Jael Killing Sisera

Entry

The Canaanite army general Sisera was defeated by the Israelite forces under the command of the Israelite ruler and judge Barak and the prophetess Deborah, who had foretold that the general would die at the hands of a woman. After his defeat, Sisera fled to the settlement of Heber the Kenite, where he was received by Heber’s wife, Jael, who lured him into her tent. She gave him milk to drink and offered to hide him under a blanket, but after he fell asleep, she drove a tent peg through his temple all the way into the ground (Judges 4:18-21).

In the drawing, Sisera lies asleep on his shield next to a chair from which his helmet hangs; Jael is about to drive the peg through his head. By placing the helmet at the same height as Jael’s head and the hammer in her hand, Rembrandt used this head-covering – which normally has a protective function – as a symbol of Sisera’s impotence. It is contrasted with the hammer, the symbol of Jael’s power, a power that she is about to wield.

The Bible relates that Jael covered Sisera with a blanket, but this is never shown in the pictorial tradition of this subject. On the other hand, as in Rembrandt’s drawing, pieces of the general’s armour – shield or helmet – are often represented in prints, such as the woodcut by Lucas van Leyden (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-1803),³ the engraving by Philips Galle from his series of six Celebrated Women from the Old Testament (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-1961-449)⁴ and the small woodcut ornamental border by Christoffel van Sichem III in the Biblia Sacra, published by Jan Moretus in Antwerp in 1657.⁵ Although the shield is missing from Van Sichem’s print, it seems generally to have been the compositional model that most influenced Rembrandt. The inventory of Rembrandt’s possessions shows that he owned a few helmets, including a Japanese helmet (‘een Japanse hellemet’), and this could have been the model for the one in the drawing.⁶

The figures are drawn with a reed pen, using broad, confident strokes. In a few places, the lines have been widened into shadows, which are indicated elsewhere with a few short lines of hatching. The lines, varied in tone and sometimes rather angular, give a convincing picture of the attitudes of the figures: the twist in the assassin Jael’s body and the weary limbs of the sleeping Sisera. At one point, too much ink flowed from Rembrandt’s pen, obscuring Jael’s face, so the artist corrected this area with opaque white.

A comparison with a drawing Rembrandt made of the same subject a decade earlier, at the end of the 1640s, now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (inv. no. WA1950.51),⁷ shows a substantial difference in style and conception. Here a slightly later moment in the story is shown, one that does not occur in the biblical text: Sisera is awake and defending himself – a highly charged dramatic scene, strengthened by the various positions in which his arms have been drawn. Sisera’s raised leg resembles not only a motif in the drawing of Cain Slaying Abel, in the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen (inv. no. KKS10094),⁸ but also a detail in the 1636 painting of the Blinding of Samson, in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt-am-Main (inv. no. 1383).⁹ In our drawing, which was made about ten years later, there is a feeling of quiet tension in the simple triangular composition of the figures, which is, of course, appropriate for the slightly earlier part of the story Rembrandt has chosen.

Another rendering of the subject by Rembrandt, probably made about the same time as the Amsterdam drawing, is lost but known from three other school versions: one in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum in Braunschweig (inv. no. Z 345),¹⁰ one in the Louvre in Paris (inv. no. 22986)¹¹ and one in the Folkestone Museum (inv. no. F3644/51).¹² Here Jael is approaching from the right, while Sisera is seen from behind. The helmet and shield are not shown.

Peter Schatborn, 2017