Triptych with the Dance around the Golden Calf

Entry

Divided over the centre panel and the wings of the triptych, this composition shows how the people of Israel disobeyed God by erecting an idol of a golden calf in the Sinai desert, which they danced around in an orgiastic feast. According to the Bible this happened after the long absence of their leader Moses, who was speaking with God on Mount Sinai. When, after 40 days and nights, he returned with the stone tablets of the law, he found his people dancing around the calf in a frenzy (Exodus 32).

The sinful behaviour of the festive Israelites, depicted in the foreground of the three panels, is the main subject of the triptych (Exodus 32:6). As Van Mander put it in his Schilder-Boeck of 1604: ‘At this banquet, the sensual appearance of the people and the impure desires revealed in their eyes can be seen depicted in a lively manner’.¹² Moses is seen way off in the background of the centre panel, kneeling on a rocky outcrop (Exodus 24:15), and again further down the mountain with his brother Aaron, at the moment when he throws down the stone tablets on seeing the feasting Israelites (Exodus 32:19). A woman with a child is offering a man a piece of fruit in the centre foreground in a reference to the Fall of Man, underlining the idea that surrendering to sensual pleasures is contrary to God’s commandment.¹³ The colourful clothing, headdresses and turbans recall the Orient, and at the same time seem to be a reference to vanity (luxuria). It can be assumed that the triptych was a warning against the first commandment, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’, and an exhortation to live according to those commandments. This moral provided an excuse for the evident pleasure with which Lucas van Leyden painted this biblical story, the anecdotal nature of which engages the viewer. Some scholars have rather speculatively suggested that this triptych and other later works by Lucas are warnings against the unorthodox ideas of the reformers.¹⁴

The depiction of isolated Old Testament subjects was a new phenomenon in early 16th-century painting, and the motif of the dance around the golden calf is rarely found in Dutch art. Old Testament stories had, however, been depicted as moral examples of the ten commandments in book illustrations, with the adoration of the golden calf being the traditional exemplum of the transgression of the first commandment. It was in that sense that the dance around the calf with Moses receiving the tablets of the law was depicted in a woodcut by Lucas Cranach in Luther’s Deutsche Catechismus of 1529. The subject was presented on a monumental scale in a painting of around 1530 on a vault in the church of Warmenhuizen, where it and three other Old Testament scenes were combined with a Last Judgement, probably designed by Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen (fig. b).¹⁵ That ceiling painting shows Moses receiving the tablets of the law from God and then breaking them into pieces when he sees the dance around the calf, but as with Lucas van Leyden the emphasis is on the dancing and feasting of children and the sumptuously dressed figures.

This remarkably well-preserved triptych shows Lucas van Leyden at his best as a painter. Stylistically it is in keeping with his late engravings of 1529/30, which suggests that it should be dated around 1530, and that is confirmed by the dendrochronology. There is also a strong stylistic similarity to the tempera painting dated 1527, Moses Striking Water from the Rock,¹⁶ and to The Healing of the Blind Man of Jericho, which is dated 1531.¹⁷ The sketchy underdrawing of the latter also fits in well with that of the Amsterdam triptych. In that underdrawing, which appears to have been executed in a dry medium, contours were used for the foreground figures, with hatching for the shadows (fig. c).

One notable feature of the underdrawing is the use of one or more letters, which were probably notations for the colours to be used in the painting or underpaint. There are no fewer than 30 of them at 20 different places. With a few exceptions, these notations for red (‘zo’, ‘sino’), green (‘grun’), blue (‘b’), white (‘v’), yellow (‘m’) and purple (‘p’) were followed in the paint.¹⁸

The background figures were painted extremely cursorily with a limited palette, and are only indicated in the underdrawing with a few contour lines (fig. d). The foreground figures are far more worked up, with calligraphic detailing. A fine brush was used in the faces and clothing to add extremely lively details, and the heightenings were built up in the paint in a draughtsman-like way. The palette is close to Cornelis Engebrechtsz’s, but is brighter and more transparent. The landscape has a convincing spatial structure, with dark green trees in the middleground giving way to light green and blue for the distant mountains.¹⁹

The non-liturgical subject matter and the simple decoration of the outer wings with red and green imitation marble, indicate that it was intended for domestic use (fig. e). Nothing is known about the person who commissioned it, but Van Mander states that in 1604 it was in a house in Kalverstraat in Amsterdam. It may have been at number 45 with Aegje van Swieten, a member of the Van Swieten family which had commissioned the Triptych with the Last Judgement from Lucas in 1526-27.²⁰ Around 1630 it left the house in Kalverstraat and came into the possession of the Amsterdam collector Jaspar Loskert (?-1658), who probably had the ebony frame made for it, a so-called kas (fig. f).²¹ Six of Loskert’s paintings, including the famous Darmstadt Madonna by Hans Holbein, stayed together and passed by descent, first to Jacob and Dirck Wuytiers, and then to Jacob Cromhout, who married a daughter of Wuytiers. His collection was auctioned after his death in 1709, and it was not until 1952 that the triptych, which had been presumed lost, was discovered in Paris and was bought by the Rijksmuseum.²² It was then removed from its 17th-century frame and given a simpler, modern one, but it was returned to its old ebony frame in 2008.

(J.P. Filedt Kok)