The Power of Women: Samson and Delilah (c. 1512): Art, History and Details

The Power of Women: Samson and Delilah (c. 1512) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Lucas van Leyden (Netherlandish, 1494–about 1533).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The publication of Albrecht Dürer's three impressive woodcut series in 1511—The Large Passion, The Apocalypse, and The Life of the Virgin—had an immediate impact on Northern painters such as Lucas. Lucas's first major designs for woodcuts were six large images whose theme was the power of women, that is, women's ability to dominate man by using wiles and beauty was a subject with broad, popular appeal at the time. The woodcut medium was eminently suitable for the bold, straightforward manner in which Lucas presented his subjects. The moment representing woman's treachery is always depicted as a restrained confrontation: here, Delilah cuts Samson's hair, sapping his extraordinary strength and leaving him vulnerable to the Philistines who wait in the background to seize him. In size, these woodcuts rival Dürer's largest sheets. The motionless figures possess a monumentality that contributes to the dramatic impact.

Object facts

• Title: The Power of Women: Samson and Delilah
• Date: c. 1512
• Creator attribution: Lucas van Leyden (Netherlandish, 1494–about 1533)
• Culture: Netherlands, 16th century
• Type: Print
• Technique: woodcut
• Dimensions: Image: 41.1 x 28.7 cm (16 3/16 x 11 5/16 in.)
• Collection: PR - Woodcut
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1935.117

Collection credit

Gift of the Print Club of Cleveland in memory of Charles T. Brooks

Further reading listed by the museum

• Francis, Henry. "Recent Print Accessions by Lucas Van Leyden." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 22, no. 9 (November 1935): 142-145
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.