1982.50: The Brazen Serpent

In Giorgio Vasari’s succinct formulation, it was Michiel Coxcie “who brought to Flanders the Italian manner.”¹ During an artistic career that spanned more than six decades, Coxcie played a major role in introducing Italian High Renaissance style into the pictorial arts of the Netherlands. According to artist–biographer Karel van Mander (1548–1606; 2001.135), Coxcie studied with Bernard van Orley (2002.22) .² He probably arrived in Rome in the late 1520s, and about 1531 the Dutch cardinal Willem van Enckenvoirt commissioned him to paint frescoes with scenes from the life of Saint Barbara in the Church of Santa Maria dell’Anima. These impressed Vasari for “imitating very well our Italian manner.”³ Enckenvoirt also supported Maarten van Heemskerck (1994.155), whose sojourn in Rome coincided with Coxcie’s. Like Heemskerck, Coxcie studied the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Giulio Romano, as well as the sculpture and architectural remains of ancient Rome.⁴ Back in the Netherlands by 1539, Coxcie worked primarily in Brussels but also fulfilled commissions from churches in Mechelen and Antwerp. In addition to painting altarpieces, devotional pictures, and portraits, he designed prints, tapestries, and stained glass. In the 1540s, Coxcie provided the cartoons for monumental windows donated by members of the imperial family to the Brussels church of Saint Gudule. He served as court painter to Mary of Hungary, regent of the Netherlands, and also worked for her brother, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and Charles’s son, King Philip II of Spain.⁵

The Harvard drawing illustrates a passage from the Book of Numbers (21:5–9). Weary from their journey in the wilderness near the Red Sea, the Israelites “spoke against God and against Moses.” The Lord sent fiery serpents that bit and killed many of the people. When they repented, Moses, following the Lord’s direction, “made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, and he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived.”⁶ The drawing shows only the serpents attacking the people, but it has been cut down from a larger composition and, like Coxcie’s print of this subject (Fig. 1), might originally have included more of the narrative.⁷

The traditional attribution to Coxcie of the Brazen Serpent, documented by inscriptions on its mount, is sustained by comparison with a series of ten drawings in the British Museum that illustrate the Loves of Jupiter. Three of these bear Coxcie’s monogram, and all ten were reproduced in reverse in engravings by an unidentified printmaker.⁸ As Molly Faries observed in her 1975 publication on the Harvard sheet, the systematic parallel and cross-hatched pen lines that model the figures are virtually identical to the disciplined strokes in the Loves of Jupiter drawings (Fig. 2).⁹ The contours and handling of details such as hands, feet, hair, and musculature are also closely comparable. The affinity of its technique to that of the Loves of Jupiter not only confirms the attribution of the Harvard sheet, but also suggests a date for it during the same period as the designs for the print series. Faries convincingly assigned the Harvard composition and the Loves of Jupiter to Coxcie’s Roman years.¹⁰ She further related the drawing to Coxcie’s only autograph print, an etching, later reinforced with etching and burin, that also represents The Brazen Serpent (see Fig. 1).¹¹ The print is signed Mighel Flamingo inventur, an Italianate form of his name that implies its publication in Rome.¹² None of the elements in the etching and drawing correspond exactly, so the Harvard work is not a direct study for the print, but a variant composition.¹³

Coxcie’s Roman works, with their complex poses, idealized musculature and proportions, and exalted facial expressions, register the impact of antique and Italian models—particularly works by Michelangelo—on his early development.¹⁴ As Faries observed, the figure seen from the back at the upper left of the drawing was inspired by the Hellenistic sculptural fragment known as the Belvedere Torso, while the pose of the terrified man with drawn-up legs next to him derives from the Deluge on the Sistine ceiling. Most conspicuously, the outstretched, heroically suffering male figures at the center of the Harvard work and lower right of the Brazen Serpent etching were adapted from Michelangelo’s Tityos, one of the drawings the Italian master made in 1532–33 for Tommaso de’ Cavalieri.¹⁵

Notes

¹ “che portò in Fiandra la maniera italiana”; Karel van Mander and ed. and trans. Hessel Miedema, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, from the First Edition of the Schilder-boeck (1603–04) (Doornspijk, Netherlands 1994–99), vol. 4, p. 185 (n. 20).

² Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 292–94, and vol. 4, p. 184; Koenraad Jonckheere and Ruben Suykerbuyk in Koenraad Jonckheere, ed., Michiel Coxcie 1499–1592 and the Giants of His Age (London and Turnhout, 2013), pp. 24–25. My thanks to Ruben Suykerbuyk for his comments on a draft of this entry.

³ “imitando molto bene la maniera nostra d’Italia”; Van Mander/Miedema, vol. 4, p. 186 (n. 29). Coxcie completed the frescoes by 1534; Koenraad Jonckheere, Ruben Suykerbuyk, and Eckhard Leuschner in Jonckheere et al., pp. 26–27 and 53–63. A preparatory drawing for one of them was published by Achim Gnann and Domenico Laurenza, “Raphael’s Influence on Michiel Coxcie: Two New Drawings and a Painting,” Master Drawings, vol. 34, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 293–302, pp. 294–98, repr. fig. 5.

⁴ Jonckheere in Jonckheere et al. 2013, pp. 66–97.

⁵ Bob van den Boogert, “Habsburgs imperialisme en de verspreiding van renaissancevormen in de Nederlanden: De vensters van Michiel Coxcie in de Sint-Goedele te Brussel,” Oud Holland, vol. 106, no. 2 (1992): 57–80, pp. 60–72 and 76; Van Mander/Miedema, vol. 4, pp. 182–91; Almudena Pérez de Tudela and Melina Reintjens in Jonckheere et al., pp. 100–115 and 140–55.

⁶ See Faries 1975, pp. 137– 38, on the popularity and significance of the subject during the sixteenth century.

⁷ See below, notes 11 and 12, for the print.

⁸ London, British Museum, 1861,0112.1–10. Arthur Ewart Popham, Dutch and Flemish Drawings of the XV and XVI Centuries, Vol. 5 in Catalogue of Drawings by Dutch and Flemish Artists Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum (London, 1932), [Coxcie], nos. 1–10, pp. 12–14; Koenraad Jonckheere and Joris van Grieken in Jonckheere et al. 2013, pp. 87–91 and 164–70. Nine of the ten drawings are executed in brown ink. One, Jupiter in the Form of Diana, Enjoying Callisto (1861,0112.10), is in black chalk. A set of the engravings is in the British Museum, 1925,1117.150–159, where they are attributed to the School of Marcantonio Raimondi. However, the traditional attribution of the prints to Cornelis Bos has recently been reconsidered; Joris van Grieken in Jonckheere et al. 2013, pp. 169–70. Virgil Solis engraved copies of seven of the prints (Hollstein, vol. 63, nos. 221–27, pp. 180– 83).

⁹ Molly Faries, “A Drawing of the Brazen Serpent by Michiel Coxie,” Revue Belge d’Archeologie et d’Histoire de l’Art, vol. 44 (1975): 131–41, pp. 131–35. Jupiter, in the Form of Amphitryon, with Alcmena Seated on His Lap (Fig. 2) is in brown ink; incised. 173 × 136 mm. London, British Museum, 1861,0112.3. Popham [Coxcie], no. 3, p. 13.

¹⁰ Faries, pp. 133–36. Joris van Grieken in Jonckheere et al., pp. 164 and 181 (n. 43), also dated the drawings for The Loves of Jupiter to Coxcie’s Roman period, although he proposes (pp. 169–70) that the prints might have been produced after Coxcie returned to the Netherlands in 1539.

¹¹ Faries, pp. 133–36. Michiel Coxcie, The Brazen Serpent (Fig. 1). Etching and engraving. 297 × 428 mm. Cambridge, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, G9083. Hollstein, vol. 5, no. 1, p. 62. Edward Wouk in New Hollstein, Frans Floris, part 1, pp. l–li.

¹² Konrad Oberhuber, Die Kunst der Graphik IV. Zwischen Renaissance und Barock: Das Zeitalter von Bruegel und Bellange (Vienna: Graphische Sammlung Albertina), p. 89; Faries, pp. 136–37; Domenico Laurenza, on p. 112 of “Michel Coxcie à Rome et dans les Pays-Bas anciens: Nouvelles attributions,” in Eugeen Van Autenboer, Yvette vanden Bemden, Bob C. van den Boogert, et al., Michel Coxcie: Pictor regis, 1499–1592 (International colloquium, Mechelen, 5–6 June 1992, published as one issue of Handelingen van de Koninklijke Kring voor Oudheidkunde, Letteren en Kunst van Mechelen (Mechelen, Belgium 1993), vol. 92, no. 2, 93–117), and again on pp. 30-31 of “Un Dessin de Giulio Clovio (1498–1578) d’après Michel Coxcie (1499–1592): De l’influence de Raphaël et de Michel-Ange sur des artistes de la génération de 1530,” Revue du Louvre, vol. 43, no. 3 (June 1994): 30–35, all dated the print to Coxcie’s Roman sojourn. Nicole Dacos, “Michiel Coxcie et les romanistes: A propos de quelques inédits,” in Van Autenboer et al.: 55–92, p. 78, dated the print after Coxcie returned to the Netherlands, citing the derivation of three figures in the print from Van Orley’s Crucifixion in Bruges, but the comparison is not compelling. More recently, Joris van Grieken also argued that Coxcie could have produced the Brazen Serpent print soon after he returned to the Netherlands in 1539; Joris van Grieken in Jonckheere et al., pp. 171–73.

¹³ Faries, p. 136, concluded, “The drawing . . . is most likely a study related to the print in the sense that it represents an alternate composition.” Karel G. Boon, The Netherlandish and German Drawings of the XVth and XVIth Centuries of the Frits Lugt Collection (Paris, 1992), vol. 1, under cat. 61, p. 104, also regarded the drawing as a study for the print. Dacos, p. 78, dated the print later than the drawing, although she did not provide an argument for her dating.

¹⁴ Faries, p. 136; Laurenza (1994), pp. 30–31.

¹⁵ Faries, pp. 136–37. Faries also noted that Coxcie’s Rape of Ganymede in the Loves of Jupiter series is based on Michelangelo’s drawing of this subject, another gift to Tommaso de’ Cavalieri in 1532. For Michelangelo’s drawings for Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, see Stephanie Buck in Stephanie Buck et al., Michelangelo’s Dream (London: The Courtauld Gallery, 2010), cats. 2–8, pp. 110–45.