Lodewijk Muns

During a holiday visit to Kronborg Castle in Denmark, one of the larger paintings particularly caught my eye. It wasn’t so much the painting as a whole (by a Dutch-Danish artist named Isaac Isaacsz), as it was the blonde woman casting a fixed gaze on the spectator, amidst a multitude of figures looking in all directions, but not at anything we can identify.

The woman – including her posture and position, hands folded across her breast, the crown, the way the hair falls over her shoulders – is almost identical to the figure of the bride in Rembrandt’s much more famous painting of Samson’s wedding.

That is fairly obvious, and Rembrandt being one of the most written-about artists, this striking similarity must have been noticed before, commented on, and perhaps explained. However, I found no trace of it online.

So here’s such a trace – a reflection for which I did not consult the vast literature on Dutch seventeenth-century painting.

One artist must have copied from the other, and according to the dating, it was Rembrandt copying from Isaacsz: the work of the latter dates from 1622, Rembrandt’s from 1638. This Isaac Isaacsz was the son of the better-known Danish court painter Pieter Isaacsz (son of Isaac Pietersz). Apparently, the younger Isaac adopted his father’s patronymic as his surname.

There are more, less significant similarities: the side table placed as a foreground prop on the right; the man and woman seated directly to the bride’s right. Rembrandt reverses the tilt of the woman’s head and has her refuse a drink. In Isaacsz’s painting a glass occupies the same position, but it is held by another man on the opposite side of the table.

Rembrandt’s Samson

What Rembrandt’s painting represents is clear. The subject, which is rare in iconography, is Samson posing a riddle to his friends at his wedding to a Philistine girl (not Delilah). The story is found in Judges 14.

For the spectator, however, the riddle is the slightly squinting, anonymous bride. Positioned near the centre, she catches most of the light, sharing it with Samson’s back, while his face is in the dark. Everyone on her left is attentive to Samson (including the musicians), while those on her right are talking, joking, kissing, or trying to force a drink upon a companion.

Given the bride’s central position behind the table, it’s easy to see why the painting should remind one of the Last Supper. But that it would be “a direct, deliberate homage to Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper” (which he knew from a print), and an attempt to create “a much livelier scene than Leonardo had achieved” (Britannica) – that is makes little sense. Such a comparison could be made with any of the countless representations of that Biblical event.

Isaacsz’s ‘Banquet’

Less like a stage drama, Isaacsz’s painting has no clear focus. Profuse daylight streams in from different directions. The composition is complex: in the background a lively band of musicians, a densely packed, festive crowd in the middle ground, and much detail in the foreground. The central pillar creates a division, which is continued by the servant carrying away a plate filled with bones, a table cloth mysteriously floating from his right arm. It may take some time to discern the scene’s central character, a monkey sitting at the base of the pillar.

Here the enigmatic bride is positioned far to the right, but she still catches the attention because of her frontal position, and because she’s actually looking at something – us.

What the painting represents – besides ‘a banquet’ – seems to be a riddle in itself. According to the description posted with the painting, it could be the wedding of Aeneas and Lavinia (an event not mentioned in Vergil’s Aeneid). But then, who is the princely, gesturing man? It seems to me that he is wearing a historical, sixteenth-century costume that doesn’t suit a classical setting.

Alternatively, it is proposed that the painting was part of a collaborative series on the theme of ‘The Seven Stages of Human Life’, depicting the fourth stage, youth. If the source for this is the second-century astrological treatise Tetrabiblos by Ptolemy, stage 4 would be ‘young manhood’ rather than ‘youth’; it covers a man’s twenties to forties. This stage is characterised by “mastery and direction of [one’s] actions, desire for substance, glory, and position, and a change from playful, ingenuous error to seriousness, decorum, and ambition”.

That the painting is an allegory is likely. But if it represents ‘young manhood’, who is the central character? The young man raising his glass? What is the role of the older bearded man? His ermine robe could indicate achieved “glory and position”; his waving at the monkey – a traditional vanity symbol – perhaps a goodbye to “ingenuous error” or vaingloriousness?

Anyhow, all this doesn’t explain the curious aloofness of the bride.