Configuring Virtue: the Emergence of Abstraction, Allegoresis and Emblem in Swedish Figural Sculpture of the Seventeenth Century
Simon McKeown CONFIGURING VIRTUE: THE EMERGENCE OF ABSTRACTION, ALLEGORESIS AND EMBLEM IN SWEDISH FIGURAL SCULPTURE OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY In 1642, the Amsterdam engraver, Crispijn de Passe the Younger pub- lished an unusual emblem book called Den Onderganck des Roomschen Arents door den Noordschen Leeuw (“The Overthrow of the Roman Eagle by the Northern Lion”).1 This work was a hagiographical memorial of the brief, but glorious, intervention of the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years’ War published ten years after his death, and some seven years after that of the book’s author, the preacher Bartholomaeus Hulsius.2 In one of the book’s twenty-nine plates, De Passe presents us with a prospect of Gustavus Adolphus’ mausoleum in Stockholm (Fig. 1). It is depicted as an effigial monument with the figure of the king recum- bent on top of a chest-tomb. He rests under a broad canopy supported by six female statues which act as a species of caryatid. Four of the statues are fully visible to the viewer, and by their attributes are easily readable as personifications of the Cardinal Virtues. From left to right, we find Iustitia (Justice) with sword and scales, Fortitudo (Fortitude) with a col- umn, Temperantia (Temperance) diluting a flagon of wine with water, and DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12697/BJAH.2015.9.05 1 Bartholomaeus Hulsius, Den Onderganck des Roomschen Arents door den Noordschen Leeuw (Amsterdam: Crispijn de Passe the Younger, 1642). 2 Concerning this work, see Simon McKeown, “A Reformed and Godly Leader: Bartholomaeus Hulsius’s Typological Emblems in Praise of Gustavus Adolphus”, Reformation 5 (2000), 55-101.
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