Romulus and Remus before Numitor
Jan van Rottom (fl. 1660s)
Category
Tapestries
Date
circa 1660 - circa 1670
Materials
Tapestry, wool and silk, 7-8 warps per cm
Measurements
1730 x 2480 mm
Place of origin
Brussels
Order this imageCollection
Cotehele, Cornwall
NT 348294.2
Summary
Tapestry, wool and silk, 7-8 warps per cm, Romulus and Remus before Numitor from a set of five of the Story of Rome, Jan van Rottom, Brussels, c. 1660-1670. A king wearing a crown and a blue cloak over red scale-armour rises from a throne under a red canopy to greet Romulus and Remus who approach to kneel before him, Remus wearing a brocaded cloak and Romulus in blue scale-armour. Behind the king to the right are an elderly soldier wearing a helmet and another man wearing a blue cloak. The lateral borders are composed of military trophies, armour and weaponry, and above putti disport amongst fruit and flowers tied up with ribbons. In the upper border a central cartouche with a Latin inscription is framed by more military trophies, with festoons of fruit either side. There is no lower border.
Full description
This tapestry is the second in the 'Story of Rome' set at Cotehele, and may be a conflation of two episodes in the story. The inscription translates as: ‘Romulus and Remus, through the agency of Faustulus who reared them, are recognised by King Numitor, their Uncle’. This points to an episode when Romulus and Remus were around 18 years old, living as shepherds guarding the flocks of Amulius, King of Alba Longa, on the Palatine Hill. Romulus and Remus frequently quarrelled with the neighbouring herdsmen of Numitor, Amulius's brother, and one day when Romulus was away Numitor’s herdsmen captured Remus and brought him before Numitor, and subsequently before King Amulius. Earlier tapestries representing the same scene include another scene of Remus being captured and led away and have inscriptions identifying the King as Amulius (Mahl 1965, pp. 12-13). The tapestry at Cotehele, although it derives from the design of the earlier tapestries, specifies that the King is in fact Numitor, and the tapestry may therefore represent a slightly different episode. The twins grew up unaware that they were in fact the grandsons of Numitor, who had been King of Alba Longa but was ousted by Amulius. When the twins were born Amulius ordered that they be left to die, and they were rescued by the shepherd Faustulus. Following Remus’s capture Numitor guessed the young man's true identity, and together Romulus, Remus and Numitor mounted a full-scale attack on Amulius to regain the kingship of Alba Longa. The tapestry may therefore represent Romulus and Remus presenting themselves to Numitor ahead of their attack on Amulius – an episode not specifically related in any of the historical accounts but with a clear narrative significance. The attack was successful, Amulius was assassinated and Numitor was restored to the throne and able to grant his grandsons permission to found a new city that would be Rome (see ‘The Building of Rome’, 348294.3). The tapestry has been altered by the removal of a strip along the bottom which survives in storage at Cotehele. The strip shows the characters’ feet and a shield, and bears the mark of the city of Brussels and the signature ‘IAN VAN ROTTOM’ on its lower galloon (348279.1). The tapestry has hung in the Old Drawing Room since at least c. 1840, when it was described by the Rev. Arundell (Arundell 1840, p. 33). The five tapestries of the ‘Story of Rome’ at Cotehele may originally have been part of a larger set. The most familiar scene from the story, showing Romulus and Remus suckled by a she-wolf, is not included at Cotehele, and elsewhere surviving weavings from the same cartoons include up to eight different scenes. With the exception of one panel, ‘The Death of Remus’ (348294.4), the designs for the series derive ultimately from a tapestry set woven in the early sixteenth century in Brussels, examples of which were acquired by both Henry VIII and Philip II of Spain in the 1540-50s (Campbell 2007, pp. 306-7; Junquera de Vega & Gallegos 1986, pp. 140-2). The designer of the original series is unknown, but it has been attributed to either Jan Vermeyen (1500-1554) or Michiel Coxcie (1499-1592). In the second half of the sixteenth century a number of tapestry sets were woven based on these designs, in some cases making alterations to the composition and arrangement (Mahl 1965; Salzburg 1987, pp. 350-354). Examples include two sets in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, which include the same figure groups but in slightly different arrangements (Mahl 1965). Of all the surviving sets, the one known as Vienna series VIII is compositionally closest to that at Cotehele. The Cotehele tapestries however were woven later, in the second half of the seventeenth century, using updated versions of the sixteenth-century cartoons. The borders with their profusion of military paraphernalia and disporting putti are of a type commonly used on late seventeenth-century Flemish tapestries with classical subject matter. In the centre of each side border is a military trophy consisting of a suit of armour and a helmet propped up on a spear and surrounded by other martial emblems. This form of trophy derives from the memorials erected in ancient Greece and Rome to commemorate victory over an enemy, and was common in funerary sculpture throughout the Renaissance and early modern period. In the context of the ‘Story of Rome’ tapestries the trophies refer to the martial basis upon which Rome was founded. In the centre of each upper border is an oval cartouche with a Latin inscription identifying the subject of the tapestry, and either side are putti with palm branches, symbols of fame, laurel wreaths for victory, olive branches for peace, and ‘fasces’, bundles of rods tied to the shaft of an axe, a symbol of the power and authority of the Roman state. The tapestries were woven without a lower border. Three panels in the 'Story of Rome' set bear the signature of Jan van Rottom, a little-known Brussels entrepreneur whose only other recorded tapestry set is a ‘History of Troy’ dated to c. 1660 (Duverger 1986 A). A fourth tapestry in the set, ‘The Rape of the Sabine Women’ (348294.5), bears the signature of Erasmus III de Pannemaker (Brussels, 1627-1681). De Pannemaker’s signature also appears on a ‘Death of Remus’ tapestry formerly in a private collection in Germany (Duverger 1986 B, p. 114; Göbel 1923, vol. 1, p. 376, vol. 2, pl. 331). Although the main battle scene in de Pannemaker’s ‘Death of Remus’ is completele different to the Cotehele version, the two tapestries have the same border and inscription, and they share a small figure group at the top left with Romulus watching for an augury. Van Rottom and de Pannemaker obviously pooled their resources, sharing design elements such as this small figure group, using the same border designs, and sharing the production of tapestry sets such as Cotehele’s ‘Story of Rome’. It was relatively common for sixteenth-century cartoons to be re-used during the seventeenth century, in part due to the cost of commissioning new designs. Many cartoon painters operating in seventeenth-century Brussels specialised in retouching sixteenth-century cartoons, which were painted in watercolour, to ensure that they remained usable in the workshop (Brosens 2009, p. 363). In the case of the ‘Story of Rome’ not one but two sixteenth-century tapestry series have been recycled, the ‘Story of Rome’ and the ‘History of Scipio’ (see text for 348294.4, ‘The Death of Remus’). The tapestries have been given a new set of inscriptions which differ substantially from those on the sixteenth-century originals: there are many spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, and in some cases, for example ‘Romulus and Remus before Numitor’, the identification of the scene has changed completely. (Helen Wyld, 2010)
Provenance
First recorded at Cotehele c. 1840; left at Cotehele when the property was accepted in lieu of tax from Kenelm, 6th Earl of Mount Edgcumbe (1873-1965) and transferred to the National Trust in 1947; amongst the contents accepted in lieu of estate duty by H M treasury and transferred to the National Trust in 1974.
Credit line
Cotehele House, The Edgcumbe Collection (The National Trust)
Marks and inscriptions
In cartouche in upper border: REMELVS ET ROME- / LVS PER FASCVLVM NVTRI- / TIVM EORVM COGNOSVN- / TVR A REGE MVMTORO / EORVM PATRVO
Makers and roles
Jan van Rottom (fl. 1660s), workshop
References
Brosens and de Laet, 2009: Koenraad Brosens and Weerle de Laet, ‘Matthijs Roelandts, Joris Leemans and Lanceloot Lefebure: new data on Baroque tapestry in Brussels’, Burlington Magazine, vol. CLI, no. 1275 (June 2009), pp. 360-367 Delmarcel, 1999: Guy Delmarcel, Flemish Tapestry, Tielt 1999 T P Wiseman, Remus. A Roman Myth, Cambridge 1995 Paulina Junquera de Vega and Concha Herrero Carretero, Catalogo de Tapices del Patrimonio nacional, volumen I: siglo XVI, Madrid 1986 Junquera de Vega and Gallegos, 1986: Paulina Junquera de Vega and Carmen Díaz Gallegos, Catalogo de Tapices del Patrimonio nacional, volumen II: siglo XVII, Madrid 1986 Duverger, 1986: Erik Duverger, ‘Een Troje-tapijt uit het Brussels atelier van Jan van Rottom van omstreeks 1660’, Artes Textiles, 11 (1986), pp. 125-148 Duverger, 1969: Erik Duverger, ‘Tapijtwerk uit het Atelier van Frans Geubels’, in De Bloeitijd van de Vlaamse Tapijtkunst, Internationaal Colloquium 23-25 Mei 1961, Brussels 1969, pp. 91-149 Cavallo, 1967: Adolpho Cavallo, Tapestries of Europe and Colonial Peru in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2 vols., Boston 1967 Elisabeth Mahl, ‘Die Romulus un Remus-Folgen der Tapisserien Sammlung des Kunsthistorischen Museums’, Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, vol. 61 (1965), pp. 7-40 Fürsterzbischof Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau, Gründer des barocken Salzburg, exh. cat. Residenz Neugebäude & Dommuseum, Salzburg 1987 Marthe Crick-Kuntziger, ‘La Tenture de l’histoire de Romulus d’Antoine Leyniers’, Bulletin des Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, vol. IV, no. 20 (1948), pp. 50-78 Göbel, 1923: Heinrich Göbel, Die Niederlande, vol. 1 of Wandteppiche, 2 vols., Berlin 1923