Cleveland Museum of Art

Jonah Cast Out by the Whale onto the Shore of Nineveh

Maarten van Heemskerck

Date

1566

Medium

Pen and brown ink over indications in black chalk, within brown ink framing lines; indented for transfer

Culture

Netherlands

Department

Drawings

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

In this dramatic composition, the Old Testament prophet Jonah floats midair after being vomited onto dry land by a giant fish. The artist Maarten van Heemskerck drew the composition as the second of four illustrations of episodes from the biblical book of Jonah, which describes how the prophet was swallowed by a fish and regurgitated after three days. Jonah’s trial was often interpreted as a metaphor for exile and redemption, or for Christ’s resurrection. Heemskerck was one of the most prolific designers of prints in the Netherlands in the mid-1500s. Working with the engraver Philips Galle in his native city of Haarlem, the drawing was indented with a dull knife for transfer onto a copperplate to be engraved. Heemskerck was an instrumental figure in bringing ideas about Italian art to northern Europe. Here, he incorporates architecture and figures reminiscent of types he saw and sketched on a trip to Italy in the 1530s. The artist’s rendering of a fish is neither a shark nor a whale, but rather a fictional combination of the two, a product of the artist’s knowledge of ornamental designs and his own imagination.

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