The Brazen Serpent by Johann König, from the Original, Framed Art Print

Public domain art from Statens Museum for Kunst, digitally enhanced in high resolution. Oil on copper.

Johann König (1586-1642) was among a number of German Baroque painters strongly influenced by their knowledge of Italian art. He was born in Nuremberg and taught to paint in Augsburg by Hans Rottenhammer. Like his teacher, König travelled to Italy: First to Venice, where he came into contact with the works of Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto, and later to Rome where he met Adam Elsheimer, who also had a lasting influence on his style.

Depicted here, the fourth book of Moses talks about when the Israelites became impatient during the exodus and began to complain against God, he sent a plague of poisonous snakes as a punishment. Many of the Israelites died from the snakebites, so they turned to Moses for help. God commanded Moses to erect a pole bearing a brass serpent with the promise that whoever looked at it after being bitten by a snake would be saved. The story was seen as a prefiguration for the crucifixion of Christ, and due to this important theological association it was often depicted in Christian art.

Here, Johann König first leads the viewer's gaze towards the Israelites wrestling with death and the snakes in the foreground. They are depicted as a monumental group illustrating God's wrath against the impatient and unfaithful. König's clever arrangement of the figures and their expressions then directs the viewer towards the hill in the background, upon which Moses has placed the pole with the brazen serpent, towards which the Israelites who were saved express their thanks and joy.

This work uses a very distinct compositional scheme in which a group of larger figures are placed in the foreground whilst the main subject of the work takes place in the mid-ground of the upper third, creating a vertical axis within the painting and accentuating the illusion of distance.

König probably became acquainted with this composition method during his sojourn to Venice, where he may have seen Tintoretto's monumental ceiling painting of the same subject in the Scuola grande di San Rocco. Tintoretto's composition is more complex, dramatic and expansive, but König has transferred the motif into something suitable for the small, finely painted format of a copper panel.

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