Juno

Entry

Standing on a plinth, this life-size statue of Juno is poised in a finely balanced contrapposto. Two attributes convey her identity: the peacock at her left leg and the mirror she holds in her raised right hand. The goddess wears a mantle of heavy fabric with an embroidered hem over a flowing, pleated robe reaching to the plinth. A diadem adorns her forehead, with a pleated veil hanging from a hairband worn at the back of the head. The sculptor has managed to render the physical form convincingly beneath the voluminous draperies, leaving no more than the neck, forearms and toes exposed.

The plinth on which Juno stands bears the signature – albeit scarcely legible due to abrasion – of the sculptor Rombout Verhulst (1624-1698). Verhulst worked for a period of four years on the new Amsterdam city hall starting in 1654 under the sculptor Artus Quellinus I (1609-1668), whose influence is manifest in the statue’s classicist-baroque style. Juno's pose was possibly derived from Quellinus’s Pallas Athene, a fountain statue from 1660 at Cleves displaying a contrapposto and positioning of the arms virtually identical to the present work (fig. a).⁴

The attribution and dating of Verhulst’s garden statues is not without complication: even with signed pieces, one observes striking variations in quality, stemming from the talent of the workshop assistant charged with carving the original model in stone and the degree to which Verhulst himself was personally involved in that process. An additional factor is that statues can display a marked resemblance when in fact dating from entirely different periods, a consequence of the long-term use of the same models, both by Verhulst and his assistants. For example, a signed and dated sandstone Flora from 1671, preserved at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, differs not only in its material but likewise displays little stylistic and qualitative affinity with Verhulst’s best-known works.⁵ Another example is the close similarity between a figure of a young Hercules⁶ - signed and dated 1687 – and a putto for the tomb monument of Anna van Ewsum, which Verhulst in fact carved twenty years prior.⁷ Questioning the level of Verhulst’s authorship in their estimation of the Juno, Van Notten and Neurdenburg placed the statue in the late phase of Verhulst’s Hague period, circa 1690, when the master’s involvement in the workshop production of garden statues was likely minimal.⁸ This conclusion nevertheless overlooks various aspects of the statue, qualities deemed typically characteristic of Verhulst’s autograph works and which elevate the Juno above the standard workshop production of the 1680s and 90s. These qualities include the exquisite proportioning, the waving pattern of the voluminous drapery folds and the soft modelling of the sturdy neck area and arms. Moreover, Juno’s graciously formed left hand is highly reminiscent of the right hand on Verhulst’s Venus in the Burgerzaal of the former Amsterdam town hall. The conclusive determination of Juno as an autograph work – or a work in which Verhulst’s artistic role was at least substantial – is its convincing similarity to Verhulst’s signed Minerva that surfaced on the art market in 1986.⁹ The two statues are virtually identical in size and display commonalities in style, iconography and execution. If not belonging to one and the same ensemble, perhaps the models on which they were based were designed with such a purpose in mind. Verhulst and his workshop are known to have produced such ensembles, including a series of twenty-two garden statues commissioned by the Grand Pensionary Gaspar Fagel for his country house Leeuwenhorst in Noordwijkerhout.¹⁰

Noteworthy is the stylistic similarity of Verhulst’s Juno to four marble statues from the series Apollo, Minerva and the Nine Muses by the Antwerp sculptor Nicolaes Millich (c. 1630-1699), made in the 1670s and 80s for the grand staircase at Drottningholm, the Swedish royal palace outside Stockholm.¹¹ Twenty years prior, Quellinus had been approached for this prestigious commission and supplied terracotta modelli, subsequently cited in 1652 in an inventory of possessions of the Swedish queen, Christina. Although today non-extant, these works were almost certainly still in Stockholm at the time of Millich’s involvement.¹² Accordingly, in conceiving his Parnassus Millich may very well have been guided by Quellinus’s design. Yet four of the marble statues in this series also suggest he was privy to models from Verhulst’s workshop. Shortly before his departure to Sweden in 1660, Millich had worked in Verhulst’s atelier in The Hague for a period of time.¹³ Accordingly, he was possibly highly familiar with such works and perhaps even went so far as to copy them. In fact, the four statues in question are the earliest works from the series (Minerva, Urania, Erato and Thalia), carved by Millich in Stockholm between the years 1670 and 1674.¹⁴ Especially in the treatment of the draperies and the somewhat rigid poses, these sculptures are more stylistically akin to Verhulst’s Juno than the works by Quellinus. Also to be noted is the greater formal correspondence between the Drottningholm Minerva (fig. b) from 1670 and the above-cited Minerva by Verhulst, a similarity lacking in Quellinus’s statue at Cleves. Verhulst’s Minerva – a work dated considerably later (1682) – may have long been known to Millich from his days working in The Hague in the form of a previously existing modello.

The painter Carel Willink (1900-1983) incorporated the present Juno as his model for the painting entitled Landscape with Museum from 1946.¹⁵

Titia de Haseth Möller, 2025