The “Pagan Fables” in Dutch Painting of the Golden Age: Narrative Subject Matter from Classical Mythology in the Northern Netherlands, ca. 1590–1670 is not the first publication of Eric Jan Sluijter’s groundbreaking dissertation on the representation of Ovid’s fables in Dutch painting. Many cherish their copy of the privately produced 1986 edition, with its stamp-size images and unglued pages. Even then Ivan Gaskell expressed the wish that this low-cost issue would soon be followed by a commercial edition, preferably in English. With the present volume this desideratum has been partially fulfilled. Its large format accommodates the original text and leaves intact its apparatus of footnotes (not brought up to date), charts, appendices, and marginal notes, while expanding both the individual size and number of the illustrations (from 215 to 296). The fact that it was not translated is offset by a nine-page English summary.

My review of this indispensable book consists of three parts. First, I focus on the organization of the book and demonstrate its usefulness as a compendium of the literary and visual tradition of the representation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Dutch painting. Next, I test its utility by tracking the history of the myth of Vertumnus and Pomona through the pages of the book. The concluding section considers Sluijter’s contribution to the state of the question on the role of these fables in Dutch society, and the knotty problem of what kind of response they were meant to elicit.

In his new introduction Sluijter reiterates the premise that a panoramic view of the chosen material must precede the work of interpretation. Without a clear sense of the intricate relationship between subjects, pictorial traditions, technical specialties, visual genres, and themes, an iconographical analysis is only a stab in the dark. Accordingly, he divides the book into two parts. The first one is a systematic review of surviving paintings and the models that inspired them (primarily loose prints, book illustrations, and the work of non-Dutch practitioners such as Adam Elsheimer and the Flemings). This analysis offers a broad perspective that allows for patterns to emerge and discoveries to be made. Comparing his approach to “driving a team of horses,” the author keeps track of the mythological output of five generations of artists while simultaneously monitoring the “careers” of mythological subjects. Each of the five chapters of Part 1 is dedicated to a generation of painters, from the Dutch late Mannerists (Abraham Bloemaert and company) active from ca. 1590 until 1600 to classicists like Gerard de Lairesse and Gerard Hoet, productive in ca. 1670. Within each generation several groups are identified. For example, the second chapter, dedicated to the “Younger Generation Between circa 1610 and 1630,” is subdivided into four distinct groups. First there are the pre-Rembrandists, centered on Pieter Lastman; then there is an idiosyncratic group composed of Moses Van Uyttenbroeck, Bartholomeus Breenbergh, and Cornelis van Poelenburch, who diverted from the Lastman model and created small-scale mythological scenes in Italianate landscapes that are close to Elsheimer’s pictures produced in Rome. Poelenburch subsequently heads a third group, now of Utrecht painters who specialized in small-figure inventions of classical subjects in the vein of Joachim Wtewael and whose taste for mythological subjects is markedly different from that of fellow Caravaggists in the fourth group. A chart (12–13) coordinates the five generations, the ten schools, and a total of thirty-eight painters, including Rembrandt. The narrative in Part 1 reveals that only a handful of subjects were destined to become “bestsellers.” These are the Diana stories of Actaeon and Callisto, the Feast of the Gods, the Judgment of Paris, Venus and Adonis, and, finally, the extraordinary longue duree—from its invention by Bloemaert in ca. 1600 until well into the eighteenth century—of the story of Vertumnus and Pomona. In this tale a young husbandman takes on the guise of an old crone in order to persuade the garden nymph Pomona not to waste her youth and beauty by shunning marriage (Met. XIV: 623–98).

Why only these stories when we are dealing with material that is infinitely rich in amorous plots? This is the leading question of Part 2. Now the perspective shifts from the all-encompassing view of the cataloguer to the probing gaze of the interpreter who looks to literary and cultural evidence to resolve the perplexing problem of how pictures with these recurrent topics functioned in their original contexts. Again, Sluijter’s approach is extremely systematic. Dedicating a chapter to each of the five most popular subjects mentioned above, he proceeds in each case as follows: First, he considers Karel van Mander’s explanation in Wtleggingh, the mythographical component of the 1604 Schilder-Boeck. Then he assembles commentary prior to van Mander (mostly Italian in origin) and compares it with opinions found in additional seventeenth-century Dutch sources. In two appendices, Sluitjer supplies, first, a systematic overview of his textual sources and, second, a schematized representation of illustrated Ovid editions. Together these chapters knit an intricate pattern of conduct literature (J. B. Houwaert, Dirk Volckertsz Coornhert, and Jacob Cats) and poetry (Pieter Cornelsz Hooft and Joost van den Vondel) that shows a problematic dissonance among modes of representation, eroticism, and moral message. One is left wondering to what degree these fables were conceived to seduce and to what degree they were meant to teach, or even if seduction is a form of teaching. The problem is a fascinating one and opens up an avenue that led Sluijter to write a series of essays examining the question from different angles. The most far-reaching of these is the essay “Venus, Visus en Pictura” in which he shows how a painter like Hendrick Goltzius conflates Venus with Pictura in order to theorize a relationship between the seductive power of female pulchritude and the deceptive beauty of the art of painting. This essay (originally published in 1991) was recently translated and collected with other texts into a book entitled Seductress of Sight: Studies in Dutch Art of the Golden Age (Zwolle: Waanders, 2000). Even more recent is an article in Zeventiende Eeuw (17:2) on the subject of Cimon and Efigenia, derived from Boccaccio’s Decamerone, which once more addresses the tension between eroticism and a moralizing code.

To give the reader a sense of the way in which Pagan Fables functions as both a compendium and an analysis, I would like to show how the subject of Vertumnus and Pomona cuts a path through its pages. A system of marginal notes makes this an easy task. First we learn that it is a subject that lacks a pictorial tradition prior to Bernard Salomon’s 1557 woodcut illustration (pl. 81) and Bloemaert’s magisterial composition engraved by Jan Saenredam in a print from 1605 (33; pl. 81). Next we observe how Goltzius used it to thematize the power of Pictura (pls. 87 and 88). It makes an early appearance (1617) in a work by Jan Tengnagel, who anticipates the Lastman tradition of dressing mythological characters in contemporary everyday clothes (44; pl. 123). In the hands of the Utrecht painters, Pomona is transformed into a pastoral figure no longer tending her gardens (55; pl. 182). Rembrandt and his followers (who were not usually engaged in fables) emphasize the theme of conversation, the subject lending itself to a consideration of the problem of life-style, a leading topos in conduct literature (69ff). Altogether Sluijter discusses four book illustrations, two loose prints, three drawings by Rembrandt and his pupils, and thirty-four paintings ranging in date from Bloemaert’s example from ca. 1600 (86) to a picture attributed to Frans Mieris II of ca. 1670 (pl. 241). For lack of literary corollaries Sluijter concludes in the exegetical chapter that the topic is strictly pictorial and should be treated as a visual genre with its own canon of conventions and commonplaces. Why this genre was in such demand is another problem. In passing, the author suggests that its uncommon popularity could be rooted in an otherwise undocumented tradition of the suitor’s gift, and he calls on social historians to advance the question of function and kind for these mythological pictures. All this information, scattered throughout the book, was subsequently united in an article now available in the aforementioned collection, Seductress of Sight. It is an example of how the author himself mined the dissertation to find answers to puzzling questions raised by the material he so painstakingly collected.

There is no question that Sluijter’s book is essential to the success of a series of exhibitions that introduced the general public to a class of pictures that had long been ignored. The recent exhibition Greek Gods in Dutch Art, with venues in Athens, Greece, and Dordrecht, the Netherlands, is only the last in a list of such events. Yet, Sluijter is the first to admit that a great deal of work still lies ahead. Critical is the need to create an even larger synoptic view that includes the work of artists in the Southern Netherlands and abroad. Exhibitions in Rome (1995) and Venice (2000) were important steps in this direction. Above all, we need to take greater advantage of the pictorial and literary evidence he marshaled and use it to understand better what role Ovid’s fables played in the civilizing processes of new societies rising from the foundations of the old Seventeen Provinces.