Guided Pathway

The “Baroque” movement of the panel itself is created by the counterpoint between the vertical arrangement of the opera and plays to the diagonal narrative discussed above. The inclusion of these images also allows the panel to capture the “spirit of the age” (“Geist der Zeit” / “Geist der Epoche” – see Warburg’s methodological claim to this effect in his Rembrandt lecture, Leuschner, 570) by moving beyond paintings to plays and opera. There is a strong thematic link between the panel’s selected artistic depictions of the “Rape of Proserpina” and the stories of child sacrifice and loss of offspring told in these seventeenth-century Dutch texts. These frontispieces and illustrations also make a strong claim about the Dutch Baroque literary and religious tradition of neo-Stoicism as another way of gaining stability in times of crisis and in the critical moment before one decides how to react or to move.

The literature of the Dutch Republic expressed the amalgamation of moral philosophy and Christianity that was neo-Stoicism, as did many other traditions throughout much of Western Europe at the time. Propelled by the influential writings of the Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius (1547-1606), who drew heavily from Greek Stoicism and Seneca, neo-Stoicism maintains the belief in divine agency at work in all things. As man uses his agency to accept life’s chain of events as being right and just, he finds himself calm and rational in the face of disruption, chaos, and illusion. Dutch authors and dramatists such as Hendrik Laurenszoon Spiegel (1549-1612), Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert (1522-1590), Jacob Struys (d. 1630), Samuel Coster (1579-1665), and Joost van den Vondel (1587-1679) drew heavily from Greco-Roman mythological and historical accounts for their Senecan treatment of crisis and tragic reversals of fortune. In panel 70, the moment of crisis manifests itself in images depicting the abduction of or sacrifice of children related to the Proserpina myth, notably in the illustrations of Vondel’s De Amsterdamsche Hekuba (1626) and Coster’s Polyxena (1630).