Sleeping Nymph

Entry

In the sixteenth century, the theme of the sleeping (half-)nude woman obtained a certain degree of popularity eventually becoming a genre unto its own. The source of this development was likely the late-fifteenth century rumour, as reported by Michael Fabricius Ferrarinus (d. before 1493), of an antique fountain discovered on the banks of the Donau River, having the form of a sleeping nymph.⁷ The rumour gained further ground when in 1512 an antique fountain of a sleeping, half-nude woman was erected in the Vatican's Belvedere Palace. Then identified as Cleopatra, the woman is today recognized as a sleeping Ariadne. Ever since, both sculpted and painted manifestations of beautiful sleeping women are common, often situated in the idyllic surroundings of a water source. These images evoke a wide array of associations, varying from sleep, dreams, eroticism and voyeurism to muses, artistic inspiration and the classical locus amoenus, i.e. an idealized refuge in nature.⁸

Among the various sculptural interpretations, the present statuette is one of the most refined. It can be attributed to the sculptor Guglielmus Paludanus (born Willem van den Broecke) on the basis of a marked stylistic similarity to one of his few signed and dated works, an alabaster Cyprus and Eros (also known as Venus and Amor) from 1559 (fig. a).⁹ That statuette depicts the seated goddess of love and beauty with her adoring son. The subject is also conveyed by the Greek inscription ΚΥΓΡΙC ΕΡΩΤΟΦΙΛΟC (Kypris erootophilos). Here Paludanus’s signature appears in full: GUILIELMUS PALUDANUS ANNO MDLIX. Quite exceptionally, the sculpture’s original socle and encasement have also been preserved, thus allowing its identification as the ‘Seated Venus of alabaster in a standing case’ listed in the 1582 inventory of Paludanus’s estate.¹⁰ A close comparison of the two alabaster statuettes reveals numerous similarities, e.g. the same positioning of the right arm and the virtually identical gesturing of the hand with the folds of the sheet descending from between the fingers, the almost indistinguishable elongation of the body with its softly modelled forms and diminutive breasts, and the same gathered cushions and draperies. When considering the many similarities shared by these two works, undoubtedly carved by the hand of the same maker, the attribution of the Amsterdam statuette to Paludanus can be made unreservedly.¹¹

Information regarding Paludanus’s life and career is relatively scant, but statements made by his contemporaries affirm he was a man of significant renown.¹² In 1567, Lodovico Guicciardini described him as a grande scultore. In the following year, Vasari added Paludanus to the second edition of his Vite. Around 1570, the historian Pieter van Opmeer mentioned his name in the same breath with the sculptor Cornelis Floris. Writing in Dresden in 1608, Gabriel Kaltemarckt included Paludanus in his list of sculptors from the Low Countries, whose works in his estimation were to be represented in every princely collection.¹³ This last point is entirely understandable when considering Paludanus specialized in small-scale sculptures and reliefs executed in alabaster, terracotta, bronze and even wax, typically the kind of works found in art cabinets.

Paludanus almost certainly spent some time in Italy, specifically in the period from 1555 to 1557, though no visit is known to have been documented.¹⁴ Archival verification of artistic activity prior to 1557 is also non-existent. It therefore seems apparent that Paludanus’s earliest trip to Italy occurred sometime around 1555, possibly undertaken in the company of his brother Hendrick (c. 1530-1590), whose own activity south of the Alps is first documented in 1557. In any event, Paludanus registered as a ‘free master’ in the Antwerp Guild of St Luke in that same year and is therefore certain to have spent some of his time in the north. Besides evident opportunity, various details drawn from classical and sixteenth-century Italian sculpture discernible in his oeuvre offer a clear indication that he must have travelled to Italy.¹⁵

Both the Sleeping Nymph and the _Venus and Amor _betray a marked interest in the art of Antiquity – with the Venus even accompanied by a Greek inscription – and the Italian Renaissance. The delicate and idealized physical forms of the two female figures are unimaginable without some kind of knowledge of one of the Venus statues accessible in sixteenth-century Italy. Particularly similar are the torso of the Venus Cnidia, which had been held in the Santacroce collection in Rome since the late fifteenth century, and the Venus Felix, on display in the Belvedere Courtyard of the Vatican Palace from 1523 on.¹⁶ In the case of the Amsterdam sleeping woman, for instance, one observes the antique form of the daybed on which she lies, with the head-end consisting of three pairs of adjacently placed volutes, surmounted by grotesque mascarons at the corners. The sculptor has masterfully kept the foremost mask in view while veiling the mask at the rear under drapery, with only its general outline showing through. Jan van Scorel’s (1495-1562) Bathsheba, preserved in the collection of the Rijksmuseum (SK-A-670), features the sleeping figure of a man lying on a similar bed. Remarkable in the present piece are the fathomless, hollowed-out eye sockets of the front mascaron, an effect Paludanus also managed to achieve with the eyes of the flayed skin of his St Bartholomew as Écorché in Vienna.¹⁷ The mascaron on the bed is derived from the mask of Michelangelo’s (1475-1564) personification of Night on the tomb of Giuliano de’Medici in the Medici Chapel (San Lorenzo, Florence), completed in 1531.

By no means is this entirely coincidental, considering the thematic agreement between the Sleeping Nymph and the sleeping beauty of Michelangelo’s Night. A closer observation reveals that Paludanus must have studied this work in depth. He relied not only on Michelangelo’s composition, but also turned to other motifs such as the volutes of the bed, the figure’s hair and even a subtler motif: the poppy seed pods held in her right hand. A clutch of poppies can also be seen at the feet of Michelangelo’s figure. This is an antique motif found, for instance, in extant versions of the Sleeping Cupid from Antiquity in Florence and elsewhere. The Sleeping Cupid was also a theme investigated by the young Michelangelo.¹⁸ Contrary to the elegant pose of the sleeping nymph, in all of these works the sleeping figure of Cupid lies either on his side or on his back. Various similarities are nevertheless to be observed in the pose and especially the positioning of the arms. Paludanus’s statuette can therefore be viewed as a personal interpretation and even an emulation of sculpture from Antiquity, but also of a number of Michelangelo’s best known and most studied creations. Paludanus’s Sleeping Nymph is therefore an entirely new composition based both on Michelangelo’s Night and his Sleeping Cupid, or any of the latter sculpture’s antique models.¹⁹ Attention has recently been drawn to the mildly erotic aspects of the present statuette in association with Petrarchan poetry composed in Antwerp at this time, including Van der Noot’s series of sonnets entitled Het Bosken. The sensuous alabaster figure, carved in a material bearing connotations with soft skin, thus emerges as an object that evokes the desire to touch while simultaneously enflaming secret desires.²⁰

Despite these evident stylistic and iconographic roots, without other tangible attributes the task of determining the precise meaning of the Amsterdam sleeping female figure remains problematic. Is it Venus who lies here, or a personification of Hypnos, a nymph or a muse? The identification of this figure as a ‘sleeping muse’ has some basis when acknowledging the presence of similar reclining female figures in works by Lucas de Heere (1534-1584), a contemporary of Paludanus who was also active in Antwerp. The central figure in De Heere’s painting Sleeping Liberal Arts in Times of War (1567), with its back turned to the viewer, and the same figure in his drawing entitled Faith, Hope and Love, Sleeping are virtually inconceivable without the artist having possessed a knowledge of Paludanus’s figure, as the pose is completely identical to that of the statuette when viewed from the reverse (fig. b).²¹ An echo of the same alabaster is likewise discernible in Frans Floris’s (1515/20-1570) Awakening of the Arts from 1559.²² Especially during a period of relative unrest in Europe, the theme of the sleeping muse (or one of the liberal arts) was certainly befitting. Yet in the absence of important attributes indicating as much, the evidence to support this particular theme is lacking. On the contrary, the poppy seed pods in the hands would suggest a less complicated, more common iconography, most likely inspired by the famous Sleeping Nymph (‘Ariadne’) in the Vatican and the Sleeping Water Nymph in the garden of the Roman humanist Angelo Colocci. ²³ In sixteenth-century humanist circles, these female sleepers were typically interpreted as the Aristotelian elemental duo Earth and Water, the counterparts of the masculine duality of Light and Fire, manifested in the form of active satyrs.²⁴ In the Hypnerotomachia Polyphili (1499), the sleeping nymph was also equated with the mother of all things, the Venus Genetrix, who from this time forward was commonly referred to as ‘sleeping Venus’.

Paludanus’s statuette is one of the earliest Netherlandish examples of representations of a nude female figure lying on a daybed, a modest genre that gained a degree of popularity especially around 1600, thanks to versions conceived by Giambologna (1529-1608) and his followers. ²⁵ Avery even suggested a direct link between Giambologna’s bronze and terracotta Geometry and Astrology to a small alabaster dated 1569, which he erroneously attributed to Paludanus.²⁶ Besides these variants, Paludanus’s Sleeping Nymph must also have enjoyed a certain notoriety at a later point in time, witness the existence of a number of literal copies and variants. She appears, for instance, in a painting of Cimon and Iphigenia attributed to Daniel Vertangen (c. 1598-1681/84), in which the painter only slightly modified the position of the nymph's free arm. A more accurate image can be seen in a portrait, attributed to the Lucca painter Pietro Paolini (1603-1681), of a man (the poet Francesco di Poggio?) seated at a writing table in candlelight (fig. c).²⁷ The statuette stands on the left, next to a writing set. In a second work showing a man repairing the strings of a lute, also attributed to Paolini, one again sees the statuette of the sleeping nymph, though this time with gilded accents. From this one may conclude that Paolini probably possessed a plaster cast of Paludanus's nymph, to be used in his work as a studio prop at his discretion. In any event, both paintings demonstrate that either the present statuette or a cast thereof must have been present in Lucca in the first half of the 17th century. In addition, several fairly literal imitations are known in painted Staffordshire pottery (‘pearlware’ and ‘black basalt ware’), produced from circa 1780 to 1830 and bearing the title Danae or Lucretia (fig. d).²⁸ This indicates that the alabaster (or a very precise copy) was held in a British collection around 1800 and accessible to modellers at the pottery factories in Staffordshire. In 1981, 1983 and 2020, a later, somewhat larger (w. 57.8 cm) and mirrored marble variant of the Amsterdam nymph surfaced on the London and subsequently Paris art market.²⁹ One cannot rule out the possibility that Paludanus’s small alabaster enjoyed a certain public status in Great Britain, at the time perhaps viewed as a work by Michelangelo or Giambologna.

Frits Scholten, 2024