Jacob's Ladder
Virgil Solis, 1565 · Genesis 28:1
The passage
And Isaac called Jacob, and blessed him, and charged him, and said unto him, Thou shalt not take a wife of the daughters of Canaan.
Genesis 28:1
About this woodcut
Jacob is asleep across the whole bottom of the frame, head on the stone, one arm thrown out, in the awkward heavy sprawl of someone who lay down where he stopped. The ladder rises out of the ground beside him at a steep diagonal into a break in the cloud, with figures climbing it. A walled town sits on the horizon at the right.
It is a plain carpenter ladder with rungs, planted in the dirt. No stairway, no architecture, nothing golden. Solis takes the Hebrew literally — a sullam is a ladder — and the effect is that heaven is reached by the sort of thing that would be leaning against a barn.
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