An Iconographical Riddle: Gerbrandt van den Eeckhout's Royal Repast in the Liechtenstein Princely Collections

Abstract

Gerbrandt van den Eeckhout's Royal Repast has been interpreted as King David mourning the death of his son by Bathsheba and as an allegory of Winter. Both explanations, however, overlook many puzzling elements, such as the setting within a cave, the unusual gifts presented to the king, and the presence of four winged figures in the background, one of whom is a haloed black boy. An alchemical interpretation brings these elements together within a coherent iconographical framework. In this context, the king serves as an allegorical pivot, complementing and magnifying the figures and objects placed around him. Eeckhout's iconography comes from popular alchemical emblem books and from medieval sources that were reprinted in the seventeenth century in response to a renewed fascination with early alchemical imagery. The Royal Repast not only reflects the seventeenth-century perception of alchemy as a force for the public good, but also demonstrates that the history of chemistry is a relatively unexplored area for art-historical research in Dutch seventeenth-century painting.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laurinda S. Dixon

Laurinda Dixon has published a book entitled Alchemical Imagery in Bosch's Garden of Delights (1981), and her articles have appeared in the Art Bulletin, the Art Journal, and Oud Holland[Department of Fine Arts, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244–1170].

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu is the author of French Realism and the Dutch Masters and collaborated on the exhibition catalogue, Im Lichte Hollands (Basel, 1987) [Department of Art and Music, Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ 07079].