ON VIEW

Description

In Helen of Troy an elaborately dressed woman stands in front of a dark background of draped cloth, beside a marble column. The picture is monogrammed and dated on the plinth near her right elbow; on the table letters spell out the name “Helena.” This half-length portrait shows special attention to the textures and details of the clothing and jewelry. The painting’s contemporary (rather than historical) dress and portrait composition suggest that the work is a portrait type in which a contemporary sitter is depicted as a historical figure, often called a portrait historié.


Context and Analysis

Hendrick Goltzius was born in Germany but moved to Haarlem in the Netherlands in 1577 to start his career as a printmaker. He played an important part in establishing the growing art market in Haarlem. Around 1600 he turned to painting, often choosing religious or mythological subjects. A few of his paintings, like Helen of Troy, are thought to be portraits historiés or to contain portraits within a larger composition. Helen of Troy belongs to the artist’s most productive period during the last four years of his life, 1613–16. 1


Goltzius depicted this sitter as Helen of Troy, the famous beauty in Homer’s Iliad. According to the story of the Judgment of Paris, Paris decides which of three goddesses should be awarded the Golden Apple of Discord, inscribed “to the fairest.” (The apple in the painting alludes to this story.) He awards the apple to Venus, who promises Helen of Troy to him. Paris then abducts Helen from her husband, the Greek king, and the Greeks’ attempt to retrieve Helen from Paris in Troy launches the Trojan War.


During Goltzius’s time, Helen of Troy was well represented in art and literature in the story of the Selection of Models by Zeuxis. Interest in this legend demonstrated Renaissance ideas of creating perfect female beauty in painting. According to the story, the ancient Greek artist Zeuxis produced a painting of Helen of Troy, by selecting the best features from five different, beautiful models. Although according to myth Helen is the most beautiful woman who ever lived, by this action Zeuxis demonstrated that painting can surpass nature in its beauty. The Italian Renaissance artist and writer Giorgio Vasari discussed this story in his influential book The Lives of the Painters and painted it in frescoes in both of his houses in Italy. Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, whom Goltzius met in 1612, also painted the story as part of a decorative scheme on the exterior of his home in Antwerp. 2For Goltzius, to choose Helen of Troy to depict this unknown sitter was a way to present her as more beautiful than the most beautiful woman who ever lived by using a historical reference that was familiar to his contemporaries.


Connections


The Currier has one painting from this period that is also a portrait historié, Jan de Bray: Banquet of Antony and Cleopatra (1669; Currier, 1969.8 ) Goltzius himself is well represented by the twelve prints of the Passion of Christ, as well as three others. As part of the development of Haarlem as a major art center of the 1600s, Goltzius can be seen among painters such as Jan de Bray, Jacob van Ruisdael, and Jan Miense Molenaer, and printmakers Willem Buytewech and Esaias van de Velde, all of whom are represented by works in the Currier’s collection.


Written by Melissa Geisler Trafton

Notes
1 Leeflang and Luijten 2003, 270.
2 This connection was noted by Elizabeth Honig about the Currier’s painting. See Elizabeth Mansfield, Too Beautiful to Picture: Zeuxis, Myth and Mimesis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 45–47.

Bibliography


Blankert, Albert, et al. Dutch Classicism in Seventeenth-Century Painting. Rotterdam: NAI Publishers, 1999.


Blankert, Albert, et al. Gods, Saints, and Heroes: Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1980.


Dixon, Annette, ed. Women Who Ruled: Queens, Goddesses, Amazons in Renaissance and Baroque Art. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum of Art, 2002.


Leeflang, Huigen, and Ger Luijten. Hendrick Goltzius: Drawings, Prints and Paintings. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2003.