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The Meaning of the Portrait of Verdonck by Frans Hals

The Meaning of the Portrait of Verdonck by Frans Hals 138 P.J.J. VAN THIEL The Meaning of the Portrait of Verdonck by Frans Hals The Iconography of the Jawbone The figure in the portrait of a man with a jawbone by Frans Hals (Fig. 1) is identifi'ed as a certain Verdonck by the text on the print after the painting by Jan van de Velde (Fig. 2). Slive interprets the text to mean that Verdonck got into trouble by wielding a jawbone and by implication suggests that he was the same kind of person as Pieter van der Morsch, the fool of the Leiden rhetoricians (Notes 1, 2). In fact, however, it is clear that the jawbone appears in the portrait as a symbol of Samson and in the verse as one for talking. An unusual feature of the portrait is the tight placing of the figure in the picture plane, whereby the knuckles fall outside it (Note 3). Hals will have borrowed this kind of composition from his im- mediate predecessors the Mannerists, cf. Jan van Ravesteyn's portrait of Hugo de Gro-ot (1599) and those by Cornelis Ketel of Hendrick Goltzius (1601) and Paulus van Vianen (Fig. 3, Note 4). Such abruptly cut-off portraits are usually close-ups http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Oud Holland - Quarterly for Dutch Art History Brill

The Meaning of the Portrait of Verdonck by Frans Hals

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Publisher
Brill
Copyright
Copyright © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
ISSN
0030-672x
eISSN
1875-0176
DOI
10.1163/187501780X00229
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

138 P.J.J. VAN THIEL The Meaning of the Portrait of Verdonck by Frans Hals The Iconography of the Jawbone The figure in the portrait of a man with a jawbone by Frans Hals (Fig. 1) is identifi'ed as a certain Verdonck by the text on the print after the painting by Jan van de Velde (Fig. 2). Slive interprets the text to mean that Verdonck got into trouble by wielding a jawbone and by implication suggests that he was the same kind of person as Pieter van der Morsch, the fool of the Leiden rhetoricians (Notes 1, 2). In fact, however, it is clear that the jawbone appears in the portrait as a symbol of Samson and in the verse as one for talking. An unusual feature of the portrait is the tight placing of the figure in the picture plane, whereby the knuckles fall outside it (Note 3). Hals will have borrowed this kind of composition from his im- mediate predecessors the Mannerists, cf. Jan van Ravesteyn's portrait of Hugo de Gro-ot (1599) and those by Cornelis Ketel of Hendrick Goltzius (1601) and Paulus van Vianen (Fig. 3, Note 4). Such abruptly cut-off portraits are usually close-ups

Journal

Oud Holland - Quarterly for Dutch Art HistoryBrill

Published: Jan 1, 1980

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