Landscape with Numa Pompilius and the Nymph Egeria

Entry

Depicted on this exceptionally detailed relief are Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, and his wife, the prophetic water nymph Egeria, as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book 15, 29-59 and 479-96). Standing left centre in the palace garden is the king, dressed in a long classical toga. He gazes upwards, reaching his hands to the sky. Directly behind him is a pergola covered in grapevines. Sitting atop its arched entryway are two small putti engaged in an embrace. Egeria sits on a wall balustrade that borders the stream and encloses the garden in front. Various imposing buildings in all’antica style dominate the scene on the right and extend well into the background. High above, the god Mercury hovers in the air. Dominating the background on the left is a woodland, populated with horses and a bull. The balustrade is decorated with finely carved representations of tritons flanking an oval cartouche in which stylized dolphins clasp a trident between their conjoined tails. A crab can be seen at the far-left end; above it floats a cornucopia. A large, classical urn stands in the middle of the balustrade, with a second, identical vessel situated at the rear of the enclosed garden.

Numa Pompilius was seen as a paragon of piety and wisdom, the latter partly thanks to his close contact with the gods and the sound advice of Egeria. The present relief shows the scene in which the king beseeches the supreme god Jupiter to halt his showering of lightning rods on the inhabitants of Rome, while at the same time asking what offering might temper his wrath. Grazing sheep and the two wine-filled urns serve as visual references to Numa’s offering. The scene in the background – horses running in a forest and a bull – alludes to another story in the Metamorphoses, specifically, the story of Theseus’s son, Hippolytus, who is killed by wild horses and a bull in the forests of Aricia. This marble relief is the only representation known to combine both scenes.

The work was long attributed to the Flemish sculptor Alexander Colyn (c. 1527-1612), who worked for the Habsburg emperor in Innsbruck. The numerous marble reliefs he produced for the mausoleum of Emperor Maximilian I in the Hofkirche in Innsbruck indeed display a similar eye for detail and the same kind of depth. Nevertheless, the stylistic deviation of the Amsterdam relief is still far too great to support this attribution. Recently, Lipinska convincingly linked this piece to a marble relief in New York (fig. a).⁶ Comparable in its dimensions, iconography, style and type, the New York relief introduces an entirely new line of inquiry regarding the attribution of the Amsterdam marble.⁷ The scene on the New York relief is rather cryptic, allegorical and emblematic in nature, dedicated to the god Jupiter’s dominion.⁸ Although precisely equal in height to that of the Amsterdam marble, it measures approximately 5 centimetres wider. This difference explains the fairly abrupt manner in which the Numa Pomilius relief terminates on the right side: 5 centimetres is all that is required to make the scene ‘complete’, without the structures on the right having to be cut off. It would also mean the Amsterdam piece originally had the exact same measurements of the Jupiter relief. Despite the similarity in concept and style, the two reliefs were not carved by the same hand. They nevertheless have so many motifs in common, that a direct connection must be deemed highly tenable. Details such as the two embracing putti – on the New York relief identified as the astrological sign Gemini – the god Mercury, the classical architecture, the flowing water (fountain, stream), the dolphins with the trident (on the fountain’s base), and the reference to Jupiter. These elements are depicted very prominently in the New York relief; on the Amsterdam piece, by contrast, they are chiefly assigned a subordinate role in the background, with Jupiter’s presence, for example, present only in the form of lightning bolts above the city of Rome. In the other relief, his personage forms the central element of the composition.

Mezzatesta and Eisler have both made attempts to interpret the Jupiter relief, linking it to the French court. Mezzatesta saw Jupiter as a deified ‘prefiguration’ of King Henry II, with Mercury being Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, a statesman renowned for his eloquence.⁹ The Gemini putti and the Sagittarius on the right are therefore to be interpreted as a possible specific astrological constellation, created by Jupiter and inspiring poetic inspiration, as symbolized by the flowing fountain in the middle. Eisler drew a connection between the iconography and the emblematic scenes on monuments built to hold the hearts of deceased princes, specifically referring to François I’s heart monument in Saint-Denis.¹⁰ In his vision, the relief was intended for a never completed monument for King Charles IX’s heart, planned around 1575. Unlike Lipinska, neither author mentions a connection to the Amsterdam relief.

Lipinska also placed the New York and Amsterdam reliefs in the context of the French court circa 1550-70, describing both works as being part of a decorative, panegyric programme in light of the marked similarity of the two. Likewise acknowledging that both works are not by the same hand, she saw no reason to rule out a provenance in the same ambiance based on the presumption that both belonged to a series carried out by a team of sculptors. The New York relief praises the prince as Jupiter, father of the Muses, and accordingly, source and protector of the arts. The Amsterdam relief, by contrast, extolls the prince himself as protector of social order and religion. Here the prince assumes the role of the ‘priestly king’ Numa Pompilius, renowned for his great wisdom and piety. Both reliefs convey the notion of the king’s deification, a recognized theme in the panegyric of the French court. The poet Ronsard, for example, wrote of a Mount Olympus on which Henry II and his wife Catherine de Médici sit enthroned as Jupiter and Juno. In his Panegyrique de la renommée, he even drew an explicit connection between Numa Pompilus’s dominion and the monarchy of the House Valois.

Lipinska suggested that both reliefs might originally have belonged to the Rotonde de Valois, a round temple-like burial chapel near the cathedral of Saint-Denis, founded in 1559-60 by Catherine de Médici in honour of the dynasty of husband, Henry II, following his sudden death.¹¹ The tomb of the king and his widow stood in the middle of the chapel, surrounded by six radiating chapels. Designed by Francesco Primaticcio (1504-1570), the chapel’s construction and decoration were assigned to a large number of artists. The Rotonde was never completed, however: in 1585, the entire project was abandoned, with the domed roof as yet unfinished. The structure itself fell into ruin and was ultimately demolished in 1719. Besides the tomb itself, Germain Pilon’s monumental Resurrection group in the Louvre is the most important sculptural component of the Rotonde design today surviving intact. The Amsterdam and New York reliefs would both have a logically befitting place in this Valois context, though this begs the question regarding their precise location as delicate works integrated in the chapel’s architecture. Whether this was possible in the Rotonde de Valois remains uncertain: the refinement of the carving suggests these works were to be viewed from close proximity. Even if belonging to the same ensemble, they seem more suitable for the intimate world of a palace interior versus the (semi-)public space of a burial chapel.

Frits Scholten, 2024