St Michael the Archangel as Dragon-Slayer

Entry

This dynamic statuette depicts a passage from the Book of Revelation (12:7-9), which tells of how Michael the Archangel and his angels engaged in battle with the devil in the form of a dragon.¹ The scene symbolizes Christ’s triumph over evil following his death on the cross and subsequent resurrection. Especially in the days the Counter-Reformation, the theme enjoyed a renewed popularity, with the archangel who defeats evil seen as a symbol of the triumphant Roman Catholic Church in its battle to defeat the ‘heresy’ of Protestantism. St Michael is depicted here in all’antica raiment, dressed as a Roman soldier. With his right foot, he presses the dragon’s human head to the globe, over which the dragon’s limp, serpentine body drapes. The archangel stands poised to deal the final blow with the point of his now missing sword or spear. Scarcely visible is the year 1692, incised in the leaves of the ornamental waist palmette below Michael’s navel.

Specifically, in the rendering of Michael’s face, his elegant pose, the treatment of the draperies and characteristic hair, the style of the boxwood statuette supports a tenable attribution to Pieter Scheemaecker I (1640-1714), one of the leading late-Baroque sculptors in Antwerp.² From 1661 on, Scheemaecker worked as an apprentice to his uncle on his mother’s side, the influential sculptor Pieter Verbrugghen I (1615-1686). In 1674, he was admitted as a free master into the city’s Guild of St Luke. Scheemaeckers served as the guild’s dean in 1699-1700 and was a member of the Olijftak oratory chamber. He owed his reputation as a sculptor to a number of monumental sculpture ensembles: the tomb monuments of the governor of Breda, Karel-Florentijn van Salm, in the Sint-Catharinakerk in Hoogstraten (after 1676-1709) and the Marquess Don Francisco Marcos del Pico de Velasco in the Sint-Jacobskerk in Antwerp (1693-98), as well as various altarpieces, including two for the abbey church of Averbode and three individual altars in the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk in Aarschot.³

Many of the aforementioned stylistic characteristics encountered on the present statuette of St Michael can also be observed on the altar of St Joseph in Aarschot from 1684.⁴ For example, the facial features and the light-footedness of the figure’s pose are strikingly in agreement with the angel upper right in the tympanum of the altarpiece. A remarkable grace and appeal is indeed ascribable to the Amsterdam archangel – certainly for a subject so aggressive in nature – almost as if he has assumed a ballet dancer’s pose. In this respect, Scheemaeckers’s style is very much in line with an earlier, sixteenth-century visual tradition rooted in the Southern Netherlands, to be observed in in works such as Hubert Gerhard’s monumental bronze version of the theme of St Michael adorning the facade of the church of the same name in Munich (1589),⁵ or in the work of Friedrich Sustris (c. 1540-1599). Yet the same kind of light-footed elegance is also trait of many works of Flemish baroque sculpture of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. One illustrative example for comparison is the marble fountain statue of Narcissus, carved more than twenty years before, in 1670-71, by Gabriel Grupello (1644-1730) for Count Lamoraal Claudius Frans von Thurn und Taxis.⁶ Although executed in mirror image, the stance of the vain youth – standing precipitously on a dolphin – is nevertheless highly similar, both in pose and elegance, to the present statuette of St Michael.

Nevertheless, the Narcissus cannot be tangibly linked to the present statuette, nor was Scheemaeckers influenced by a model of Rubens or the many Flemish engravings of the archangel dispersed as early as the late sixteenth century.⁷ In general terms, the boxwood figure displays an affinity to the painting of St Michael by Guido Reni in the Santa Maria della Concezione, Rome of circa 1636, of which engravings were made shortly after it was painted.⁸ Scheemaeckers’s model for the sculpture was perhaps the engraving by the Flemish artist Pieter de Bailliu (1630-1660), reproduced well into the eighteenth century (RP-P-BI-486). Renderings of the saint in both paintings and engravings are strikingly similar to the pose of the wood-carved archangel, albeit in mirror image. Moreover, numerous points of agreements can be discerned in detailed aspects of the angel’s attire. At the same time, however, Scheemaeckers deviated from his model in a number of ways. He modified the positioning of the wings and omitted the dragon’s wings altogether. Motifs in Michael’s all’antica suit of armour, e.g. the palmette and the fringe lining his skirt, indicate the sculptor adapted his version to meet the taste of his day. Having transferred the original composition to a globe, Scheemaeckers chose to alter the dragon’s pose, whose body on the statuette wraps around in a circle enabling him to grasp his own tail.

A slightly larger, polychromed limewood version of the present St Michael originates from the Sint-Michielskerk in Leuven, today preserved in a local museum in the same city.⁹ Measuring 72 centimetres high, this statue of Michael still has the original attributes missing from its Amsterdam equivalent – a sword and shield. The saintly figure stands on an integrally conceived, rather oddly shaped black pedestal adorned with garlands in classical style, with a cavity carved out to accommodate the globe on which he stands. The pedestal’s noticeably massive construction not only strongly diminishes the elegant lightness of the overall composition, it can be deemed entirely unnecessary for the limewood statuette and most certainly for its smaller boxwood equivalent. The form suggest it could only have been designed with a much larger statue in mind: a monumental St Michael the Dragon-Slayer executed in marble or wood, requiring a sturdy construction due to its imposing scale and weight. Most plausible is a statue conceived but never executed for the baroque facade or high altar of the Sint-Michielskerk, a Jesuit church built between 1650 and 1672 based on a design by the architect and mathematician Willem van Hees (Hesius). That there is no known monumental statue of the patron saint in or near this baroque church is remarkable, even if acknowledging the heavy damage sustained during the war.

The attribution to Pieter Scheemaeckers is confirmed by the existence of highly precise rendering of the Amsterdam statuette and its larger version in Leuven made by the sculptor himself (fig. a).¹⁰ This wax drawing in pen and pencil, today preserved at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, bears a signature commonly found on other drawings by the sculptor: P. Scheemaeck[..] invenit et delineavit.¹¹ While a direct link between the drawing and both statuettes is certain, it remains unclear whether the two-dimensional rendering concerns a preliminary study. The drawing also has importance in that it conveys the attributes formerly held in Michael’s now empty hands: a raised flaming sword and a shield. Another noteworthy element of the drawing is the presence of a black, irregularly shaped socle conceived in classical style, similar to the one that supports the Leuven statuette. For the small boxwood figure in the Rijksmuseum, such construction would have been entirely unnecessary and only greatly undermined the lightness of the overall composition. It therefore seems apparent that Scheemaeckers’s drawing, like the statuette in Leuven, was intended as a preliminary study for a monumental statue in marble or wood, which due to its size and weight would have necessitated a more stable construction. In this case, the large pedestal supporting the statue would have been carved in black marble and adorned with white marble garlands.

The Amsterdam statuette must be seen in this light, i.e. a scale reduction of the drawn design. It would unlikely have functioned as a vidimus, a work made for presentation to the monumental statue’s patron, as Scheemaeckers typically modelled his designs for larger projects in clay.¹² The high level of finishing, the elegant balance and the spatial dimensionality of the composition instead suggest the statuette was instead carved as a freestanding sculpture, meant to surmount a larger object, such as a house altar, tabernacle or processional staff. By no means is it inconceivable, however, that the boxwood St Michael was originally conceived as an autonomous work of cabinet sculpture.¹³

Frits Scholten, 2025