An Iconographical Riddle: Gerbrandt van den Eeckhout's Royal Repast in the Liechtenstein Princely Collections

Abstract

Gerbrandt van den Eeckhout's Royal Repast has been interpreted as King David mourning the death of his son by Bathsheba and as an allegory of Winter. Both explanations, however, overlook many puzzling elements, such as the setting within a cave, the unusual gifts presented to the king, and the presence of four winged figures in the background, one of whom is a haloed black boy. An alchemical interpretation brings these elements together within a coherent iconographical framework. In this context, the king serves as an allegorical pivot, complementing and magnifying the figures and objects placed around him. Eeckhout's iconography comes from popular alchemical emblem books and from medieval sources that were reprinted in the seventeenth century in response to a renewed fascination with early alchemical imagery. The Royal Repast not only reflects the seventeenth-century perception of alchemy as a force for the public good, but also demonstrates that the history of chemistry is a relatively unexplored area for art-historical research in Dutch seventeenth-century painting.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 1 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.