In 'The Riddle of Jael', Peter Scott Brown offers the first history of the Biblical heroine Jael in medieval and Renaissance art. Jael, who betrayed and killed the tyrant Sisera in the Book of Judges by hammering a tent peg through his brain as he slept under her care, was a blessed murderess and an especially fertile moral paradox in the art of the early modern period. Jael’s representations offer insights into key religious, intellectual, and social developments in late medieval and early modern society. They reflect the influence on art of exegesis, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, humanism and moral philosophy, misogyny and the battle of the sexes, the emergence of syphilis, and the Renaissance ideal of the artist.
Author(s): Peter Scott Brown
Series: Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, 278. Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, 25
Publisher: Brill
Year: 2018
Language: English
Pages: 372
City: Leiden
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Part 1. The Riddle of Jael
Chapter 1. Jael under Erasure
Chapter 2. Jael in Medieval and Early Modern Art and Thought
Part 2. Transformations of Jael (1400–1550)
Chapter 3. Jan van Eyck and the Early Modern Re-imagination of Jael
Chapter 4. Albrecht Altdorfer’s Jael, the Power of Women, and Syphilis in Sixteenth-Century Print
Chapter 5. Lambert Lombard’s Jael, Poxied Penitents, and Northern Humanism
Part 3. Jael among the Haarlem Humanists (1550–1600)
Chapter 6. Maarten van Heemskerck and Dirck Coornhert’s Power of Women: A Pasquinade on the Perfectibility of the Imperfect Soul
Chapter 7. Maarten van Heemskerck and Hendrick Goltzius on Jael’s Nail and the Artist’s Hand
Chapter 8. Philips Galle and Hadrianus Junius’ Jael: A Biblical Circe and Her Eloquent Riddle
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
