Andrea Mantegna (1430-1506) was a sophisticated reader of both textual and material history, known for "using classical theme[s] as an opportunity to display his classical learning"; also renowned as the late fifteenth-century artist "most devoted to antiquity". (1) On the other hand, he had no obvious connections to Rabbinic commentary or the Jewish community in Mantua. Although it is difficult to assess how literate Mantegna was for his day, he was a Paduan and Mantuan painter of great influence in northern Italy and especially beyond his own region and in Venice, where he married into the accomplished Bellini family of artists. This unusual painting (48 x 37 cm) has been in the National Gallery of London since the late nineteenth century (c. 1883) and is an exceptional distillation of allegory and literary allusion as a biblical hermeneutic ekphrasis. This ekphrasis is overlaid by Renaissance historical narrative itself derived from an older complicated Medieval commentary, possibly even informed by Hebrewmidrash, as unlikely as this might seem. (2) One of the most comprehensive prior discussions of this painting and its provenance is by Keith Christiansen.(3)

This grisaille (gray-tone) “cameo-style” painting of Andrea Mantegna was painted on linen and used glue sizing (guazzo) rather than gesso for its base. It has been often described as either imitating variegated marble (africano or africano rosso or breccia pavonazza di Ezine) or an imperial Roman sardonyx gemstone cameo with alternating reddish-brown and white layers, although marble imitation is more compelling as a description. The combination of grisaille subject with marbleized background is entirely in keeping with a Classicizing mode where Mantegna deliberately quoted Roman antiquity. The archaeologist Ward-Perkins elsewhere documented the Roman love of multicolored marble like this, as easily categorized in the encyclopedic Marmi Antichi. (4) While the painting lands in the category of history painting, in this case it is a famous biblical rather than a Classical subject. Because Mantegna’s adoptive father and teacher, the painter Francesco Squarcione, had been an antiquarian and collector, the artist would have been able early on to observe many such antiquities such as Roman cameo seals, gems or fragments of highly-colored Roman marbles and sarcophagus cast reliefs to provide ample all’antica models. Furthermore, one of Mantegna’s own patrons in 1459, Cardinal Lodovico Trevisan, had been “an ardent collector of ancient gems and medals.” (5)

Although not the first image of Samson and Delilah (Nicola and Giovanni Pisano earlier portrayed the story in relief on the Perugia fountain in 1278, which is ironic given the biblical exegesis of Proverbs 5 to follow below), this painting is a uniquely interpretive ekphrasis of the biblical narrative in the Book of Judges. The biblical passage describes how Samson, a great judge (shophet in Hebrew) of the Danite tribe and arch-enemy of the Philistines, was nonetheless ultimately neutralized by lust. His many trysts with harlots and Philistine women (somehow the biblical narrative attempts to equivocate the two) portray Samson as a man whose passions ultimately outweigh his prodigious strength. The frustrated Philistine elders had hired the femme fatale Delilah to learn the secret of Samson’s great strength after he had single-handedly slain a thousand Philistines with only the weapon of an ass jawbone (Judges 15:15) . On other occasions when they had tried to lure him with a woman and trap him within the city of Gaza, Samson had torn the city gates from their sockets (Judges 16:3) and also burned their grain crops with 300 foxes whose tails he had lit with fire (Judges 15:4-5). Samson was assuredly not a paragon of virtue, but his people the Israelites tolerated his venality and moral weaknesses because he kept the Philistines at bay. After multiple failures to guilefully elicit the secret of his great strength, Delilah finally learned (only successful on the fourth try, as the third was not a charm for the desperate Philistine lords who finally offered Delilah 1,100 pieces of silver) that Samson was aNazirite from birth, one sworn with a divine vow by his parents to never cut his hair or drink wine and spirits (Judges 13:4, 7 ff.). The text says aNazirite must also not be defiled by non-kosher food, but is curiously silent about consorting with prostitutes, which was a regular pastime of Samson in his sad story of a compromised judge.

The way the sleeping Samson sprawls between Delilah’s legs suggests she has first enervated him by sexual intercourse after which his sleep would be only natural. The phrase “Delilah’s lap” was even a literary metaphor for harlotry.(6) With décolletage thinly veiled, Delilah cuts his hair with her scissors similar to sheep shears – perhaps symbolic of her own instrument of sexual prowess in this case unnaturally external like a man rather than internal - and thus destroys his superhuman power that was almost magically located in his hair until that moment. It is not surprising that in the Ancient Near East, cutting off a man's hair - especially his beard - was a degrading trope for loss of virility and often even believed superstitiously to have the parallel effect of a kind of eunuchizing. For misogynistic scholiasts and medieval biblicists, the association here of Samson's "emasculation" is at least in the right anatomical locus for her power, which is visually centered at her loins.