Fire down below

Frans Francken the Younger (Antwerp 1582-164s) painted marvellous kunstkamerschilderijen: cabinets of wonders, filled with cups and coins and wenteltraps and knives and skeletons and rings, with paintings of paintings of flowers or of battle scenes; sometimes with a monkey gazing quizzically: O brave new world! (The most glorious of all this genre is The Allegory of Sight by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens.) I was looking for more such, when I stumbled onto this scene:





Whee!

It's called "The bravery of the Persian women."  The story is taken from Plutarch's Moralia V:

"Cyrus, causing the Persians to revolt from King Astyages and the Medes, was overcome in battle; and the Persians retreating by flight into the city, the enemy pursued so close that they had almost fallen into the city with them. The women ran out to meet them before the city, plucking up their petticoats to their middle, saying, Ye vilest varlets among men, whither so fast? Ye surely cannot find a refuge in these parts, from whence ye came forth."

Closed.

They're not just handing out white feathers, of course: they were looking at a siege at best, with famine and disease; at worst, rape, slaughter, and enslavement.  Fortunately, the smock-lifting worked.

"The Persians blushing for shame at the sight and speech, and rebuking themselves, faced about, and renewing the fight routed their enemies. Hence a law was enacted, that when the king enters the city, every woman should receive a piece of gold; and this law Cyrus made. And they say that Ochus, being in other kinds a naughty and covetous king, would always, when he came, compass the city and not enter it, and so deprive the women of their largess; but Alexander entered twice, and gave all the women with child a double benevolence."

Francken, I discover, was in awe (not unmingled with prurience, alas) of women's power. Even when he's making sermons, he's thunderstruck.  He painted some spectacular witches' kitchens and sabbaths, where, in spite of the whizzbangs and the flesh, they're all hard at work, studying wickedness.  This scene resembles nothing so much as a dark, chaotic colloquium.  Science camp for the black arts.

And (I suddenly realized), Francken painted that recent acquisition at the MFA, one of the gleefullest Hells in the history of art.

Nine