Bulletin du Musée National de Varsovie (37.1996)

this subject, and to summon angels to earth in order to accompany David in his
playing?

The hybrid animal carved on the throne would then be the symbolic
equivalent of the lion and the dragon from Psalm 91, whom man, safe under
the protective wings of angels, can trample under foot. This monster turns in
the opposite direction to that of David and the angels, which is the simplest
way to emphasise the antagonism of these figures. The ominous power of the
beast has been neutralised by giving it a menial function.

Although the population of Utrecht was predominantly Catholic, ter
Brugghen himself was most likely Protestant; furthermore, he probably painted
David on official commission. In Holland, where the Calvinist church was
predominant, only those religious pictures were officially permitted which
contained didactic and moralistic subject matter. Therefore, Kobayashi-Sato
rightly observed that there is good reason for expecting this moralising content
in our painting as well.27 In my opinion, the aforementioned allusions to the
Psalms speak in favour of a vanitative interpretation of the David Playing his
Harp, Surrounded by Angels. The principal bearer of this meaning seems to be
the lion-sphinx, creeping out portentously from under the magnificent
overcoat of David, symbolising the destructive power of embodied evil. The
extremely strong contrast between the juvenile faces of the angels and the
senile countenance of David, emphasising the inevitable decline of human
life, together with the theme of music, at the time so commonly loaded with
vanitative symbolism, harmonise fully with these allusions.

The horizon line of the painting lies at approximately the level of the eyes
of the depicted figures, and one should believe that the David was meant to be
hung low. If we assume that Kobayashi-Sato’s supposition about the
commission for the Utrecht Collegium Musicum is correct, we can imagine that
the members of this association sat during their concerts facing the picture in
such a way that both the pictorial and the real spaces complemented each
other, as if David and the angels were playing together (in the same circle) with
the real musicians. Thus, the possible vanitative message must have been in this
case more immediate than usual (enhanced by the painting’s deceptive realism),
comparable to the mode of introducing it into a portrait.28

The painting Satyrs with a Brass Pitcher from 1623 (Fig. 12), previously
unknown to scholars, can be considered with great probability an autograph
work by Honthorst, despite its poor state of preservation, since its composition

27 Y.Kobayashi-Sato in her reasoning followed in the footsteps of Chr. Tümpel, Religieuse
Historieschilderkunst, Amsterdam 1981, pp.45-53; Cf. Y.Kobayashi-Sato, “Hendrick ter
Brugghen's...” op. cit., p.16, where in note 50 she even mentions an example of vanitative
symbolism of another David Playing a Harp, one of panels of an organ shutter painted by Roelof
van Zijl.

23 The effect must have been comparable to that of the seventeenth-century Dutch or German mirror
with a Vanitas still life painted on it, in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, discussed by J. Bialostocki,
“Man and Mirror in Painting: Reality and Transience”, in: Studies in Late Medieval and Renaissance
Painting in Honor of Millard Meiss (ed. I. Lavin and J. Plummer), New York University 1977, p.72.

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