Trusting hands: The dextrarum iunctio in seventeenth-century Dutch Marriage Iconography

Abstract

Publishing illustrated booklets to celebrate the weddings of their offspring became a vogue among well-to-do Dutch citizens, many of them Flemish immigrants, at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The private booklets aimed to put occasional poems and songs, the so-called epithalamia, on record, but the fine style of the nuptial ephemera were made even more exclusive by adorning them with illustrations specially commissioned from fashionable artists of the day. The title pages of these occasional booklets were illustrated with the motif of the dextrarum iunctio, two clasped right hands signifying the physical union flowing from the marriage vow. While the dextrarum iunctio was the one element among epithalamic imagery that encapsulated the essential significance of the marital bond, the depictions of the celebrants in the nuptial illustrations were often altered to fit individual circumstances. They were Christ, who was copied after the Marriage for Spiritual Love in Goltzius’s Marriage Trilogy, Reformed ministers and the tetragrammaton. Based on the survey of the use of the dextrarum iunctio in Dutch epithalamic illustrations, I will examine how Gerrit van Honthorst’s Allegory of the Marriage of Frederik Hendrik and Amalia van Solms of 1649, which was painted for the decoration of the Oranjezaal, was closely associated with the standard epithalamic imagery of the day, incorporating as it does the gesture of the dextrarum iunctio. By addressing the nuptial ephemera as a principal visual source for matrimonial iconography, I will argue that the motif of the dextrarum iunctio was not restricted to the decoration of private wedding booklets, but evolved into the principal symbol of the marriage ritual in the upper echelons of seventeenth-century Dutch society.