David Plays the Harp for Saul

Rembrandt van Rijn’s Protestant environment and Jewish neighbours are known to have enhanced his general interest in Old Testament scenes, but the exhilarating, almost oedipal drama dominating much of the books of Samuel—the fraught relationship between King Saul and his successor David—must have been particularly inspiring for the painter’s artistic temperament, drawn to darkness both literally and figuratively. The dramatic moments of that plot are only anticipated in the episode represented here—the very first encounter between the two men, narrated right after David’s clandestine anointing—but Rembrandt already sets the supposedly calm episode in a sombre, tense atmosphere. Only the two protagonists are represented, with the paradoxical combination—typical to Rembrandt—of quasi-monochrome dimness and ‘orientalist’ splendour.

David is completely dominated by the older king in terms of size, position, and lighting, but it is his excellence in music-making that saves the day. Mieke Bal (2006: 355–57) connects the psychoanalytic aspects of the narrative to an emphasis, frequent in the art of painting (and in particular in the work of seventeenth-century artists such as Caravaggio and Velázquez), on the ambitions and deficiencies of seeing. Indeed, the painting is an almost exact contemporary of Velázquez’s famously self-reflective Las Meninas (Museo del Prado, Madrid).

Rembrandt’s Saul and David is made still more complex by the dominant presence of sight’s rival sense: hearing. In a dark, visually impoverished environment, musical sounds could gain an enhanced medical and moral agency. Saul covers one of his eyes with what seems to be a curtain, becoming a cyclopean figure staring at the painting’s hypothetical spectators, whereas David’s gaze is vacant, his thoughts lost in the music he is making. While Saul is curled up as if protecting himself from the predicaments of his political life, the young musician emanates soundwaves reaching every corner of the depicted space. Saul seems conscious and wary of that invisible command and, while the Bible insists on his love for David at that moment, clearly senses how destabilizing to him such a power could become.

References

Bal, Mieke. 2006 [1991]. Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press)

Northern early modern artists routinely chose a grotesque register for their sacred scenes, but not any episode of Christian iconography would be considered apt for that treatment. While The Mocking of Christ or The Temptation of Saint Anthony were habitual occasions for outlandish grimaces and physical deformities of all kinds, the solemn, even lyrical story of David musically assuaging King Saul’s bad mood hardly seems to call for such handling. And yet, Lucas van Leyden, an artist often described as a Northern Mannerist, gives his figures that unmistakable aesthetic, shunning ideal beauty for the sake of a more piquant, slightly ridiculous presentation of his subjects.

Saul, in particular, is far from noble-looking; by contrast with what the biblical text affirms, David’s music seems to have had no effect on the ‘evil spirit from God’ that torments him (1 Samuel 16:14). Understandably perhaps: David’s perfunctory playing and stiff posture hardly appear inspiring. The king’s grumpiness—or otherwise more serious mental illness, such as the Dutch biographer Karel van Mander detected in Saul’s face here as early as 1604 (Wagini 2017)—is compounded by his (involuntary?) gesture of pointing his spear towards David, an obvious anticipation of the later episode (1 Samuel 18:10–13) in which Saul will attack the musician with that same weapon. Indeed, the two biblical passages are often conflated in early modern images.

The medium of engraving, with its reproducibility and thus a far broader audience than painting, lends itself to a lighter tone, or at least to the inclusion of anecdotal detail ensuring the immediate curiosity of potential buyers. Inherent to such a variety of details is the presence of bystanders, densely crowding the background of the scene, and the vivacious, comically graceful sculptural reliefs adorning the king’s throne. At least one of the latter decorations—possibly Cain assassinating his brother Abel—presents darker overtones hinting at Saul’s madness, as it depicts a violent attack.

References

Wagini, Susanne. 2017. Lucas van Leyden: Meister der Druckgraphik (Munich: Staatliche graphische Sammlung München

Mattia Preti, who was active in the most important hubs of Caravaggism in Southern Europe—Rome, Naples, and Malta—presents here a belated version of some of the typical characteristics of that style. His depiction of the first encounter between Saul and David is vigorous and dynamic, far from the lethargic melancholy suggested by other artists. In this sense, it can be deemed typically Baroque; it insists on the ephemeral instant in a composition ostensibly frozen in time. Witnesses of every gender, age, and race are petrified by the musical charisma of the future psalmist. Preti’s typical brilliant white light enhances the drama: the cloudy sky seems to be clearing up just like Saul’s melancholia.

For the biblical episode, Preti borrows elements from an eclectic array of sources, both mythological and mundane. The figure of David attracting a motley group of people to his magical music-making is reminiscent of Orpheus’s magnetic prowess—pacifying the entire natural world with his lyre. Closer yet to his habitual artistic references, Preti here pursues the development of tavern and concert scenes to which Caravaggist circles earlier in the century repeatedly contributed.

Paradoxically, in this group of humans all ravished and hypnotized by the talented harpist, the least affected seems to be Saul himself. Dominating the diagonal composition but still shrouded by shadows and thus contrasted with the brightly-lit David, the older king is shown to belong to Israel’s past, on his way to oblivion. Perhaps recalling what was suffered by the recipients of certain mental health treatments in Preti’s day, Saul is here paying the price of a debilitating apathy for the tranquillisation of his ‘evil spirit’ (1 Samuel 16:14). The solace brought to him by David is as ephemeral as the instant depicted here; soon enough, the new king will make him jealous and frustrated; worse still, David will deprive him of his dynastic posterity.