The Wise and Foolish Virgins
Godfried Schalcken·1700
Historical Context
Schalcken's Wise and Foolish Virgins from around 1700 depicts the New Testament parable in which ten virgins await a bridegroom — five with sufficient oil for their lamps, five without — finding in the nocturnal lamplight exactly the pictorial motif that was his specialty. The parable's moral about spiritual preparedness was a standard subject for devotional painting, but Schalcken transforms it into an exercise in virtuoso candlelit genre painting, each lamp providing a source of the warm, raking light that animated all his most successful compositions.
Technical Analysis
The multiple lamp sources create a complex nocturnal illumination scene in which each figure is partly lit from a different direction. Schalcken's mastery of reflected light — the glow of flame on skin, fabric, and the interior of lamp vessels — is displayed to maximum advantage in this multi-figure candle-lit composition.
