Lady as Venus, probably Sophia Coymans (1636-1714)

Entry

This pair of terracotta all’antica figures of a man (BK-KOG-1644) and woman (shown here) is attributed to Rombout Verhulst (1624-1698) on stylistic grounds. Verhulst’s authorship is recognizable in the soft modelling of the faces, arms and legs, and the manner in which the folds have been developed. The detail of the man’s slightly open mouth also betrays the sculptor’s hand. A stylistic comparison of the faces with Verhulst’s surviving portrait studies in terracotta also seemingly supports this attribution: most instructive is the similarity between the woman’s face and the life-size portrait study Maria van Reygersbergh (BK-NM-11957-B), made by Verhulst around 1663. Despite the figures’ small height – 42 and 40.5 cm respectively – both have been rendered with an exceptional eye for detail and textural complexity. Most striking are the highly distinctive faces, thus warranting the classification of these terracottas as portraits historiés.

The sculptor’s likely source of inspiration was a life-size Roman sculptural group in marble, today preserved in the Louvre (fig. a). The group shows Venus assisting Mars in removing his military garb: she takes his belt, which hangs over his shoulder with his sword. He still wears his richly ornamented helmet, but his coat of mail has already been removed and hangs at the side. Besides the thematic correspondence between this antique group and the two terracottas, similarities in detail can also be discerned: the pose and attire of both women (one leg raised, with a kind of gathered robe draped crosswise over it) and Mars’s hand, resting on the hilt of his sword. Verhulst unlikely gazed upon the life-size marble Mars and Venus with his own eyes: in the seventeenth century, it was held in the Borghese collection in Rome, and there is no documentation suggesting the sculptor ever travelled to that city. North of the Alps, however, the group was widely known thanks to an illustration in François Perrier’s much-read compilation of antique sculptures in Rome published in 1638, entitled the Segmenta nobilium signorum et statuarum […]. Interestingly, Perrier’s rendering of the group is in mirror image, with Venus standing on Mars’s left, thus resulting in a reversed positioning of the two figures identical to that of the two terracottas. Moreover, the author also observed that some questioned the identification of the marble group as Mars and Venus, instead believing it to be a depiction of Empress Faustina the Younger and her lover, a gladiator.

With these portraits histories depicted as Mars and Venus, the seventeenth-century pair gave visual expression to their loving bond. Their personal identification with the gods moreover emphasized the couple’s inherent virtues: the man as a brave and righteous warrior; the woman as the fairest of her sex. In Greco-Roman mythology, Venus, wife of the physically loathsome Vulcan, had engaged in a love affair with Mars. Despite the unlawfulness of the divine pair’s relationship, their intimacy was still considered an appropriate marital theme. Classical writers justified the gods’ extramarital love affair by addressing its symbolic significance as an image of harmony, peace and true love. It was in the same vein that Mars and Venus appeared, for example, flanking the entrance to the office of marriage registration in the northern gallery of the Amsterdam city town, of which Verhulst had carved the Venus himself.¹

That the seventeenth-century couple commissioned portraits of themselves as Mars and Venus also provides the key to their identification. Gary Schwartz proffered that the two might be identified as members of the Amsterdam regental family Huydecoper, lords of Maarsseveen.² In this case, Mars and Venus would then form a direct allusion to the name of that landed estate (Mars-and-Venus = Maarsseveen). Indeed, this identification proves founded: the lady disguised as Venus precisely resembles Sophia Coymans (1636-1714), wife of Joan Huydecoper (1625-1704), Lord of Maarsseveen, the son and namesake of the prominent Amsterdam burgomaster Huydecoper (1599-1661). Sophia’s appearance as a young woman is preserved in a painted portrait by Bartholomeus van der Helst from 1660.³ Here she is depicted holding an apple in her hand, a motif that further reinforces a connection to Venus, the most beautiful of the Three Graces who received Paris’s apple. Sophia was indeed renowned for her physical beauty, lyricized by the poet Jan Vos and others.⁴ Similarly, in the Mars figure of the present group, one can readily discern Joan Huydecoper’s facial features, when compared to those for example, on his portrait, attributed to Jacob van Loo.⁵ At the time the couple married in 1656, Rombout Verhulst was still working in Amsterdam, two years prior to his departure for Leiden.

To what extent Joan Huydecoper and Sophia Coymans were aware of this alternative, more piquant identification of the classical group as Empress Faustina and her fighting lover remains unresolved. Invariably, however, its relevance was secondary. It was first and foremost an association with the gods Mars and Venus and the implicit theme of Triumphant Love that had determined this most befitting iconography – whether in the eyes of the couple themselves or perhaps the individual who commissioned the two figures as a wedding gift. If indeed the faint echo of the lovesick Faustina was ever heard, it was no more than an entertaining thought shared in private circles.

Noteworthy is that sculpted historical portraits of this nature were quite uncommon in the seventeenth century, certainly on the scale of cabinet culture – in fact, no other Northern Netherlandish examples are even known to exist.⁶ By contrast, works of German origin dating from this period do exist. One is an ivory group of Adam and Eve by Leonard Kern (1588-1662), first mentioned as early as 1688 and originating from the Kunstkammer of the Brandenburg electors.⁷ This ivory depiction of the first living couple has been described as a small group portrait of Great Elector Frederick William of Brandenburg and his wife, Louise Henrietta of Orange-Nassau, on the basis of the figures’ portrait-like appearance and several specific motifs.⁸ Associatively, the ivory group is thought to have been commissioned as a gift on the occasion of the couple’s wedding, held on 7 December 1646 in The Hague.

The second example is a palmwood group depicting a pair of lovers engaged in an embrace. This work has been alternatively described as a scene of Mars and Venus, Paris and Helen, or Rinaldo and Armida.⁹ Regardless of the mythological or pastoral pair originally intended, this disguise all’antica likely conveys a seventeenth-century love affair. The figure of the woman is virtually naked, while her partner wears the full military raiment of the antique era. The figures’ faces, especially that of the male, are nevertheless so highly individualized that the only reasonable interpretation is that we are dealing with a historicized, antique-allegorical portrait group. It is attributed to the North-German ivorycarver Joachim Henne (active c. 1660-after 1707), who is thought to have worked for a time in the Dutch Republic around 1662. His style betrays a strong Amsterdam influence, seemingly pointing to some kind of contact with Artus Quellinus I (1608-1668) in those years.¹⁰ Also discernible is a degree of sfumato, quite similar to that of Quellinus’s leading pupil, Rombout Verhulst. Accordingly, a connection – albeit hypothetical – to Verhulst’s terracotta portrait pair becomes tenable.

Frits Scholten, 2025