From La Historia imaginada: Construcciónes visuales del pasado en la Edad Moderna, ed. Joan Lluís Palos and Diana Carrió-Invernizzi, Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2008, pp. 65-81 (in Spanish)

 

 

 

The Amsterdam Town Hall:

Political Power, or the Power of Art?

 

 

Ivan Gaskell

 

 

 

Amsterdam rose, in part, at the expense of the Spanish Empire. This chapter examines aspects of an implicitly anti-Hapsburg phenomenon: the former Town Hall of Amsterdam (currently Royal Palace), and some contemporary representations of it.

      In the seventeenth century Amsterdam was the place above all others where relatively free trade and proto-capitalist enterprise flourished in a recognizably modern form for the first time. It became what London was to be in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and New York in the twentieth: the grand center of commerce attracting migrants of all social degrees from far and wide. Amsterdam owed the growth of its prosperity in large part to the decline of its southern neighbor, Antwerp, which had been the leading entrepot of the Netherlands prior to the revolt against Spanish rule. In 1578 the civic militia had expelled the Catholic members of the city council of Amsterdam loyal to Philip II of Spain, and thereafter a Reformed Amsterdam embraced Protestantism and the cause of revolt. Even though the Spanish recaptured Antwerp in 1585, the rebels controlled the city’s access to the sea, so choked its trade. Amsterdam reaped the benefit. Thereafter it remained one of Amsterdam’s principal war aims that Antwerp should remain commercially crippled. Since Amsterdam was the largest single contributor to the military budget of the province of Holland, the regents of Amsterdam usually had their way.[1] The subject of this chapter is a number of visual artifacts from Amsterdam. These objects, whether huge buildings or relatively small paintings and prints, are extraordinarily complex. Can they be used to say anything of interest about power and its relationship with art in seventeenth-century Amsterdam?

      In 1648 peace was finally concluded between the United Provinces of the Netherlands and Spain, against which the Dutch had fought for their independence for eighty years. On October 28, four children, the sons and nephews of the burgomasters of Amsterdam, laid the foundation stone of what was to be the new Town Hall, the seat of government of the most commercially powerful city in Europe.[2] Building and embellishment continued for the best part of twenty years—although it was in use within seven—and eventually the front pediment was surmounted by a huge bronze figure personifying Peace and Public Happiness surveying the great square—the Dam—below. The entire building was decorated inside and out according to an integrated scheme, employing classical allegorical convention. An entire sculptor’s workshop, that of the Quellinus family led by Artus Quellinus, moved from Antwerp to Amsterdam to execute the designs. A number of the terracotta models produced as part of the design process have survived and are preserved in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

      The form of the building itself and its sculptural decoration form a unity presumably designed to be interpreted as a statement of governmental ideals.[3] Its basic conceit was to place Amsterdam at the center of the world. The front pediment represents the riches of all the seas being brought to her. The rear pediment represents the treasures of all the continents similarly presented to Amsterdam personified as a woman in the classical manner. The rear pediment is surmounted by a colossal statue of Atlas bearing the globe of the world on his shoulders, for the design of the building proposes that Amsterdam bears the weight of the entire world, at the center of which stands its Town Hall. To an extent, these pediment designs allegorized the real activity in the Dam Square before the building. Here trade goods were handled, and the municipal weigh-house regulated the all-important weights and measures. (Tellingly, when the Town Hall was converted into a palace for the Bonapartist monarch in 1808, he had the weigh-house demolished.) Here, in the Dam Square, prior to the building of the Exchange, dealers and brokers in shares met to conduct their business twice daily. Amsterdam had the most highly developed stock market in Europe, and foreign diplomats regularly reported to their governments the price fluctuation of its leading shares, those in the United East India Company (known by its Dutch initials as the V.O.C.). This was as a primary indicator of the state of confidence in the city and the nation, which might have far-reaching effects on its foreign policy. The activities of the V.O.C. alone would have justified the claims sculpted on the pediments of the Town Hall. It conducted trade across the globe on an astonishing scale, exchanging silver from Spanish Peru and copper from Japan for luxury goods from the East Indies and, after 1640, Ceylon, notably high value spices. By 1669 the V.O.C. was the richest private company the world had yet seen, with its own fleet and a private army. Its center of governance was in Amsterdam.[4]

      To press home the conceit of Amsterdam as the center of the world, the largest single space within the Town Hall, the Burgerzaal, or “Hall of the Citizens,” on the second floor, was conceived literally as a microcosm. Over the entrance doorway the city, personified in the classical manner, sits enthroned between personifications of Fortitude and Wisdom. She looks down upon the world at her feet represented by maps accurately aligned inlaid in the floor. On either side of the Great Hall are internal courtyards, the whole being surrounded by grand galleries. The huge arched lunette spaces at the ends of these galleries are the site of some of the most prestigious painting commissions of the day. In 1659 prominent artists were commissioned to execute compositions on subjects from the history of the Batavians: the ancient inhabitants of the Netherlands who had resisted Roman incursions. The largest share went to Rembrandt van Rijn’s student, Govaert Flinck, but his premature death in 1660 entailed a redistribution of the commissions. Rembrandt’s own contribution, representing the conspiracy oath of the Batavians under their leader, Claudius Civilis, was, for reasons unknown, rejected, or at least not installed, and in a cut-down state survives in Stockholm.[5] Doors lead from the galleries to the offices of the various city government departments. Each is appropriately indicated by a sculpted relieve above. For instance, a personification of Silence, her finger to her lips, was carved over the door to the office of the City Secretary; while the fall of Icarus decorates that of the Bankruptcy Chamber. The scheme as a whole would seem to be more than a display of Humanist learning and wit: it can be seen as an embodiment of the governmental ideology of the wealthiest, most confident and powerful middle class of seventeenth-century Europe who had swept away the old medieval Town Hall, known from a painting by Pieter Saenredam,[6] which the city government had far outgrown, and which was incommensurate with the newfound wealth and dignity of the city and its rulers. This is a tempting interpretation of events, but perhaps it would be as well to hesitate and think a bit more carefully about the possible nature of the relationship between political and social power and the art deployed on behalf of those who exercised that power. Would we really be justified in this case in claiming that art reflected and possibly helped to define the nature of governmental power? Even if it did, what importance can we ascribe to it? Caution seems in order. If we allow historical assumptions to swamp close attention to visual detail we may end up like Icarus. The forms of towns, when planned, and buildings within them would seem to be of greater significance for the practical definition and consequent exercise of power than their decoration, which is often a matter of decorum.

      Faced with enormous population growth, the ruling oligarchy of Amsterdam combined its concept of governmental interest with private enrichment to discipline the urban environment on the largest scale. From 31,000 in 1590 the population more than quadrupled within fifty years to about 139,000 by 1640. The city’s area trebled in the same period, and continued to grow, leading to the building of new ring canals, and necessitating the construction of new fortifications not once, but twice during the century. The map of the city of 1647 by Johannes Blaeu clearly shows the fortifications on the western side of the city as they had been built by 1613. The first stretches of the three new concentric ring canals are clearly visible; and, beyond them disorderly suburbs have been swept away to be replaced by an area of speculative housing development, badly built and poorly drained, constructed for private gain by members of the governmental families. This is the overt exercise of power on a large scale. The new Town Hall is at the very center of this scheme. Even while the Town Hall was still being embellished, a map by Nicolaas Visscher from about 1680 shows the fourth major expansion, planned between the late 1650s and 1662 by the city architect, Daniël Stalpaert. The semi-circle of fortifications was completed, and so were the concentric canals. In 1648 the Weigh House and the old Town Hall stood on the Dam, the market place at the head of the Damrak waterway leading into the city from the harbor. The gothic Nieuwe Kerk (the New Church) was not directly on the Dam, but was accessible only by narrow streets and the Nieuwzijdsvoorburgwal canal at its west end. In the new scheme the old buildings have been swept away, and the Nieuwe Kerk unmasked by the demolition of intervening housing to join the new Town Hall in dominating a vastly enlarged central square. The newly expanded Dam square became an enormous civic stage on which the rituals of public governmental discipline could be enacted.

      One of the oddest features of the Town Hall is the lack of a grand entrance. Instead, following the precedent of the old Town Hall, the archways in the center allow a token number of onlookers to view from outside one of the most important symbolic elements of the building: the Vierschaar (Hall of Justice). This extraordinary, marble-clad room was used for a single purpose: the passing of the death sentence. Facing the square is the tribunal where the magistrates sat between weeping female caryatids against sculpted marble relief panels representing scenes of exemplary justice from classical antiquity. The burgomasters viewed the proceedings from an internal embrasure on the second floor above, like gods on high. The condemned was taken onto a temporary scaffold set against the front of the building so that the Town Hall, and the oligarchs’ authority that it embodied, formed a backdrop for the performance of the execution as an exemplary scene. This is where the least fortunate of those attracted by Amsterdam’s supposed economic opportunities, or driven there from all over northwest Europe by war or famine, might make their final dramatic appearance at the hands of the executioner.[7] One such recently arrived immigrant and victim of the city and its rigorous justice was an eighteen-year-old Danish girl named Elsje Christiaens. She was condemned to death for killing her landlady during a quarrel over her inability to pay her rent on April 27, 1664. Brought before the Aldermen’s Court, she was tried by six of the city’s merchant oligarchs. Found guilty, she was sentenced to be garroted and struck on the head with the very hatchet that she herself had used in the crime. Her body was to be displayed and left to decay at Volewijk, a spit of land facing the city across the main waterway in full view of incoming ships. The hatchet was to be hung beside her as a form of exemplary labeling. The elderly Rembrandt must have had himself rowed out to Volewijk to portray the dead girl within days of her execution, for two drawings by him of her slumped body tied to a gallows, the hatchet beside her, survive. His fortunes, too, had declined considerably since the days of his greatest success some twenty years previously, but not so far as hers.[8]

      If the execution was one form of social theater enacted in the Dam, the parade of civic militia companies was another. A large print by Daniel Marot, published in 1686, of militia companies parading during the annual fair makes the social division of space dictated by its planned form clearly visible.[9] The regimented companies are drawn up before the Town Hall while a disorderly crowd mills around the edges of the square, its inner boundary patrolled by sheriff’s deputies armed with cudgels. The mass of the population, made up not only of citizens of the Republic, but—threateningly for the civic authorities—of immigrants from all over Europe and even beyond contrasts pointedly with the order of the drilled soldiery who receive their instructions and their weapons directly from the Town Hall. Their officers were themselves members of the City Council, or members of the families of councilors. For instance, Dirck Spieghel, one of the aldermen magistrates who had condemned Elsje Christiaens, was a director of the West India Company, and a captain in the militia. The militia was the final guarantor of the power of the city oligarchs, and Marot’s print can be interpreted as a representation of the clear demonstration of social and political power in action in close association with the articulation of space defined by planning and architecture. Of course, this is a historical claim based on information gathered from written sources in combination with an interpretation of an artwork, a print by Daniel Marot. The print is not straightforwardly a transparent record of reality, but rather a made object, an invention. Its contrivance, though, seems to reflect an actual state of affairs. It suggests that grand form may be in a direct relationship with the exercise of power. The case of decoration may be more equivocal. Let us examine an aspect of the decoration of the interior of the Town Hall through the medium of another artwork.

      Pieter de Hooch, best known for his interior and courtyard scenes painted in Delft, had moved to Amsterdam by April, 1661. A painting in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, executed presumably within a decade of this move, represents the interior of one of the most important rooms in the new Town Hall: the chamber in which the council of the four ruling burgomasters and their immediate predecessors met.[10] This was the most powerful governmental body in a city ruled by a self-perpetuating oligarchy of wealthy families, and consequently one of the most influential powers in the land. The painting might therefore be said to represent the very heart of Amsterdam, the source of all civic discipline, its ultimate seat of power.

      The room is much the same today as it was then. The painting over the fireplace is still in place, as is its companion that hangs in a similar position opposite. These two paintings, which between them visually dominate the room, are unmistakably didactic. The work on the north wall, glimpsed in de Hooch’s painting, is by Ferdinand Bol, and depicts Gaius Fabritius Luscinus in the Camp of King Pyrrhus.[11] The subject is found in Plutarch’s account of Pyrrhus, among the Lives, which tells how the king first tried to bribe Fabritius into betraying Rome, and, when this failed, tried to frighten him with an elephant, a creature that the Roman had never seen before.[12] The didacticism of the work is underlined by explanatory verses by Joost van den Vondel carved upon the marble of the mantel. They emphasize the hero’s fearlessness and incorruptibility. These verses are perfectly legible in de Hooch’s canvas. Rhetorical verses are also found beneath the work that hangs opposite the Bol, Manius Curius Dentatus refusing the Gifts of the Samnite Ambassadors by Govaert Flinck, a subject also found in Plutarch.[13] The hero in this case refuses the offer of great riches in return for his services, preferring his austere diet of turnips. Vondel makes the lesson plain in his inscription: on temperance and trust the city was built.

      The reason for the choice of these two unusual subjects to illustrate virtuous behavior may well be that these incidents are described one after another in the handbook of historical exempla frequently used in the Renaissance, Valerius Maximus’s Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium.[14] The strategy, though, is familiar: it is an example of the Renaissance mental habit of seeking the sanction of antique precedent. Amsterdam is identified with Rome. The heroes chosen are Roman consuls who dominated the expanding city state during her period of republican greatness following the expulsion of her kings. These consuls are explicitly presented as the equivalents of Amsterdam’s burgomasters, and the imagery reflects the grandiose, paternalistic republicanism that the city’s leaders espoused. Indeed, viewers are invited to interpret this scheme as an ideological statement. Its form—the combination of pictorial images with verses—was one with which contemporary viewers were familiar in various circumstances as a vehicle for moral exposition.[15]

      Can this decoration be said to have functioned in the service of political power, and, if so, how? The scheme associates Amsterdam’s burgomasters with temperance, fearlessness, and incorruptibility: qualities that give them the moral authority to rule. The paintings by Bol and Flinck present this in two senses: as ideal, and as implied fact, thereby promoting an ambiguity conducive to the preservation of power. The members of the burgomasters’ council who assembled to deliberate beneath these paintings were, by their means, constantly reminded of their responsibility to live up to the ideals they represent. This can be seen to be the case by those who visit the chamber. But this form of decoration cannot define the line between ideal and actuality. The contrivers of the scheme invite its viewers to imbue the burgomasters with these qualities, but without their actually having to suffer the inconvenience of necessarily practicing them. In other word, such decoration enhances the mystique of power, enhancing for the sake of the powerful the social and ideological climate within which the true functions of power operate. The efficacy ascribable to art in these circumstances is not of the same order as that of the art of city planning and the forms of architecture, which go a long way to prescribing the physical placement and movement of numbers of people. Indeed, we may wonder whether decoration of the council chamber, or of any part of the new Town Hall, enhanced the effective power of the burgomasters of Amsterdam. Yet such decorations enhanced the prestige of those to whom they referred, and prestige could—and does—oil the wheels of power. The prestige that derives from display matters, even if only insofar as it is thought to matter.

      So far this discussion has considered de Hooch’s painting of the interior of the burgomasters’ chamber as a record of the appearance of that room in the 1660s. One of its great interests to the historian considering the possible effects of decoration is that the painter depicts visitors examining it in this room. We actually see a representation of decoration fulfilling one of the functions ascribed to it in contemporary accounts. But we ought not to treat this picture as an image to be taken at face value. In the first place, we cannot assume that it is a disinterested depiction, nor that it was initially or subsequently received as being ideologically neutral. We do not know the circumstances of the initial use of this painting, from which we might infer so much. It is first recorded when it was in Estonia in the early twentieth century, though the art collection of which it formed part had been largely assembled in the late eighteenth century.[16] Since it depicts the ruled in the act of examining a decorative scheme that defines an idealized aspect of their rulers’ power, it was amenable to interpretation as a commentary upon, or some other intermediary at work within, the power relationships among the rulers themselves, and between the rulers and the ruled. Although there is no evidence other than by analogy, it is quite conceivable that de Hooch’s large painting might have occupied a place in an Amsterdam domestic setting of the type that imitated the interiors of the new Town Hall with fireplaces supported by classical columns, such as can be seen in a work by Gabriel Metsu of about 1657, most likely depicting the family of Gillis Valckenier, who became a burgomaster of Amsterdam in 1665 and remained one of the most powerful of the ruling inner elite until his death in 1680.[17] It would have been a fitting visual conceit (for reasons that will become clear) to have placed the de Hooch as an overmantel above a fireplace like the one represented in part on the right in the Valckenier house. A wealthy Amsterdammer, either a member of, or with pretensions to joining, the government oligarchy might have ordered or bought this work.

      Yet in spite of its subject matter, the concerns that dominate de Hooch’s painting have little to do with the exercise of political power. He, a painter, swiftly found a use for the Town Hall that even its brilliant architect, Jacob van Campen, is unlikely to have anticipated. That is, by mixing the description of observed reality with pictorial contrivance, de Hooch produced a painting that is primarily about the art of painting itself. It is pleasant irony that de Hooch’s use for the building is the longest lived, for the Town Hall itself no longer serves its original purpose, but since 1808 has been a royal palace. This painting repays analysis in some detail, for we can thereby learn something further about the relationship between art and power, which is basic to any discussion of the kind proposed in this chapter, but which historians may not necessarily be aware of: namely, to discover a contemporary notion of the power of art. And art, whatever else it may have been, was certainly one of the most prestigious and, at the high end, expensive commodities for sale in seventeenth-century Amsterdam.

      The room that de Hooch used as the basis of his composition is on the second floor, to the left of the central block. De Hooch has not transcribed observed reality as exactly as one might assume. The window of the further room on the left can only be an invention: its position is an architectural impossibility given the remainder of the building. So although de Hooch employs the conventions of realistic pictorial description, these are not sufficient to allow us to account for the appearance of the painting. The composition is a mixture of transcription and plausible invention. One might even infer that by inventing a window and exterior space where in actuality only further interior space of the building can be, the painter is deliberately demonstrating the capacity of his own medium to allow the manipulation of the appearance of reality by the painter himself.

      The geometry of the painting, both as a representation and as an object, is of considerable significance. The central vanishing point projection scheme and the size of the work (112.5 x 99 cm.) together determine a mean viewing distance of an arm’s length. This suggests that de Hooch purposefully painted the optical equivalent of what one might actually experience in situ when standing in front of it. One might think of it as a true-to-life-size peep show, the kind of painted artifact that compels a specific monocular viewing position thereby creating the illusion of reality.[18] Referring to the plan of the room, one can calculate that the angle of vision represented in the painting is 58 degrees: well beyond the point at which distortion begins to occur. In order to accommodate so wide a prospect de Hooch had to employ artistic ingenuity. He countered distortion in the first place by depicting only one corner of the room, on the right, so that there are only two major vertical planes, which in actuality meet at right angles, to deal with. His choice of spectator point about three feet to the right of a line bisecting the room lengthways makes this ploy naturalistically plausible. Secondly, the curtain distracts attention from what would otherwise be the disturbing angle of the orthogonals of the window embrasures in relation to the far wall, and conceals the springing of the vault on the left-hand side, the presence of which, in conjunction with the visible springing of the vault on the right, would have alerted the viewer to the artifice of the projection. Infra-red reflectography reveals that de Hooch painted the entire frame and vaulting to be seen from his viewpoint prior to concealing it with the painted curtain.[19] So De Hooch presents us with a form of pictorial deception at the basic level of size and projection. De Hooch’s major means of achieving this—the curtain—is more than a convenient functional device, for it is itself an iconographical evocation of deception. De Hooch appeals—though with a twist—to the celebrated story from Pliny’s Natural History of Parrhasios and Zeuxis. In Pliny’s story, the painter Parrhasios deceived the birds with his illusionistically painted grapes, for they came down to peck at them. But Zeuxis outdid his fellow painter by deceiving him with a painted curtain, which his rival tried to draw aside to reveal the painting he supposed was underneath.[20] It was a motif used by numbers of Dutch painters to draw attention to their skill as creators of pictorial illusions. The inclusion of the curtain in de Hooch’s work draws the viewer’s attention to the painter’s skill as a deceiver. The painter’s contrivance elides the distinction between description and allusion. The motif of the curtain alerts us to the character of the painting as a made object. Yet we can go further. As well as being a means of disguising distortion and of alluding to the painter’s illusionistic skill, the curtain in this instance allows de Hooch to make a witty allusion that equates the surprises he reveals by his art with the surprise faced by Bol’s Roman consul, Fabritius. He plays on the viewer’s knowledge of Bol’s painting, concealing with a painted curtain of his own the curtain that concealed the elephant revealed when Pyrrhus had it drawn aside.

      We can go further yet. The curtain alerts us to our own role as viewers. Not only does it serve as a visible threshold dividing our world from that of the painting, but it defines the nature of that threshold within the fictive terms of the picture. It is not simply a fictive curtain emulating those sometimes actually to be seen represented as hanging before paintings. In de Hooch’s painting of the council chamber there is neither a rod nor are there rings to indicate that the curtain is a trompe l’oeil painted to look as though it hangs in front of the picture. Nor, more significantly, is there a fictive shadow as though cast by it on the picture surface of the kind we see in another painting by de Hooch in Copenhagen of a trompe l’oeil curtain hanging in front a partly revealed painting of an interior scene.[21] The curtains in his two works in Madrid and Copenhagen respectively therefore differ radically: the former represented as though beyond the picture plane within the pictorial world, the latter as though on this side of the picture plane within the viewer’s world. That is, the foreground curtain in the scene of the Burgomasters’ Council Chamber implies pictorial space in front of it, space that extends ambiguously without a clear boundary between the pictorial world and the viewer’s world, implicitly extending as though to include the viewers. De Hooch purposefully leaves the definition of the picture plane imprecise, thereby deepening the viewer’s sense of inclusion in the fictionally extended space. This device further enhances the “reality effect” that we have already seen him carefully establish by means of his choice of size of canvas and projection scheme. De Hooch enhances this sense of spatial inclusion rupturing the picture plane by means of the male figure standing nearest to us. De Hooch contrived this figure to appeal to the viewer’s assumed existing knowledge of the rest of the room. This man is looking at something above our heads and slightly to the left. This can only be the painting that hangs opposite that by Ferdinand Bol in the corresponding position above the second fireplace, Govaert Flinck’s Marcus Curius Dentatus refusing the Gifts of the Samnite Ambassadors. This pictorial device implies the presence of a wall behind the viewer. De Hooch has invented a pictorial contrivance to invite viewers to infer that something is there that is not, and which he has not even attempted to represent, but which accommodates the viewers of his painting within the pictorial world. By doing so he further demonstrates the capacity of painting to evoke as well as to represent. The viewing figure suggests a further conceit, for he is doing precisely what we are doing when we look at this painting. His activity reminds us of our own. He is not looking at us, for he, like us, is looking at a painting. Playing on the viewer’s knowledge of a room such as this is the only means by which this activity can be depicted unobscured, face on. De Hooch directs the viewer’s attention solely towards the fictive viewer and the act of viewing, rather than suffering it to be diverted to the pictorial relationship between the fictive viewer and the object of his attention, which must be the case when both are represented. But this is more than simply a device to draw viewers into the pictorial world. It alerts them to the act of looking, and draws to their notice the issue of visual attention itself; both the attention being paid by the figures to the didactic paintings in the room depicted, and their attention to the painting they themselves—we ourselves—are examining.

      In his painting of the burgomasters’ council chamber, Pieter de Hooch achieved a high degree of artistry in his exposition of his visual invitation to contemplate the power of art. In order to invite his viewers to consider the range of visual skills and the quality of attention required of them, de Hooch so constructed the work as to make the viewer both self-conscious and fully aware of the painter’s own role in the processes of fabrication and observation. De Hooch invites us to consider the terms of encounter between artwork and viewer in circumstances in which those who contrived a vast new scheme of political subordination also contrived its visual analogue by means of spatial and decorative manipulation on a grand scale hitherto unknown. De Hooch explored this complex phenomenon not only in the Madrid painting, but in a number of other hitherto scarcely examined late paintings that make use of adaptations of the interior spaces of the Town Hall.[22]

      It is worth drawing a further contrast, in terms of process, between de Hooch’s projects and those of at least some of the artists who contributed to the decoration of the Town Hall. Those who decorated the Town Hall did so with histories, and some history subjects, at least, required the representation of the female nude. The most conspicuous female nudes in the Town Hall are the four sculpted weeping caryatids by Artus Quellinus in the Hall of Justice. What was the process for achieving such works? We know nothing about this particular case, but we do know that the only reliable way in which artists could study the female nude, other than from an intimate, was by hiring prostitutes. A legal deposition of 1648 records Govaert Flinck as having employed as nude models three sisters with reputations as prostitutes, Catharina, Margaretha, and Anna van Wullen.[23] A drawing by Flinck dated that year, and another by Jacob Backer, would appear to document them working simultaneously from the same nude model. Their drawings may depict one of the van Wullen sisters, though we have no way of knowing how many models—how many prostitutes—Flinck and his colleagues may have employed in 1648.[24] Another notarial deposition of ten years later records five artists, including Flinck, Ferdinand Bol, and Nicolaes van Helt Stocade, who all worked in the Town Hall, testifying that a certain Catarina Jans, daughter of a needle-maker, had sat stark naked before them and had thus been drawn and painted.[25] It seems probable that this deposition was drawn up at the behest of a man who was trying to discredit her by associating her with prostitution. Whatever the circumstances, it is clear that these artists had the economic power to command women’s nakedness at a time when modeling was a discreditable activity. Nicolaes van Helt Stocade, who shared in that power, was commissioned to paint an Allegory of the Justice of Amsterdam overcoming Greed and Discord on the ceiling of the Chamber of Justice.[26] This was the very room in which cases were brought against the unlucky sisters of his models, members of the female lumpenproletariat of the city. And Elsje Christiaens, the Danish girl convicted of the murder of her landlady who, the court record implies, may have been encouraging her to become a prostitute, was sentenced to death before the caryatids whose forms may well have been derived from the study of actual women scarcely less fortunate than her. It is quite clear that the art of at least some of those who contributed to the decoration of the Town Hall was nourished by the study of women whose nakedness they had the economic power to command. These artists were fully implicated in a system in which everything was for sale. Much the same can be said of many of those admitted to view the Town Hall, the grandest public building to that date in Europe. With the oligarchs who ruled the city from within its walls, they were beneficiaries of a booming, scarcely regulated liberal economy in the interests of which, and of whom, everything was for sale, from company stocks, to great artworks, to impoverished women’s bodies. In terms of the social and political power structures that had their centers of concentration in the new Town Hall of Amsterdam, a painter such as Pieter de Hooch seems a marginal, even obscure figure; considerably more so than his contemporaries who had won big commissions in the patronage power struggles surrounding the construction and decoration of the building: artists such as Ferdinand Bol and Govaert Flinck. But the power of his art is of a different order. By learning to interpret his work we learn something of the visual values of a highly sophisticated, though ruthless society. There is something satisfying to the historian deriving from the knowledge that de Hooch’s own power—that of his artistry—actively survives, while the merchant oligarchs’ power, absolute when de Hooch lived and worked, faded to nothing long ago.[27]

 

 

 

 

Illustrations

 

Fig. 1 Gerrit Adriaensz. Berckheyde, The Amsterdam Town Hall from the Dam, 1680s, oil on canvas, Collezione Thyssen-Bornemisza, Lugano (1980.48)

 

Fig. 2  Pieter de Hooch, The interior of the Burgomasters’ Council Chamber in the Amsterdam Town Hall, with visitors, c. 1663-65, oil on canvas, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid (1960.3)

 

Fig. 3  Jacob Backer, Seated female nude, c. 1648, black and white chalk on blue paper, Maida and George Abrams Collection, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, Mass., Promised Gift (25.1998.107)

 

Fig. 4  Nicolaes van Helt Stocade, Allegory of the Justice of Amsterdam overcoming Greed and Discord, oil on panel (ceiling of the Chamber of Justice), Royal Palace (former Town Hall), Amsterdam

 

 


[1] The best recent synoptic account is by Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477-1806 (Oxford, 1995).

[2] The most comprehensive account of the Town Hall is by Katharine Fremantle, The Baroque Town Hall of Amsterdam (Utrecht, 1959).

[3] Prints by Hubertus Quellinus after the designs were published in his Van de voornaemste Statuen ende Cieraten, vant konstryck Stadthuys van Amstelredam (Amsterdam, 1665-69).

[4] The works of C.R. Boxer remain standard: The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600-1800 (New York, 1965, and subsequent editions); see also his Jan Compagnie in oorlog en vrede. Beknopte geschiedenis van de V.O.C. (Bussum, 1977).

[5] Canvas, 196 x 309 cm. (originally c. 600 x 550 cm.), Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, inv. no. NM 578. The best concise account of the history of this painting (and the preparatory drawing: pen and wash, 196 x 180 cm., Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich) is by Gary Schwartz, Rembrandt, his Life, his Paintings (Harmondsworth, 1985), pp. 318-20. For the scheme as a whole, see Barbara J. Buchbinder-Green, The Painted Decorations of the Town Hall of Amsterdam (Ann Arbor, 1976).

[6] Dated 1657, panel, 64.5 x 83 cm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (on loan from the City of Amsterdam), inv. no. SK-C-1409. The painting is derived from a drawing dated July 15-20, 1641 (pen, watercolor, and some gray wash, 370 x 490 mm., Gemeentearchief, Amsterdam). The extensive inscription on another drawing by Saenredam of the building (pen and watercolor, 225 x 167 mm., Teylers Museum, Haarlem) records the composition of the painting and its purchase by the burgomasters in July, 1658: Gary Schwartz and Marten Jan Bok, Pieter Saenredam: The Painter and his Time (New York, n.d. [1990]), pp. 188-91, 254, nos. 13-15, figs. 197-99.

[7] Capital punishment was relatively infrequent, and was the prerogative of the executioner of the County of Holland who traveled from the county seat in nearby Haarlem: see C.J. Gonnet, De Meester van den Scherpen Zwaarde te Haarlem. Bijdrage tot de geschiedenis der lijfstraffelijke rechtspleging (Haarlem, 1917). For a discussion of executions in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, see Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Pre-Industrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge and New York, 1984).

[8] A Woman Hanging on the Gallows (frontal view), pen and bistre, 176 x 93 mm., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, inv. No. 76437; A Woman Hanging on the Gallows (three-quarter profile), pen and bistre, wash, on brownish paper, 142 x 81 mm., Metropolitan Museum of Art (Robert Lehman Collection), New York: Otto Benesch, The Drawings of Rembrandt, enlarged edition, ed. Eva Benesch (London and New York, 1973), 5, pp. 299-300, nos. 1105, 1106, figs. 1397, 1398. The executed woman in Rembrandt’s drawings was identified by I.H. van Eeghen, “Elsje Christiaens en de kunsthistorici,” Amstelodamum: Maandblad voor de kennis van Amsterdam 56, 4, 1969, pp. 73-85.

[9] Amsterdamse Kermis, vertonende de Burgery in de Wapenen sig Presenteerende an de Groot Agtb: Heeren Burger meesteren, etching, 640 x 920 mm.: F.W.H. Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, ca. 1450-1700, 11 (Amsterdam, n.d.), p. 171 no. 6. (The impression studied by the author is in the Atlas van Stolk, Rotterdam.)

[10] The Interior of the Burgomasters’ Council Chamber in the Amsterdam Town Hall, with Visitors, canvas, 112.5 x 99 cm., Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, no. 1960.3: see Ivan Gaskell, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection: Seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish Painting (London, 1990), pp. 284-89, no. 62, with further references.

[11] Albert Blankert, Ferdinand Bol (1616-1680). Rembrandt’s Pupil (The Hague, 1982), pp. 42-46, 112, no. 52, pl. 26 and col. Pl.

[12] Plutarch, Pyrrhus, XX, 1-3.

[13] J.W. von Moltke, Govaert Flinck, 1615-1660 (Amsterdam, 1965), p. 90, no. 113, pl. 22; Plutarch, Marcus Cato, II, 1-2.

[14] Kindly pointed out in conversation by Elizabeth McGrath.

[15] The locus classicus of the discussion of emblems (printed pictorial images accompanied by verses) and their relation to seventeenth-century Dutch paintings is E. de Jongh, Tot Lering en Vermaak, exh. cat. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (Amsterdam, 1976).

[16] It is first recorded in the collection of Peter Ernst Freiherr von Stackelberg (d. 1916) at his country house at Vääna, near Tallin, by Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, Beschreibendes und kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke de hervorragendsten holländischen Maler des XVII. Jahrhunderts 1 (Esslingen and Paris, 1907), p. 524, no. 180. The house was built in 1784 and the collection largely formed shortly thereafter by Otto Magnus Freiherr von Stackelberg: Heinz Pirang, Das baltische Herrenhaus 2 (Riga, 1928), p. 50; Erik Thomson and Georg Baron von Manteuffel-Szoege, Schlosser und Herrensitze im Baltikum nach alter Stichen (Burgen, Schlosser und Herrensitze 8), (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1959), pp. 36-37, pl. p. 133.

[17] Canvas, 71 x 79 cm., Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Gemäldegalerie, inv. no. 792: see, The Picture Gallery, Berlin, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Catalogue of Paintings, 13th-18th Century, 2nd revised edition, trans. Linda Parshall (Berlin, 1978), p. 288, and Franklin W. Robinson, Gabriel Metsu (1629-1667): A Study of his Place in Dutch Genre Painting of the Golden Age (New York, 1974), pp. 55, 179 fig. 131. De Hooch emulated this approach to family portraiture, also incorporating a columned fireplace with a history painting above it in Portrait of a Family Making Music, canvas, 100.3 x 119.4 cm., Cleveland Museum of Art, 1951.355: Peter C. Sutton, Pieter de Hooch, 1629-1684, exh. cat. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Conn. (New Haven and London, 1998), pp. 142-45, no. 26.

[18] See David Bomford, “Perspective, Anamorphosis, and Illusion: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Peep Shows,” in Ivan Gaskell and Michiel Jonker, eds., Vermeer Studies (Studies in the History of Art 55), (New Haven and London, 1998), pp. 125-35.

[19] Gaskell 1990, p. 287, fig.3.

[20] Gaius Plinius Secundus, Naturalis Historia, XXXV, 65.

[21] A Couple with Musicians in a Hall, canvas, 72 x 67 cm., Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, no. Sp 615: Peter C. Sutton, Pieter de Hooch. Complete Edition with a Catalogue Raisonné (New York and Oxford, 1980), pp. 96-97, no. 65, pl. 68

[22] In addition to the paintings in Madrid and Copenhagen (n. 19), these include, A Couple Walking in the Citizens’ Hall of the Amsterdam Town Hall, canvas, 72 x 85 cm., Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg, inv. no. 213; and A Music Party in a Hall, canvas, 81 x 68.3 cm., Museum der bildende Künste, Leipzig, inv. no. 1031: Sutton 1998, pp. 156-63, nos. 31-33.

[23] S.A.C. Dudok van Heel, “Het ‘Schilderhuis’ van Govert Flinck en de kunsthandel van Uylenburgh aan de Lauriergracht te Amsterdam,” Jaarboek Amstelodamum 74, 1982, pp. 74-75.

[24] The Flinck drawing (black and white chalk on blue paper, 363 x 249 mm.) is in the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, inv. No. 1327. The Backer (black and white chalk on blue paper, 288 x 228 mm.) is in the Maida and George Abrams Collection, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass., Promised Gift, 25.1998.107. A possible association of the latter with the van Wullens was first suggested by Peter Schatborn, Dutch Figure Drawings from the Seventeenth Century, exh. cat. Rijksprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (The Hague, 1981), p. 90; and of the former with them by B.J.P. Broos, review of Werner Sumowski, Drawings of the Rembrandt School, in Oud Holland 93, 1984, p. 170. The most recent discussion of the possibilities is by William W. Robinson, Bruegel to Rembrandt: Dutch and Flemish Drawings from the Maida and George Abrams Collection, exh. cat. British Museum, London; Institut Neerlandais, Paris; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass. (Cambridge, Mass., New Haven, and London, 2002), pp. 124-25, no. 49, with further references.

[25] Abraham Bredius, Künstler-Inventare. Urkunden zur Geschichte der holländischen Kunst des XVIten, XVIIten und XVIIIten Jahrhunderts 4, (The Hague, 1917), p. 1255: Gemeentearchief, Amsterdam, Notarial Archives no. 1474, Prot. Not. G. Borsselaer.

[26] Buchbinder-Green 1976, pp. 127-29, and fig. 105.

[27] The material and ideas in this article have been gestating for many years, first finding inchoate expression in a lecture at Cambridge University in 1983, then variously developed in symposium papers and lectures given at the Royal Academy, London in November, 1984, at the annual meeting of the College Art Association, New York in February, 1986, at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut in February, 1999, and at Harvard University in February, 2006. I should like to thank all who have contributed to the development of my thinking about this topic, including Christopher Brown, Peter Burke, Jonathan Israel, Eddy de Jongh, Elizabeth McGrath, Jean Michel Massing, Griselda Pollock, Charles Robertson, Simon Schama, Peter Sutton, and John Walsh.