Sampling Samson

The legend of Samson and his supernatural strength—and his betrayal by the seductive Delilah—is one of the most famous tales in all Western culture. It’s no surprise that images of the Israelite warrior and Philistine temptress have been circulated and adapted across diverse media for centuries, from Renaissance paintings to political cartoons to contemporary films.

The great artists of the early modern period took a special interest in biblical subjects, and the story of Samson was no exception. Artemisia Gentileschi, the Italian Baroque painter, depicted Delilah snipping Samson’s hair while he sleeps (c. 1630–38). The painting’s focus is Delilah, who occupies the center of the canvas and is bathed in light against a dark background. Her contemporary Guercino depicted another episode of the legend in Samson Captured by the Philistines (1619), which highlights the musculature of the hero’s back, his face turned away from the viewer. Other artists like Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553) and Luca Giordano (1634–1705), meanwhile, took inspiration from Samson’s heroic feats of strength, as when he defeated a lion with his bare hands or killed 1,000 Philistine troops with just a donkey’s jawbone.

In the 19th century, French visual art followed the exoticist tendencies of contemporary composers like Saint-Saëns, Georges Bizet, Jules Massenet, and Léo Delibes, who were fascinated by the cultures of the Middle East and Asia. Henri-Léopold Lévy’s Samson et Dalila (1898) is a case in point. The work is flush with vivid color, especially deep reds and golds, and there is a deep sense of eroticism. Delilah is kneeling, her fingers caressing Samson’s hair, her gaze beseechingly turned upward at him.

Around the same time, the figure of Samson began to take on broader political significance, especially as he was seen as the leader of an oppressed people rebelling against their conquerors. In the United States, Samson was frequently depicted as Black, personifying the struggle first against slavery and then political disenfranchisement in the aftermath of the Civil War. Eminent cartoonist Thomas Nast’s “The Modern Samson” (1868), published in Harper’s Weekly, one of the country’s leading magazines, shows a Black man whose hair has been cut off by a white woman. His hair has the word “suffrage” written on it, the woman’s dress “Southern democracy.” She holds up her prize to a crowd of cheering men representing the Confederate States of America, who had fought to preserve slavery in the American south, and the Ku Klux Klan. Nast thus uses biblical allegory to critique how white supremacists sabotaged Black political power by targeting its source—the right to vote.

Samson also made his way to Hollywood, as in Cecil B. DeMille’s blockbuster Samson and Delilah (1949) starring Hedy Lamarr and Victor Mature. In the 1970s, amid the craze for “Blaxploitation,” a subgenre of action films focused on the urban poor, Black Samson (1974) told the story of a nightclub owner trying to rid his neighborhood of drugs and crime. Bridging popular culture and high art, New York–based artist Jean-Michel Basquiat incorporated the figure of Samson into his Obnoxious Liberals, a critique (in the artist’s distinctive graffiti-esque style) of the contemporary art scene. And as recently as 2009, the biblical story forming the basis of Saint-Saëns’s opera has been adapted as a film set in an Australian aboriginal community, a clear indication of the staying power of this legend and the indelible characters at its center.