicism and the persecution of Catholics in the Protestant Northern provinces, it appears that the De Bray family preferred the cause of Dutch independence to immediate religious freedom. Both Salomon and his brother, Simon, a lawyer, were members of the St. Adriaen's Guard in Haarlem. (11) Salomon, born and raised in the Republic, seems to have favored independence from Spain and, like many citizens of the Republic, both Catholic and Protestant, to have desired the liberation of the southern provinces from whence his family emigrated. This is distinctly the implication, as I will show, of his painting of Jael.

De Bray was intellectually gifted and ambitious. The first sign of his presence in Haarlem is the record of his membership in the rhetoric association, De Wijngaardranken. (12) He was conversant in Greek, Latin, French and Italian, according to the Dutch publisher of Italian architect Vincenzo Scamozzi's architectural treatise, L'Idea della Architettura Universale, for which De Bray provided translations of Italian terms in 1658. (13) He himself published an anthology of poetry in 1627, a treatise on architecture in 1631, and in 1661 a volume concerning the proposed expansion of Haarlem. (14) Throughout his career, De Bray referred to himself as a painter and architect, though his pride in his identity as a painter is particularly evident in his involvement in the reorganization of the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke. (15) De Bray led the movement during the early 1630s to reform the Guild, which had fallen into disarray and was plagued by personal disputes, and he wrote or oversaw the composition of much of its new charter. (16) The charter lends insight into his views on painting. It states that the guild's "first and greatest concern is the renewal of the ancient luster of the art of painting, which was always held in the highest esteem by the olden kings and princes." (17) This idealistic desire to renew the art of painting, as Taverne has shown, channels the equally idealistic spirit of an earlier generation of Haarlem artists: Karel van Mander and his followers (and De Bray's teachers), Hendrik Goltzius and Cornelis van Haarlem. (18)

De Bray was heir to and advocate for a refined and ambitious vision of the painter and the painter's art, and it is natural that his artwork reflects this in its subject matter, its erudition, and its symbolic density. De Bray is (or at least he seems to have imagined himself) in the class of painter-philosophers for whom intellectual esoterica and symbolic supersubtlety are not merely tendencies but part of a favored dialectical mode. His subjects and pictorial compositions are recherche, and his many surviving drawings and sketches, including numerous subtly differing versions of the same subject, attest to the labor that he invested in planning and revising compositions for his paintings. In a ca. 1650 canvas, for instance, De Bray depicts an obscure episode from the Odyssey in which the melancholy Odysseus mourns for his companions, who Circe has transformed into swine. Friso Lammertse notes that this "unspectacular" moment in the story of Circe and Odysseus was rarely if ever depicted and that, judging from details of the composition, it appears that De Bray drew directly on both Ovid's Metamorphoses and Homer, perhaps in the Greek. (19) A cloth draped over Odysseus's chair, as in Homer, and not over a bed, as in the widely available Latin-Dutch translation of the Odyssey by Coornhert, suggests that De Bray derived this detail directly from Homer. (20) In another painting from 1655 of Joseph receiving his father and brothers in Egypt, De Bray prominently placed a Corinthian capital and the fragments of a column in the immediate foreground of the composition. As Lammertse observes, "One might suspect the erudite Salomon de Braij ... of having erroneously introduced an anachronism." (21) The presence of an obviously classical architectural component in a painting of Joseph in Egypt seems out of place. After all, Vitruvius himself stated that the Corinithian capital was invented in the fifth century BCE by the sculptor Kallimachos. In fact, as Lammertse notes, De Bray specifically sought to refute Vitruvius's claim in his treatise on architecture, Architectura Moderna. (22) He argued that biblical evidence supported the existence of the Corinthian capital as early as Moses's lifetime, if not earlier. In the Joseph painting, De Bray evidently took up his thesis again twenty-four years after its initial publication. Both of these paintings, exempla of De Bray's style and approach to painting, anticipate a tutored, initiated audience capable of recognizing and comprehending the fine points by which the artist thoughtfully sought to authenticate and to deepen the significance of his compositions. Both examples likewise reflect an artist who sees himself also as a scholar, who cerebrally embraces the concept of ut pictura poesis and who treats painting as a form of scholarly disquisition. In this regard, De Bray was by no means unique in his era. Among others, such luminaries as Nicolas Poussin and Pieter Paul Rubens, as well as many of the Dutch Classicists with whom De Bray is ordinarily grouped, practiced at times a similarly learned and intellectual approach to painting.

The Jael-Virago

De Bray's Jael, at once a visually exquisite and disturbing painting, is distinctly in this mode. The story of Jael, which occurs in Judges 4:9-22, was a popular subject in early modern European art, particularly during the seventeenth-century. (23) Its dramatic, gruesome climax and its moral ambiguity appealed especially to the Baroque taste for the violent and gory. Jael, like Judith to whom she is often compared, is a murderess. She entrapped her male victim, Sisera, who like Holophernes, was the general of the armies of the enemy of the Israelites, in this case, King Jabin of Hazor. Jael herself, however, is not a Hebrew but a Kenite, whose husband (conspicuously absent in this story) is an ally and friend of her victim. On the pretense of sheltering Sisera from the pursuing Hebrew champion, Barak, Jael brought him into her tent. She gave him milk when asked only for water. Exhausted, he lay down to sleep, begging her to stand guard and to mislead his pursuer. When Sisera closed his eyes, Jael took a hammer and tent peg, and placing it carefully on his temple, she drove it through his skull and into the ground. This morally questionable act, foretold by the prophetess Deborah, robs the Hebrew warrior, Barak, of his manly right to slay his enemy and acts spiritually as a judgment against him and, in Christian interpretation, the Jews. (24)

Jael's bloody deed is a common subject in early modern art with a simple and stable iconography grounded in pictorial narrative, but the version by De Bray departs radically from the usual formula. (25) In composition, it betrays the clear influence of the Dutch Caravaggists, painters like Hendrik ter Brugghen, Gerrit van Honthorst, and Dirck van Baburen, who frequently painted similar works with life-size, half-length figures crowded into indeterminate spaces with Caravaggesque lighting. (26) The expected narrative content in De Bray's Jael is not merely compressed within a single portentous gesture or exchange of glances, as is sometimes the case in the works of these artists. It is omitted altogether. The character that propels Jael's story in the Bible, her victim, the Philistine general Sisera, is missing from the composition entirely. His absence is practically unique in the pictorial tradition. (27) In the narrative vacuum of his composition, De Bray generates a descriptive tension through the irregular appearances and arrangement of the picture's three biblical personalities: the heroine Jael, who appears at once lusty and enraged; the prophetess Deborah, anomalously aged; and the dull, retiring, emasculated Israelite general, Barak.

Previous scholars have observed that De Bray's painting, as a retelling of the Jael story, is confusing. (28) Like the Corinthian capital in biblical Egypt, something is decidedly wrong with the composition. It omits the very elements that form the crux of the scriptural narrative and that are most characteristic of the subject in the iconographic tradition, namely the murder of Sisera. (29) In nearly every case, this act of violence supplies the central visual and thematic component of representations of the subject. One sees, in myriad different versions, Jael, raising the hammer, poising the nail, and striking the blow, sometimes violently in a flurry of motion, again gracefully, like a dancer, or even gently and caressingly, as in a version by Bartholomaeus Spranger (fig. 2). One sees Sisera at times lying peacefully and at others struggling in the brief foreknowledge of his peril, as in a drawing by Rembrandt (fig. 3). In some representations, he appears contorted in his death throes. In others, he lies still, transfixed through the temples to the ground by the perfidious spike. Many significant early modern artists depicted this subject, including Jan van Eyck, Albrecht Altdorfer, Lucas van Leyden, Lucas Cranach, Lambert Lombard, Hendrik Goltzius, Jan Saenredam, Carlo Cignani, Guercino, Ludovico Carracci, Cigoli, and Artemisia Gentilleschi, to name only a few.

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Of the many versions of the Jael story from the early modern period, De Bray's is one of the few that differs from the model just described. De Bray, moreover, presents us with three persons drawn from the Jael story who are, in the biblical narrative and pictorial tradition, never at any time together as a group. The three tightly bunched figures do not interact. They betray absolutely no awareness of each other, and in their poses and expressions, they seem to be absorbed separately and clumsily by entirely different concerns and preoccupations.

In the left foreground of the picture, the figure of Jael dominates the composition, filling fully two-thirds of the canvas with her turbaned head and furious expression, voluptuous decolletage, and voluminous sleeves and dress. Atypically, she glares out of the canvas directly at the viewer. Ordinarily, Jael fixes her gaze on the nail, the hammer, the temple of Sisera, the heavens, or Barak, depending on the symbolic or narrative emphasis of the composition. Jael's murderous expression differs strikingly from her countenance in other images of the type, in which her appearance conveys a mixture of blander and holier emotions than that of anger. The violent passion that engulfs her features encroaches dangerously on the province of vice--of anger, certainly, and considering the high coloration of her face and the deeply sensual aspect of her exposed neck and bosom, perhaps other carnal sins, as well. Lust and wrath, in fact, were closely linked female sins in the Dutch moral spectrum during the seventeenth-century. (30) In contrast to De Bray's version, Jael, in keeping with her status as biblical heroine, usually looks gentle, anxious, resolute, or even peaceful, but rarely passionate or angry. (31) In De Bray's painting, Jael grasps the hammer in her right hand and, in her left, the spike. Despite a previous suggestion that she is preparing to slay Sisera, it appears in the absence of a victim that she is unprepared to use her weapons and wields them mainly as identifying attributes. (32) Sisera is not depicted, nor is there any direct allusion to his presence nearby.

One aspect of the significance of Jael's active pose becomes clear when she is compared to the dull, passive figure of Barak, who stands nearly eclipsed by shadows in the background of the painting as the foil to the luminous Jael. Jael's aggressive posture, her taking up arms, signals her seizing of manly authority and the consequent neutering of Barak. De Bray conveys this idea quite literally. Jael grasps the manly spike in the lower left corner of the canvas at roughly the point where, corresponding to the figure in the background, Barak's penis would be. In scripture, Barak meets Jael only after she has murdered Sisera. The most common pictorial formula for their encounter has Barak charging up from the field of battle to Jael's tent, where she stands, hammer in hand, pointing blandly or sweetly to the corpse of Sisera. (33) In De Bray's painting, Barak is clad in armor of sixteenth- or seventeenth-century vintage, including a helmet with open beaver. He wears a full mustache of the sort worn by Dutch gentlemen of the period, and his blank, staring face forms a stark contrast to Jael's livid expression. His gaze also projects directly out of the canvas but does not meet that of the viewer. He is, it seems, in a brown study or perhaps a deeper fugue, and he appears as completely unaware of Jael's presence in the composition as she is of his. A redorange sash, as worn by the princes of Orange and other contemporary European nobility, descends from his left shoulder, where it is fastened by a golden, gemmed clasp. (34)

Between Jael and Barak, finally, stands the figure of Deborah, the Hebrew prophetess, who commissioned Barak and prophesied Jael. In scripture as apparently in De Bray's painting, Deborah mediates from an ambiguous remove Jael and Barak's relationship. Deborah foretells and interprets the significance of Sisera's death at Jael's hands. She commands Barak to lead an attack on Sisera's army, but Barak, disliking his odds, declines to go unless accompanied by the prophetess herself. Deborah responds, "I will go indeed with thee, but at this time the victory shall not be attributed to thee, because Sisara shall be delivered into the hand of a woman." (35) Logically, these are the words of prophecy binding Barak's fate to Jael's that tremble on the lips of De Bray's aged Deborah, whose hands clasped in prayer, eyes raised to heaven, and steely, severe expression announce to the viewer that God once again reproaches the inconstant Hebrews through his prophet. In De Bray's painting, however, Deborah's role is frankly anomalous and problematic. In scripture, she is not in the company of Jael and Barak, at their only meeting, outside the entrance to Jael's tent. In the iconographic tradition, Deborah rarely or never appears in the company of Jael, De Bray's version being the only exception to this rule of which I am aware. In fact, Deborah is altogether an uncommon subject in medieval and early modern art. Whereas dozens, perhaps even hundreds of depictions of Jael's bloody deed exist, I have collected only a handful of images of Deborah. (36) In these, she is usually paired with Barak or, less frequently, appears by herself. Moreover, in all other examples of which I am aware, she looks nothing at all like De Bray's wizened, wrinkled prophetess. Deborah typically is represented as a vigorous, attractive woman in the prime of life, frequently carrying a sword and shield, as in the thirteenth-century Psalter of St-Louis, for instance, or the image of her in Pierre Le Moyne's Gallerie des femmes fortes. This iconography reflects both the scriptural and post-biblical accounts of Deborah and her relation to Barak. In scripture, there is nothing to suggest that Deborah is aged. The fact that she accompanies Barak into battle has naturally been taken as evidence to the contrary. Deborah is often argued to be or is thought of as the wife of Barak, and in both Jewish and Christian interpretation, Deborah and Barak are seen to be partners. (37) Commentators, among others Josephus, Ambrose, Erasmus, and John Calvin, emphasize Deborah's energetic and assertive qualities. (38) Indeed, Peter Martyr Vermigli wrote to the young Elizabeth I upon her accession in 1558 at the age of 25 to "play the role of holy Deborah for our times." (39) De Bray's wrinkled, elderly Deborah is, it seems, without precedent.

The learned, thoughtful De Bray has concocted a strange and perplexing image. It required some considerable imagination on the artist's part, in addition to a strong motivation for rethinking the established iconography. Unlike most representations of Jael, the composition of De Bray's version does not derive straightforwardly from its narrative source. As Lammertse observes with some perplexity, "De Braij's painting is rather like a group portrait of the victors." (40) The three figures form an iconic tableau in which they interpret their roles not within the overall narrative but specifically in relation to each other. They form a seesaw, Jael rising and Barak falling on either side of Deborah's fulcrum. Sisera, who supplies the whole crisis of the scriptural plot, is omitted altogether. Jael's fierce gaze, moreover, breaks the invisible barrier between object and audience. Her disconcerting awareness of us in turn draws our attention to her. The lack of a clear pictorial narrative, the depiction of Jael and Deborah together in the same image, the piercing gaze of Jael, the anomalously wrinkled Deborah--all of these aspects of the painting are unusual, unprecedented, or flatly incongruous with the story as understood by commentators and as interpreted by artists in early modern Europe. In short, little or nothing in the religious or iconographic tradition anticipates De Bray's Jael.

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Jael, the Harlot

To find the sources of De Bray's inspiration, one must look outside of Jael's conventional iconography. In the pictorial tradition, the Jael theme is strongly narrative in character, and this foregrounds expectations of De Bray's painting. However, De Bray's composition is closer to allegorical representations of Jael found in broadsheets and illustrated moral treatises. Like De Bray's version, such allegorical images are the only other examples of the Jael subject that omit Sisera and neglect pictorial narrative. For instance, Hans Burgkmair depicts Jael along with Judith and Esther for his series of prints of biblical and antique heroes and heroines. (41) The women carry identifying attributes (Jael her hammer and spike, Judith her sword and the head of Holophernes), but the image makes no other reference to their stories. Indeed, a sort of biblical kaffeeklatsch seems to be taking place. Jael gently rests her hand on Judith's shoulder, while Judith and Esther earnestly converse. In Ludwig Glatsch's series of prints of the women of the Old and New Testaments, Jael appears alone as a paragon of honesty, surprisingly enough. (42) Here, Jael die Redliche (Jael the honest) is a solidly built young woman who stands in the center of the picture plane, resting her hand on an altar and gazing intently out of frame to her right.

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De Bray's composition is indebted to this allegorical tradition, yet inspiration for his unexpected composition--and the significance of its equivocal representation of Jael--is not to be found either in scripture or in previous depictions of the subject. To locate its pictorial source, one must look outside of the Jael tradition altogether. De Bray's painting, consisting of life-size, half-length figures with vivid expressions in a crowded, indeterminate space is inspired by a compositional model popularized during the 1620s by Utrecht painters like Gerrit van Honthorst, Hendrik ter Brugghen, and Dirck van Baburen. (43) The Jael composition bears a particularly close resemblance to a well-known painting by Van Baburen, The Procuress, dated 1622 (fig. 4). The figure of Jael is in many respects deeply similar to the prostitute in Van Baburen's painting. They occupy the same space in the composition, filling the bottom left of the canvas (fig. 5). From the neck down, the two women exhibit the same pose and general appearance. The decolletage, the position of the right arms, the folds and character of the drapery of the sleeves--all these details support the hypothesis that the pictures are directly related. The differences between the figures are attributable primarily to the different subjects depicted. De Bray substitutes the murderous gaze of Jael for the seductive gaze of the prostitute, the phallic nail and hammer for the yonic, feminine lute. Even these differences, which after all involve closely related aspects of vice, anger and lust, simply suggest a logic of substitution. The change in expression reflects the transformation of one animal passion (and type of sin) into another, and the opposite sexual connotations of the lute and the nail and hammer reinforce the identities and pictorial roles of the two women in their separate compositions. The lute recapitulates the image of the prostitute as an object of sensual desire. The hammer and nail emphasize Jael's appropriation of a male role and, consequently, the neutering or castration of the man, Barak.

Other similarities between the two pictures strengthen the likelihood of a direct relation between them. De Bray transfers to Jael the white cloth turban worn by the procuress in Van Baburen's picture. The faces of Deborah and the procuress are nearly identical in appearance. They are certainly sisters, if not twins. In his depiction of Deborah, De Bray plainly appropriates or adapts the shape and set of the jaw, the mouth, the nose, the cheekbones, and the expression of the eyes and raised brows. Likewise, the face of the man in both images is the same, at least as far as the face of Barak is visible in De Bray's painting. Perhaps most significantly, both works confront us with the same three character types: the seductive young woman, the would-be gallant male, and the wizened crone, who is the matchmaker. These three characters form the nucleus of every image of the common procuress type, and as stereotypes in combination with each other, they constituted a pictorial formula that was familiar and easily recognizable to the Dutch public in the seventeenth-century. Many viewers of De Bray's canvas, based, as it seems to be, on a well-known painting of the procuress type, would have quickly recognized not only Jael, Deborah, and Barak but, lurking behind them, the notorious trio of prostitute, procuress, and their male patron. The dependence of De Bray's composition on the procuress iconography and, most likely, on the specific model of Van Baburen's painting helpfully explains some of the otherwise intractable mysteries about De Bray's Jael. Deborah is wrinkled and aged in De Bray's composition, a pictorial choice without precedent, because she plays the matchmaking madam. Likewise, De Bray's decision to represent Jael, Deborah, and Barak together in the same frame, in defiance of every inherited scriptural, literary, and pictorial model, can be explained by his evident desire to infuse his allegory with an allusion to the procuress theme.

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The Netherlands' "Hebraic Self-Image" Corrupted

In some respects, it is not surprising to find De Bray undermining the virtuous image of the biblical heroine, Jael, who unquestionably possessed a dark side in early modern culture. As a woman who received a man into her home while her own husband was away, her chastity is naturally suspect. Though according to Deborah, Jael is "most blessed of women in tents," in Jewish midrash, Jael has sexual intercourse with Sisera seven times before she murders him. (44) She is portrayed by the historian Pseudo-Philo as a seductress, scattering roses on a bed prepared for her victim, and her voice alone inspires lust. (45) For the Puritan John Gibbon, Jael is sin itself: "When sin, like Jael, invites thee into her tent, with the lure and decoy of a lordly treatment, think of the nail and hammer which fastened Sisera dead to the ground." (46) Two starkly contrasting views of Jael prevailed in early modern culture. At times, she was honored and admired. At others, she was scorned and despised. In the Dutch pictorial tradition, inscriptions on two prints representing the Jael theme by Jan Saenredam and Lucas van Leyden nicely summarize the two positions. The text in Saenredam's image reads: "Mighty foes are not always conquered in battle; they can also be slain by the courage of a woman." (47) Van Leyden's, on the other hand, states simply: "All evil is trifling compared to the evil of a woman." (48) This sentiment is repeated in an image from the late seventeenth-century of Jael striking Sisera on the title page of the misogynist satire, De Beurs der Vrouwen (The Stock Exchange of Women), which, set in the Amsterdam stock exchange, surveys the market in female vices and follies (fig. 6). (49) The title page depicts a statue of Pandora opening her box set against a backdrop of well-dressed women milling about in front of the stock exchange. On either side of the statue appear the ape of folly and the serpent of guile and, in relief on the pedestal on which Pandora stands, the image of Jael, one hand on the temple of the prostrate Sisera, the other drawn back to strike the death blow. (50) In De Bray's painting, we encounter this wicked, vicious, perhaps even wanton Jael. De Bray does not depict the courageous blow struck for freedom against the tyrant Sisera, which is the usual theme in images of Jael. He portrays the rarely if ever represented crisis of authority that precedes Sisera's murder. This "breeches-toting" Jael usurps the meek and surrendering Barak. In the misogynist cultural context of the seventeenth-century Netherlands, it is difficult if not impossible to imagine how this gender inversion could be viewed in positive much less heroic terms.

To be fair, on the other hand, De Bray likewise undermines the positive images of Deborah and Barak, transforming them respectively into a toothless crone and a meek, feckless chump. In early modern Europe, Deborah and Barak were conventionally understood to be patriotic symbols of good governance or righteous authority. (51) The two were regarded as a complementary pair, even as husband and wife. Deborah, who calls herself the mother of Israel, serves as the mother figure to Barak's father figure, and these gender roles characterize the nature and limits of their political or temporal authority. According to Joseph Hall (1574-1656), the English clergyman and satirist, Deborah was to sentence, not to strike; to command, not to execute. This [latter] act is masculine, fit for some captain of Israel. She was the head of Israel; it was meet some other should be the hand. It is an imperfect and titular government, where there is a commanding power without correction, without execution. (52)

Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499-1562), writing to Elizabeth I on her ascent to the throne, advised her to "play the role of holy Deborah for our times. Join yourself to some godly Barak. Bring the Israelites who are oppressed in various ways into the sincere and pure liberty of the gospel." (53) The use of biblical analogies like this for contemporary persons and events was a conventional practice in the seventeenth-century Netherlands among historians, theologians, moralists, and politicians, as Simon Schama makes clear in his investigation of the "Hebraic self-image" in Dutch culture in The Embarrassment of Riches. (54) A vision of Netherlands-Israel lies at the heart of a Dutch "patriotic scripture," as Schama terms it. (55) In this vision, Deborah and Barak, along with Moses, Jephthah, Samson, David, Solomon, and a variety of Old Testament leaders and champions serve as metaphors, symbols, or analogies for the Dutch Republic in its struggles against the Spanish and other oppressive forces. In the Nederlantsche Gedenck-Clanck (The Netherlands Anthem of Commemoration), a patriotic history of the Netherlands, published in Haarlem by Adriaan Valerius in 1626, only four years before the Haarlemer De Bray produced his first Jael painting, Deborah and Barak serve as symbols of Dutch independence and sovereignty in the lengthy prayer that concludes the work: Almighty God! Dear, merciful Heavenly father Thou who art the support of the puny, the comfort of the oppressed, the source and font of all goodness and blessings. We poor sinners acknowledge before you what is merely the truth: that in our own beloved Fatherland we have time and again felt and beheld your all-mighty power and the blessings of your inscrutable wisdom, and have received succor and favor when stricken by ferocious tyrants ... You have not counted the sins of your people against them but have freed us from the yoke of the Moabites even as it was with Deborah and Barach, whose power went before us in the field ... (56)

[FIGURE 7 OMITTED]

The aged Deborah and the meek Barak in De Bray's painting can scarcely be considered effective symbols of good government or strong leadership, despite the fact that Barak, dressed in the manner of the princes of Orange, clearly plays on the contemporary image of the Dutch stadholder and military leaders. Nevertheless, it appears that the overriding significance of De Bray's painting is political in nature.

In his composition, Jael, the foil to the princely Barak, who steals and subverts his authority, is presented as the natural foil to the princes of Orange in Dutch politics. She is the avatar of the Dutch Republic. Jael is clad in a white dress trimmed with red and blue. She is girded distinctively with a tricolor sash consisting of solid bands of red, white, and blue, a detail that has heretofore escaped notice. On close inspection, this odd girdle looks suspiciously like a flag, specifically the flag of the Dutch Republic, which possessed the first such tricolor flag in modern Europe. It appears, given this evidence, that Jael represents the personified Dutch Republic, particularly in light of the princely appearance of Barak and the symbolic political meaning attached to Deborah and Barak in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. In casting Jael as the figure of the United Provinces, De Bray was evidently making use of the type of the "woman warrior" personification of republic. (57) A contemporaneous example appears in a painting by Jacob Backer from ca. 1645 today in the collection of the Jagdschloss Grunewald and made for Frederick Henry, the Prince of Orange and the Dutch stadholder from 1625 to 1648. In this picture, the Republic appears as a stolid, powerfully built, helmed female clad in red, white, and blue holding a spear and shield. Although the type of the "woman warrior" and the moral virtues usually ascribed to Jael--courage, honesty, fidelity--are symbolic characteristics of the republic, Jael herself is by no means a common symbol of republican government. As the image of the Dutch Republic, De Bray's Jael is problematic.

Jael, in contrast to Deborah and Barak, is an unsettling and unlikely patriotic symbol. Whereas Jacob Backer's Republica forthrightly addresses the viewer as a soldier with conventional arms, the sword and shield, the vicious-looking Jael confronts her audience with domestic artifacts that have been subverted to serve as weapons. The hammer and the spike, wholesome Old Testament emblems of the stability of the tent and tabernacle, transform in her hands into instruments of violence and cold-blooded murder. This resonates deeply with contemporary Dutch and European antifeminist polemics concerning the battle of the sexes, such as the well-known satirical subject of the battle for the pants. (58) In these productions, various household objects become weapons in the hands of the wife: rolling pins, crockery missiles, spindles and distaffs, etc. Jael, like the wives in these stories, not only usurps the male's authority but does so by violating rules of hospitality and norms of virtuous womanly behavior. De Bray's Jael might also be compared to her Haarlem sister, Kenau Simonsdochter Hasselaer, who organized the women of the town to fight the Spanish during the siege of Haarlem in 1572. She appears in some images bearing the Dutch flag and leading a battalion of housewives armed with mallets, pots and pans, and kitchen cutlery. (59) Ironically, Kenau, a heroine-patriot, is, like Jael, alternately an object of scorn. Her name has come to signify in Dutch a bossy, detestable woman, a virago.

On the other hand, Jael is, in certain respects, a natural symbol of republic. The image of the republic has long been feminine, as opposed to the masculine image of monarchy, which inheres in its king. (60) Female personification of the republic was conventional by the time of the formation in the sixteenth century of the United Provinces of the Netherlands. (61) Heroic women from antiquity and the Bible, like Lucretia and Judith, for instance, lent their images to the expression of republican ideals in Renaissance Italy. (62) Mary, Venus, and Roma, among others, also contributed to the development of the iconography of the republic. (63) In the Netherlands, the wholesome figure of the Hollands Maid served as a symbol of the free provinces of the Republic during the seventeenth-century. (64) Almost invariably, the republic was figured as a woman in early modern Europe. In her female guise, the republic usually presents a positive view of women and a singularly optimistic outlook on human government and human nature. Fidelity, honesty, liberty, courage, stalwartness, justice, charity, chastity--these are the virtues commonly associated with the republic's female embodiments. The irony of this virtuous, female figure is at least twofold. First, behind this image exists the tumult of political reality, of factionalism and the social and religious divisions that plague republican government. Second, though men of the seventeenth-century exalted the ideal of the powerful woman in these images of the republic, powerful women in practice were often regarded with mingled outrage and scorn. Among others, Pierre le Moyne, author of La Gallerie des femmes fortes, wrote at length about the virtues of heroic women from the past whose strength might serve as a model for the modern woman. In practice, however, powerful women like Elizabeth I and le Moyne's patron, Marie de Medici, provoked considerable criticism by taking on a manly authority. (65) In like fashion, the "blessed" Jael was often condemned for violating female norms and usurping Barak's manly role. (66)

De Bray's Jael, Deborah, and Barak reflects directly on both of these ironies of the republic's representation. His painting of Jael--one of the powerful women praised by le Moyne and one of the Bible's few woman warriors--spins a political allegory around the female iconography of the republic that offers an antidote to the era's often saccharin allegories of peaceful, harmonious, good government. (67) De Bray's painting is at once deeply anti-republican and viciously misogynist.

Barak and Frederick Henry

De Bray's painting of Jael emerges from the misogynist tradition of Van Leyden's print, but what is the significance of her role as Republica? It involves a harsh critique of government in the Netherlands, yet De Bray's composition is, as I interpret it, not unpatriotic. The significance of Jael-Republica depends ultimately on our understanding of the identity of Barak, Jael's foil in scripture as well as in De Bray's painting. De Bray captures biblical Israel's moment of crisis of authority--hence also a crisis of authority in contemporary Netherlands-Israel. In De Bray's painting, Barak's failure of initiative, his reluctance to prosecute Israel's war against the Moabites--that is, the Spanish--leads directly to the promiscuous Jael-Republica's breeches-toting usurpation. Who is Barak? To borrow Joseph Hall's words, he is the "captain of Israel," fit to strike and execute. In the seventeenth-century Netherlands, this captain, the commander of the armies of Netherlands-Israel, was the stadholder--the manly, would-be monarch who was often at odds with and thwarted by the fractious, shifting political leadership of the "womanly" Republic, just as from a misogynist perspective the inconstant and disloyal Jael thwarted Barak. At the time that De Bray conceived and painted his Jael, in 1630, this "Barak" was Frederick Henry, the Prince of Orange, the son of William the Silent and brother of the stadholder before him, Prince Maurice. Frederick occupied the office of stadholder from 1625 until his death in 1648.68

Barak, armored, dressed, and whiskered in the character of a Dutch knight of noble rank, adds a self-consciously contemporary dimension to the painting's meaning. Barak's appearance is comparable to that of Frederick Henry in contemporary portraits, in which the mustachioed Frederick frequently wears armor matching Barak's. The little that is visible of Barak's face resembles portraits of Frederick Henry from the same era, such as, Van Dyck's ca.1631 portrait of Frederick as engraved by Paulus Pontius (fig. 7). However, the shadows and, especially, the obscuring helmet worn by De Bray's Barak preclude any convincing match. It is difficult to confirm or to absolutely deny the image of Barak as a portrait of Frederick solely on appearance. Given the political risk involved in representing the stadholder as the impotent, unmanned Barak, it is moreover not surprising that De Bray might have opted for a veiled or allusive portrait of Frederick, whose meaning might be, like the example of the Corinthian capital in biblical Egypt, available only to an initiated and sympathetic audience. Fortunately, De Bray has left us a further clue to Barak's identity, perhaps not inadvertently. A figure identical to Barak appears unmistakably in one and only one other painting by De Bray: a Triumph, executed eighteen years after the first Jael canvas, honoring the victories of Frederick Henry (fig. 8). (69) Amalia van Solms, Frederick's widow, commissioned the work to decorate the Oranjezaal at her palace, Huis ten Bosch. (70) Van Solms conceived this room along the lines of Rubens's cycle for Marie de Medici as a memorial to Frederick and his monarchical, dynastic ambitions. (71) In De Bray's panel, Barak's doppelganger sits astride a white horse at the front of a triumphal procession, gazing expressionlessly ahead. To his left, before and behind, are flags captured by Frederick during the course of his campaigns against Spain in the southern Netherlands.

This image belongs to a series of paintings depicting a triumphal procession honoring the victories of Frederick Henry that occupies the ground level of the Oranjezaal. De Bray contributed two panels to this ensemble, the most important commissions of his career. Within the context of the triumphal procession, De Bray's Barak-like knight at the Oranjezaal cannot be understood as an actual portrait of Frederick Henry, though it represents him in aspect. Notably, the princely sash worn by Barak is absent in the Oranjezaal painting, the only significant difference between the two figures. In the Oranjezaal canvas, the Barak figure is a noble Dutch knight dressed in armor befitting the stadholder (in other Oranjezaal paintings, explicit representations of Frederick Henry depict him wearing nearly identical armor) surrounded by Frederick's war trophies in a painting honoring the dead prince, in a room in which every element was designed to commemorate his accomplishments. What led De Bray to redeploy Barak in this manner, eighteen years after the first of his Jael paintings? I strongly suspect that the painter was indulging in a joke to which perhaps he alone was privy and which his noble patron would surely never have perceived. De Bray, for whom the Oranjezaal commissions were the most important of his career, is reflecting on the irony that, nearly two decades earlier, he had represented Frederick in the guise of Barak (undoubtedly for a very different audience) as an impotent, weak, and ineffectual leader. In casting the Republic as Jael and the stadholder as Barak, De Bray depicted the political conflict between the Republic and its military commander, the would-be monarch, Frederick. It would seem that the composition accuses the Republic of wantonness and Frederick of weakness--of a Barak-like failure to lead and prosecute.

[FIGURE 8 OMITTED]

This reading finds context in Dutch politics of the 1620s and 30s. Opposing anti- and pro-war fronts linked respectively to the Arminian Remonstrant and Orthodox Counter-Remonstrant religious sects shaped the political climate of the Netherlands during this period. (72) When Frederick succeeded to the position of stadholder on the death of Prince Maurice, he inherited a complicated and difficult political situation. During his rule, Maurice actively repressed the Arminian faction, going so far as to overthrow and execute in 1618 his former political ally and Arminian supporter, Johan van Oldebarnevelt, the architect of the Twelve Years Truce, which expired in 1621. (73) Despite the support of the pro-war Counter-Remonstrants, Maurice pursued a primarily defensive military strategy following the resumption of hostilities with Spain, and even this cautious strategy failed, in large part due paradoxically to the unwillingness of the provincial assemblies, dominated by Counter-Remonstrants, to vote funding for the Prince's war needs. (74) As Maurice lay dying in 1625, the Republic stood on the verge of its most humiliating defeat in the resumed war with Spain, the capture of Breda. Frederick Henry, following Maurice's death, was unable to lift the siege at Breda, and in the year following his installation as stadholder, he had to adapt to new political realities at home and abroad. Hapsburg gains in Germany coupled with the Spanish success at Breda encouraged a gloomy outlook on the Republic's future, and political gains by the Arminians after the death of Prince Maurice placed Frederick in the position of choosing either diplomacy and compromise or a drastic return to his brother's strategy of repression. Frederick throughout his rule promoted religious tolerance and, as Jonathan Israel points out, was tutored as a youth by Arminian leader Johannes Uyttenbogaert and was a close friend of Oldenbarnevelt's son-in-law, Cornelis van der Mijle. (75) Though he showed no inclination toward religious Arminianism, the Prince adopted a strategy of political Arminianism during the first eight years of his governance. (76)

Frederick surrounded himself with deputies who, though not necessarily Arminians themselves, advanced the Arminian political cause on the Prince's behalf. (77) During his early years in power, Frederick seeded the vroedschappen, the city councils, with Arminians, whose positions depended largely on the Prince's support because of their lack of popular support among the urban masses. (78) Often, it was only the Prince's intervention and on occasion his use of troops that staved off popular uprisings against the Arminian majorities of the vroedschappen in cities like Amsterdam and The Hague. (79)

A principal cause of the Arminians' unpopularity was also the source of their principal usefulness to Frederick: their willingness to levy taxes to support the stadholder's war plans. Frederick used the Arminian faction to balance the Counter-Remonstrants. As had been the case under his brother, Maurice, the pro-war Counter-Remonstrant towns paradoxically continued to object to and obstruct the Prince's requests for military funding, largely owing to their unwillingness to increase taxes. Israel observes, "Though the Holland Counter-Remonstrants on occasion paid lip-service to the cause of liberating the South Netherlands from Spain and Popery, they habitually preferred the cheaper course of remaining strictly on the defensive." (80) This unwillingness stemmed in no small part from the perception that higher taxes would threaten the Counter-Remonstrant faction's popular support. On the other hand, the Arminians, widely known as Trevisten or "pacificators," could be counted on to support Frederick's war effort. English observer Sir Henry Vane explained: The Remonstrant [party] pressing the making of an offensive warre and laying on the hundredth penny presently to be collected; which they conceive will be so heavie, as the common people will not be able to beare it, but that finding their purses to smart, they will conclude for a peace. The Contraremonstrant seeing this will not by no means consent to the laying on the of the hundredth penny, nor of making an offensive warre, or scarce think of putting the army into the field this yeare other then for defence. (81)

Haarlem, Salomon de Bray's home, was solidly Counter-Remonstrant and among the cities most vociferously opposed to the Prince and his politics during the period of 1625-33. Together, Haarlem and Leiden conspired to block nearly all of Frederick's requests for war subsidies to fund military offensives during this period, including notably in 1629, the year before De Bray completed his Jael, when Haarlem sought to thwart funding of the Prince's massive assault and siege of 's-Hertogenbosch. (82)

In this political landscape, in 1629-30, Frederick opened his first truce and peace negotiations with Spain. (83) Without the knowledge of provincial leaders, he secretly made peaceful overtures in 1628 through his Arminian representative at a Spanish-Dutch prisoner exchange. As Frederick's peace initiative unfolded, with a Spanish offer of a thirty-four year truce, the stadholder's deputies sought to rush a favorable decision through the provincial assemblies and the States General in October and November of 1629, over the opposition of the Counter-Remonstrants. Gelderland, Overijssel, and Utrecht approved the truce, though at least in Utrecht the vast majority of the population was vehemently opposed to the measure. Zeeland, traditionally a strong supporter of the stadholder, voted down the resolution and even considered lodging a formal protest in the States General against Frederick's policy. The vote on the truce in Holland split among the towns five against five, with Haarlem leading the opposition to block Frederick's initiative. Ultimately, the treaty failed, but that did not prevent Frederick Henry from again pursuing a peace with Spain in 1632-33, just before De Bray executed a second copy of the Jael painting, dated 1635. This initiative, however, met with a similar fate. (84)

To the Counter-Remonstrants and other pro-war factions, when news of the potential truce broke, the Prince must have seemed to have lost his resolve and to have ceded his war-making authority. The Counter-Remonstrants at least nominally favored permanent war with papist Spain and liberation of the southern provinces, and the princes of Orange as stadholders had traditionally championed and sustained this cause. Frederick Henry, captain-general of the Dutch armies, abandoning the fight and empowering the Arminian "pacificators" evidently recalled for some observers, among them De Bray, Barak's cowardice and lapse of faith in balking at Deborah's command to lead his men into battle.

In sum, the tense and complicated political environment in Haarlem, Holland, and the Republic in which De Bray made his Jael opens several avenues of interpretation of the painting, although it is difficult to conclude in favor of any one reading without clearer insight into the patron's character, the painting's intended audience, or De Bray's own politics. It is possible that De Bray's Jael laments the Netherlands' want of a true king, a supreme, manly authority with the resources and the nerve to command and execute, who could lead without the political nagging and shifting loyalties of assemblies and vroedschappen. If this is the case, then Jael, as Republica, depicts an inherently imperfect and intolerable form of government, one characterized by politically vicious, underhanded, and wanton behavior. She causes one to wonder whether if, lying down with assurances of safety and protection, one will nevertheless awake to the prick of a deadly spike at the temple. Perhaps this aspect of betrayal in Jael's story provides the basis for a narrower political interpretation of Jael-Republica. De Bray's Jael may be an Arminian Jael, seen as betraying both the religious Orthodoxy and the political interests of the Republic, while a Counter-Remonstrant Deborah chides the weak and relenting Barak. Perhaps most tempting of all is the possibility that Jael recalls the old Hollands Maid, no longer idealized as peaceful, virtuous, and sweet but vulgar, ruthless, and prostituted to the politically promiscuous stadholder, vroedschappen, and Dutch public. This Jael is a woman who, like other fallen and corrupted women in seventeenth-century Dutch art and popular culture, exchanges the virtue of obedience for defiance, chastity for promiscuity, honesty for deceit, and peacefulness for wrath and violence.

(1.) De Bray's painting of Jael has been featured in several recent exhibitions, and previous authors have singled out this work as one of the artist's most intriguing. See Friso Lammertse, Painting Family: The De Brays, Master Paintersof 17th Century Holland (Zwolle: Waanders, 2008); Friso Lammertse, "Salomon de Braij," in Dutch Classicism in Seventeenth-century Painting (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, 1999), 84-6; Albert Blankert, "Classicism in Dutch Painting, 1614-1670," in Gods, Saints & Heroes: Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1980), 196-8; and Joachim Wolfgang von Moltke, "Salomon de Bray," Marburger Jahrbuch fur Kunstwissenschaft 11 (1938-39): 309-420

(2.) On Jael's representation in early modern art, see Babette Bohn, "Death, Dispassion, and the Female Hero: Artemisia Gentileschi's Jael and Sisera," in The Artemisia Files: Artemisia Gentileschi for Feminists and Other Thinking People, ed. Mieke Bal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 107-27; Bettina Baumgartel and Sylvia Neysters eds., Die Galerie der Starken Frauen: die Heldin in der franzosischen und italienischen Kunst des 17. Jahrhunderts (Munchen: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1995), 231-7; and David Gunn, Judges (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 68-71.

(3.) The first version is located today in the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico. The 1635 version is in the Netherlands in the Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht. Late in life, De Bray made a third study of Jael that is entirely different in conception and more consistent with the iconographic tradition. Lammertse, "Salomon de Braij," 86-7.

(4.) Concerning the penetration of these character types in Dutch art and culture, see Simon Schama, "Wives and Wantons: Versions of Womanhood in 17th Century Dutch Art," Oxford Art Journal 3:1 (1980): 5-13.

(5.) Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 51-126.

(6.) De Bray is today not well known and is recalled most frequently perhaps as the father of a number of successful artists, including Jan and Dirck de Bray. See for instance Lammertse, Painting Family. Von Moltke's dated 1938 study on the artist remains the principal work on his career. De Bray was a student of the important Mannerist artists Hendrik Goltzius and Cornelis van Haarlem. He was well educated, long-lived, extremely productive, and employed by noble patrons, including by the House of Orange itself. See Lammertse, "Salomon de Braij," 84-6; Blankert, "Classicism," 196-8; and Joachim Wolgang von Moltke, "De Bray," in The Grove Dictionary of Art: From Rembrandt to Vermeer, 17th-Century Dutch Artists, ed. Jane Turner (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 52-3. He was moreover a leading, deeply influential figure in the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke. See E. Taverne, "Salomon de Bray and the Reorganization of the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke," Simiolus 6:1 (1972-3): 50-69.

(7.) Von Moltke, "Salomon de Bray," 309-311. Lammertse, "Salomon de Braij," 84.

(8.) No less an authority than Constantijn Huygens, the secretary to the Prince of Orange and an "influential and many-sided connoisseur of art," considered him to rank among the elite painters of his generation and solicited his participation in the decoration of Princess Amalia van Solms's palace, Huis ten Bosch. Blankert, "Classicism," 13. De Bray, along with Vermeer among others, was on the itinerary of French collector and nobleman, Balthasar de Monconys, on his 1663 tour through the Netherlands. Yet, as Blankert notes, "The development of Salomon de Braij as a painter is not yet entirely clear." Blankert, "Classicism," 196. Lammertse, "Salomon de Braij," 88.

(9.) These artists, including some of the more successful and important artists in the seventeenth-century, have suffered collectively from a lack of sustained scholarly attention that has only recently begun to be remedied. See catalogues of recent exhibitions, including Blankert et al., Gods, Saints & Heroes and Blankert et al., Dutch Classicism.

(10.) Lammertse, "Salomon de Braij," 84. Von Moltke suggests that the father emigrated north from Aalst, outside of Ghent. Von Moltke, "Salomon de Bray," 309.

(11.) Lammertse, "Salomon de Braij," 84; and Von Moltke, "Salomon de Bray," 309.

(12.) Lammertse, "Salomon de Braij," 84; and Von Moltke, "Salomon de Bray," 309. Albert Heppner, "The Popular Theatre of the Rederijkers in the Work of Jan Steen and His Contemporaries," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 3:1 (1939-40): 22-48, esp. 23.

(13.) Lammertse, "Salomon de Braij," 86.

(14.) Lammertse, "Salomon de Braij," 86; and Von Moltke, "Salomon de Bray," 310.

(15.) Though many of his designs survive, little remains physically to attest to De Bray's career as an architect. De Bray and a number of his contemporaries among the Dutch classicists made intellectual and aesthetic engagement with architecture a conspicuous aspect of their identities as artists. See Koen Ottenheym, "The Painters cum Architects of Dutch Classicism," in Dutch Classicism (See note 1), 34-53, esp. 43-46.

(16.) Taverne, "Salomon de Bray," 50-2.

(17.) Ibid., 52.

(18.) Ibid., 50-1.

(19.) Lammertse, "Salomon de Braij," 96-9.

(20.) Ibid., 99, n. 3.

(21.) Ibid., 106.

(22.) Ibid., 106.

(23.) Dozens of the depictions of Jael exist in the art of early modern period, in painting, sculpture, and print. Though it is common in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century art, the subject probably reached the height of its popularity in numerical terms in the seventeenth-century. Despite Jael's abundant representations in Renaissance and Baroque art, scholars have devoted very little attention to the subject's iconographic development or role in early modern art. See Bohn, "Death, Dispassion, and the Female Hero," 107-27; Baumgartel and Neysters, Die Galerie der Starken Frauen, 231-7; and Gunn, Judges, 68-71.

(24.) In this view, widely held during the Middle Ages and early modern period, Jael represents the bride of Christ, Ecclesia. Gunn, Judges, 68-71.

(25.) See Bohn, "Death, Dispassion, and the Female Hero."

(26.) Blankert compares De Bray's Jael to works by the Utrecht Caravaggisti, Jan Lievens, and De Bray's fellow Haarlem artist, Pieter de Grebber. Blankert, "Classicism," 184-5, 198. See also Christian Tumpel, "Religious History Painting," in Gods, Saints & Heroes, 48-9.

(27.) Jael parts company with Sisera in very few images--to my knowledge, only in a small number of prints that present iconic, emblematic, or allegorical portraits of Jael, as in Pierre Le Moyne's Galerie des femmes fortes or in Ludwig Glatsch's print series of heroines of the Old Testament. See below for further consideration of the relation of De Bray's Jael to these examples.

(28.) Lammertse notes that the painting "is rather like a group portrait of the victors ... De Braij's illustration of the story is most unusual ... Jael is normally depicted in the act of killing Sisera." Lammertse, "Salomon de Braij," 84. Von Moltke, "Salomon de Bray," 320-1. Von Moltke, "De Bray," 53.

(29.) See Bohn, "Death, Dispassion, and the Female Hero," 107-127; and Gunn, Judges, 68-71.

(30.) See Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, 430-3.

(31.) See for example depictions of the Jael theme by Lambert Lombard, Bartholomeus Spranger, Jan Sanredam, Gentileschi, Cigoli, or Luca Giordano, among others.

(32.) Von Moltke writes that Jael is preparing to strike Sisera, a suggestion that is not borne out by the pictorial composition. Von Moltke, "De Bray," 53. The hammer and spike are at best oblique references to Sisera, and the presence of Deborah and Barak alongside Jael disrupts the plot of the story and ultimately dissolves its narrative. Pictorially, however, the nail and hammer function directly and explicitly as attributes of Jael's identity and as the sources of her complexity and ambiguity, a fact that becomes clear when one imagines her without these implements. The subject of the composition would then be unidentifiable, particularly given its general incongruity with the theme's typical iconography.

(33.) See for instance versions by Carlo Maratta, Guercino, Hans Speeckaert, Lambert Lombard, and Lucas van Leyden.

(34.) Frederick Henry wears just such a sash in a number of portraits. See for instance Lyon Jacob after Mierevelt, Portrait of Frederick Henry, 1610, Rijksmuseum; Pawels Hillegaert, Prince Frederik Hendrik on Horseback outside the Fortifications of 's-Hertogenbosch, 1629, Rijksmuseum; and Adriaen van de Venne, Princes Maurits and Frederik Hendrik of Orange at the Valkenburg Horse Fair, 1618, Rijksmuseum.

(35.) The Holy Bible, Douay-Rheims, Judges 4:9

(36.) These include images of Deborah and Barak in battle from thirteenth-century manuscripts at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France (The Psalter of St-Louis, Latin 10525, fol. 47v) and the Pierpont Morgan Library (MS. M.0638, fol. 12r); from a fourteenth-century German manuscript (Pommersfelden, Schloss Weissenstein, Cod. 303, fol. 128); an image of Deborah from the late fifteenth-century Sforza Hours (British Library, Add. 34294, f. 251); the seventeenth-century, woman-warrior Deborah by Charles Audran from Le Moyne's Galerie des Femmes Fortes; and a 1752 relief image of the song of Deborah and Barak by Carlo Pietro Morsegno from Schloss Augustusburg in Germany. In every case, Deborah is youthful and modestly beautiful in appearance.

(37.) Gunn, Judges, 55.

(38.) Ibid., 57-60.

(39.) Ibid., 60.

(40.) Lammertse, "Salomon de Braij," 84.

(41.) See Bettina Baumgartel, "Die Tugendheldin als Symbol kirchlicher und staatlicher Macht: Uber die Galerie der Starken Frauen in Austattungsprogrammen und als Buchillustrationen," in Die Gallerie der Starken Frauen (see note 2), 160-1.

(42.) Ibid., 165.

(43.) Von Moltke, "Salomon de Bray," 321-2; and Blankert, "Classicism," 184-5, 196.

(44.) Gunn, Judges, 56.

(45.) Ibid., 56.

(46.) Ibid., 72-4.

(47.) Lammertse, "Salomon de Braij," 86.

(48.) Ibid., 86.

(49.) See Schama, Embarrassment ofRiches, 382-3, 448-9.

(50.) Ibid., 448-9.

(51.) Gunn, Judges, 55-62.

(52.) Ibid., 61.

(53.) Ibid., 60.

(54.) Schama, Embarassment ofRiches, 97.

(55.) Ibid., 51-126.

(56.) Ibid., 98.

(57.) On the woman-warrior and her role in republican iconography, see Linda Nochlin, Representing Women (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 35-57.

(58.) See Schama, Embarrassment ofRiches, 447-8; and Pierre Bureau, "La Dispute pour la culotte: variations litteraires et iconographiques d'un theme profane: XIIIe-XVIe siecle," Cahiers de Conques 2 (1996): 95-119.

(59.) Schama, Embarrassment ofRiches, 88-9.

(60.) On the image of the Dutch Republic, see Carol Louise Janson, The Birth of Dutch Liberty: Origins of the Political Imagery (University of Minnesota, Ph.D. Dissertation, 1982). On republican iconography in general, including the Dutch Republic, see Thomas Froschl, "Republican Virtues and the Free State: Conceptual Frame and Meaning in Early Modern Europe and North America," in Iconography, Propaganda, and Legitimation, ed. Allan Ellenius (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 255-75, esp. 265. See also Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1780-1880 (Cambridge, GBR: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

(61.) See Janson, Birth of Dutch Liberty; Elizabeth McGrath, "A Netherlandish History by Joachim Wtewael," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 38 (1975): 182-217; and H. Perry Chapman, "A Hollandse Pictura: Observations on the Title Page of Philips Angel's 'Lof der schilder-konst,'" Simiolus 16:4 (1986): 233-248.

(62.) See Jerzy Miziolek, "'Florentina libertas': la 'storia di Lucrezia romana e la cacciata del tiranno' sui cassoni del primo Rinascimento," Prospettiva 83-84 (1996): 159-176; and Sarah Blake McHam, "Donatello's Bronze David and Judith as Metaphors of Medici Rule in Florence," Art Bulletin 83:1 (2001): 32-47.

(63.) See David Rosand, "Venetia Figurata: the Iconography of a Myth," in Interpretazioni veneziane: studi di storia dell'arte in onore di Michelangelo Muraro (Venezia: Arsenale, 1984), 177-96.

(64.) Janson, Birth of Dutch Liberty, 1-13; and Schama, Embarrassment ofRiches, 69-71.

(65.) See Margareta Zimmerman, "Vom Streit der Geschlechter: die franzosische und italienische Querelle des Femmes des 15. bis 17. Jahrhunderts," in Die Gallerie der Starken Frauen (see note 2), 14-33.

(66.) See Gunn, Judges, 72-4.

(67.) See for instance Nannette Salomon's study of a political allegory of the rule of Prince Frederick Henry. Nannette Salomon, "Political Iconography in a Painting by Jan Miense Molenaer," Hoogsteder-Naumann Mercury 4 (1986): 23-38.

(68.) See Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477-1806 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 485-546; Jonathan Israel, "Frederick Henry and the Dutch Political Factions, 1625-1642," The English Historical Review, 98:386 (1983): 1-27; and Jonathan Israel, "A Conflict of Empires: Spain and the Netherlands 1618-1648," Past and Present 76 (1977): 34-74.

(69.) Previous scholars have likewise recognized Barak's twin in this canvas without attributing any significance to it. Lammertse, "Salomon de Braij," 91; Von Moltke, "Salomon de Bray," 334; and Blankert, "Classicism," 198.

(70.) See Beatrijs Brenninkmeyer-de Rooij, "Notities betreffende de decoratie van de Oranjezaal in Huis Ten Bosch," Oud Holland, 96 (1982): 133-190; and Hanna Peter-Raupp, Die Ikonographie des Oranjezaal (New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1980).

(71.) See Peter-Raupp, Ikonographie, 193-200.

(72.) See Charles H. Parker, "To the Attentive, Nonpartisan Reader: The Appeal to History and National Identity in the Religious Disputes of the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands," Sixteenth Century Journal 28:1 (1997): 57-78. Israel, "Frederick Henry," 2-4.

(73.) Israel, "Frederick Henry," 2-3.

(74.) Ibid., 2.

(75.) Ibid., 3-4.

(76.) Ibid., 13-14.

(77.) According to Israel, "Every single one of Frederick Henry's managers can be shown to have been active in blunting Counter-Remonstrant pressure in the provincial assemblies during the late 1620s and in promoting the political Arminian faction in the vroedschappen." Israel, "Frederick Henry," 13.

(78.) English observer Sir Henry Vane noted in 1630, "Of the 36 of Amsterdam [the vroedschap] in which consists the govt. of the towne, there are but 8 of the Contraremonstrants, all the rest being Arminians and the common people of the towne against them." Israel, "Frederick Henry," 10.

(79.) Ibid., 10.

(80.) Ibid., 6.

(81.) Ibid., 20.

(82.) Ibid., 14.

(83.) Concerning the circumstances and details of the truce initiative outlined in this passage, see Israel, "Frederick Henry," 15-20.

(84.) Ibid., 20.