Peter Scott Brown's thorough history of Jael imagery, including medieval exempla but focused on the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, presents iconography in its most inclusive form: how do social, sexual, medical, and church histories, as well as intergenerational artistic traditions, alter and/or inflect the representation of a subject? This book provides insights based primarily on texts. But Brown always combines text-based analysis with broader histories as he tracks the representation of Jael.
What is the “riddle” of the title? In the biblical book of Judges, Jael appears briefly (4:17–22). As enemy general Sisera flees from the Israelite army commanded by Barak, Sisera finds the tent of an absent ally. The ally's wife, Jael, invites Sisera in to have milk. Later, as he rests, she hammers his head into the ground with a tent peg. Then she presents the result to Barak. In sum, she breaks taboos of hospitality, and commits a murder, but aids the chosen people of God. The riddle therefore is: how does “the ideal of her blessed spirit tangle with the deceptive, carnal, bloody form of her deed” (173)? As Brown states, this ambiguity and doubleness differentiates Jael from other unambiguously vicious or virtuous heroines in the series in which she is typically placed, especially in the sixteenth century.
The book opens with “false” sixteenth-century panel paintings of Jael since shown to be probable seventeenth-century emendations. After introducing previous historiography—largely non–art historical—of Jael, Brown proceeds chronologically: from illuminations in twelfth-century and thirteenth-century manuscripts (though medievalist readers may resist his characterizations of the relative “free[dom]” and “fallow ground” of the “early modern,” 5, 65); to a drawing attributed to Van Eyck; and then to the meat of the book, sustained analyses of sixteenth-century print series in the Low Countries. (The most impressive parts of these analyses are his close readings of sixteenth-century Dutch humanistic circles’ references to antique verse and to each other.) The book closes with late sixteenth-century engravings designed by Hendrik Goltzius and Antonius II Wierix, in dialogue with predecessors yet signaling a loss of ambiguity to come.
Most valuably, Brown acknowledges throughout that Jael imagery depends upon other images of women. In fact, sometimes he gets carried away imagining the sophisticated intertextual imbrication of the sixteenth-century Dutch series. His otherwise convincing account of a Power of Women by Dirck Coornhert after Maarten Heemskerck as a pasquinade suffers both from overextension of the concept of chiasmus for the series's structure and from too-aggressive specificity about how the anonymized public discourse of Pasquino and Marforio in Rome loaded meaning onto the borrowings of their forms in the figures of Lot, Sisera, Samson, and Solomon. I would question whether Solomon, his shoulders aligned with his face, is even a borrowing from the Pasquino, most recognizable for torsion (204–08).
Likewise, Brown perhaps overinterprets the caption for a Jael by Philips Galle after Heemskerck, stretching “adde operi titulum pictor” into something like “painter, increase the repute of the work” (which would ordinarily involve operis in the genitive) rather than the far more likely “painter, add [this] title to the work” of previous scholarship (231–34). Brown misses here the opportunity to think about why the painter and Jael are addressed in consecutive sentences, two addressees crammed into a short distich. This pairing anticipates one of Brown's most beautiful arguments, the identification of Jael with the artist himself in Hendrik Goltzius's 1588 version (he borrows his own hand for hers!) rendered by Jacob Matham (255–61).
Such quibbles are small, and my appreciation for Brown's contribution large. Imagination is better than drought in such a thorough inventory. Overall, Brown's sensitivity to context is to be applauded. Only occasionally does he slip, despite sensitive readings of Mieke Bal's work on Jael, into a masculinist art history of female imagery paralleling that of the nude: he sometimes declares that Jael is a “cypher” awaiting male population, an “empty tenor of metaphor, a vessel” (115), “essentially mysterious and unknowable” (326). In general, this book instead offers several specific reasons why Jael imagery exceeded and inflected the predictable meanings of female virtue and male downfall: increasing attention among the audience of such prints to syphilis, eloquence, and the engraver's burin, among others. This extensive catalogue will be of great use, especially, one hopes, to scholars continuing to build feminist accounts of the Northern Renaissance.
