A Masterly Hand / Scientia Artis 9

7.2 Fig. 7.2 Samson and the Lion, London, Victoria and Albert Museum, inv. A.4-1936 Margaret arose out of Meit’s status as an artist attached to Margaret’s court around 1514-1 530. 2 M eit’s career alone shows that a prestigious artist ­ connected with a grand household might work on a tiny as well as a monu- mental scale; Paul Williamson suggests that Jacques de Baerze, the much ­ earlier Dendermonde carver documented only in relation to two carved ­ altarpieces commissioned in 1390 by Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, may also have been responsible for a tiny boxwood reliquary b ust. 3 Th e Samson and the Lion ­suggests that like these artists this Elsloo sculptor produced tiny pieces for the private scrutiny of aristocratic customers in addition to the larger-scale work for churches for which the Elsloo group is primarily known. The London Samson and the Lion has been understood primarily in religious terms because the incident was so often taken to prefigure Christ’s victory over e vil. 4 As Jos Koldeweij has shown in relation to hat badges, however, the appeal of the Samson theme lay in its dual significance as a type for Christ and as a model of heroism; the image of Samson could also double for that of the classical hero Hercules, who, like Samson, fought with a lion and, like him, was associated with virtue and val our. 5 Ac cording to chronicler Olivier de la Marche, the labours of Hercules dramatised at the marriage feast of Charles the Bold and Margaret of York in 1468 encouraged the audience to be soldiers of virt ue. 6 Th e iconography of the London carving is curious and, like the hat badges, the hero could be Samson or Hercules or both. Judges 14: 5-6 specifies that Samson killed the lion with his bare hands, yet here Samson carries a sword. Although rare, artistic representations occasionally show Samson ­ carrying a sword as, for example, in an engraving by monogrammist Master F vB. 7 He rcules deliberately killed the lion with his bare hands rather than his weapons but is usually shown in classical dress strangling the li on. 8 An artist at this date in the eastern Netherlands would be unlikely to be familiar with classicising approaches, however. Whichever hero the London image repre- sents, it could be considered primarily as a secular image of courage appealing, perhaps, to a knightly aristocrat, its religious significance being secondary. Late-medieval art works representing Samson’s encounter with the lion ­ certainly did not always depict the scene as an overtly violent one. 9 Th e London carving eschews violence in a particularly idiosyncratic way, however. Rather than strangling or tearing apart the lion with his bare hands as legend demanded, the hero of the piece reaches right into the lion’s mouth and grasps the tongue while the lion itself is subdued and silenced. The nearest precedent for the motif of grasping the lion’s tongue is an engraving of Samson and the Lion by Israhel van Meckenem, who worked nearby in Bocholt in the Lower Rhine region, but the parallels are not close enough for this to constitute a source or an explanati on. 10 Th is is very strange iconography; it is possible that the carver had no experience of the narrative and interpreted it his own indi- vidual way, or he could have adopted this pose more deliberately. The coats of arms of Guelders, Brabant, Flanders and Limburg all have lions, and the house of Burgundy claimed to descend fromHercules, as didMaximilian of Bava ria. 11 Charles of Egmond, ruler of Guelders, was described as a second Hercules in his admittedly later epitaph of 1538, and the early-sixteenth-century chronicles