Setting up the Copper Snake

This 1551 canvas at the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem depicts the biblical episode from Numbers 21 when Moses raises the bronze serpent in the desert, offering the Israelites bitten by venomous snakes the miraculous cure of gazing upon it. The subject carried intense typological significance: Christ himself identified the bronze serpent as a type of the Crucifixion (John 3:14), making this Old Testament episode a direct Passion prefiguration. The Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem — Heemskerck's own city — holds this canvas as part of its collection of major Haarlem school painting. The large-format canvas allowed Heemskerck to develop a complex multi-figure composition showing the stricken Israelites in various states of suffering and recovery, combining the dramatic physical intensity of Italian history painting with the narrative detail of the Northern tradition.

Canvas with large-format multi-figure composition that demonstrates the full range of Heemskerck's figure-painting capability. The scene requires figures in multiple postures — prostrate with pain, struggling to rise, upright and gazing at the serpent — that tested compositional and anatomical knowledge. The bronze serpent on the pole is positioned to create a vertical compositional axis around which the human drama organises itself. The landscape setting accommodates the crowd while providing recession and air around the densely packed foreground figures.