Experiments in Religious Art: Style and Audience

CHAPTER 7 Experiments in Religious Art: Style and Audience

The Raising of the Brazen Serpent (fig. 7.1; cat. H.25), engraved on two large copperplates by Pieter van der Heyden and published by Hieronymus Cock in 1555 with an important imperial privilege, re- cords the design of what must have been among the largest paintings Frans Floris produced for his illustrious early patron, the states- man and cleric Cardinal Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle (fig. 7.17). Depicting the punishment inflicted on the Israelites because of their doubts and ingratitude, this spectacular engraving is an image about the salvific powers of looking. God sent poisonous serpents to attack the restive Israelites in the desert. After Moses intervened, the deity commanded them to set up a brazen serpent so that all who looked on it would be healed (Numbers 21: 6–9). In its iconography and its materiality, van der Heyden’s print, an image made from “brazen” copper plates, advances the efficacy of sight as a vehicle for salvation. While the entwining of antique form and Christian content had become a convention of Renaissance art by the sixteenth century, the specificity of the allusions to classical and distinctly Roman art in this sacred istoria is particularly strik- ing. Many of Floris’s writhing figures are explicitly based on antique prototypes and the work of Michelangelo (particularly his Sistine ceiling) and they combine here to form an overpowering display of afflicted bodies arranged as though in a relief. The eye follows the undulating musculature of Floris’s contorted, tormented figures as they fill the image’s foreground, until eventually the gaze reaches the upper left corner where Moses raises up the serpent and those who look upon it are restored to health. An inscription in the upper right corner by Dominicus Lampsonius – his earliest known text on a work of art – addresses the beholder with a direct exhortation to look: “Adspice” or “behold!” Composed expressly for the engraving and carved into an illusionis- tic cartouche that appears to adhere to the picture surface, this text (see Appendix A) establishes a distinction between sacred images and profane ones, aligning Floris’s creation with the former and spe- cifically praising his Apelles-like hand, which produces a divine art Figure 7.20, detail sanctioned through its connection to the ancients.1 Crucifixion