Stop and Look – Hendrick ter Brugghen: The Liberation of Peter 1624
A frail old man, locked up in the dark, is roused from sleep by a touch on his shoulder. He looks up startled, and staring into his face is a young man, his expression compassionate, his gestures urgent and commanding.
The Biblical story is told in St Luke’s account of the early ministry of the Apostles: “Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains: and the keepers before the door kept the prison. And behold, the angel of the Lord came upon him, and a light shined in the prison: and he smote Peter on the side, and raised him up, saying, Arise up quickly. And his chains fell from off his hands.” (Acts 12: 6,7)
Ter Brugghen gives us the scene with absolutely no frills. The two guards are not in the picture: only the young angel, whispering his urgent instructions in the old man’s ear, one capable hand on his shoulder, the other pointing upwards over his head to Peter’s ultimate destination. His wings give off a ghostly glimmer of agitated feathers.
The only distractions from this tense interchange are the play of bright light on the angel’s shoulder and his unexpectedly rich red sleeve. Peter’s face expresses sheer terror, his hands clasped in a gesture both of distress and prayer. The angel is almost more present than the Saint himself: a down-to-earth street boy who happens to have grown near invisible wings, and knows exactly what he has to do. His certainty defeats Peter’s doubt: the fetters will drop off, and the escape be effected.
The Netherlands had recently declared their own escape, by asserting their independence from the might of Catholic Spain, in 1581. That event was confirmed by several decades of war, but very soon the newly liberated cities – Amsterdam, Haarlem, Delft, Leiden – grew into thriving commercial centres, each with its own distinct character and strengths. Their artists, too, evolved separate schools, with noticeable local characteristics. We are familiar with the “little masters” of Delft and Leiden who produced domestic scenes of great charm and intimacy: de Hoogh, Vermeer, Jan Steen, and many others. Ter Brugghen belonged to the school of Utrecht, which developed rather differently.
The city was important, large and metropolitan, and its artists were correspondingly cosmopolitan. Its population was divided fairly evenly between Protestant sects and the old Catholic belief. As far as we know, ter Brugghen adhered to the Reformed (Protestant) church. But he had been to Italy and absorbed the sophistication of the Catholic Italian masters. Much of his subject matter was taken from them. He was drawn, in particular, to the ideas of his slightly older contemporary, Caravaggio (1571-1610). It is Caravaggio whose influence we see in the powerful realism of ter Brugghen’s work, as in that of several of his Utrecht colleagues.
Caravaggio had very recently shown that even sublime religious subjects could be presented as vivid contemporary events, enacted by real, believable people, recognizable as part of our own world. The Utrecht painters took up his ideas with gusto and worked their own remarkable variations on them. Ter Brugghen was one of the most imaginative of them and could reinvent this scene from the Acts of the Apostles as a startling, indeed shocking, and also very moving episode in the life of a frightened but intrepid and inspired old man.
