Jan van der Heyden's urban prose*
2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 26; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/02666280902944114
ISSN1943-2178
Autores Tópico(s)Lexicography and Language Studies
ResumoAbstract ACKNOWLEDGMENTS As elsewhere, I have benefited greatly from the help of a small group of faithful friends and colleagues, kindred spirits all who have read the drafts and offered invaluable criticism and advice: David Levine, Catherine Levesque, Lincoln Perry, and Aneta Georgievska-Shine. Notes * This essay grows out of a larger chapter on Dutch cityscape painting in my still-evolving book Privacy and Civilization in Dutch Art, 1650–1675. 1 – See Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Art of the everyday. Dutch painting and the realist novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008) pp. 1–23; Peter Brooks, Realist vision, New Haven, 2005. Unlike Brooks, who is solely concerned with nineteenth-century paintings and novels, Yeazell compares those nineteenth-century novelists to Dutch seventeenth-century painters, a somewhat different enterprise from mine in this article. 2 – See Richard J. Wattenmaker, ‘Introduction’, in The Dutch cityscape in the 17th century and its sources, exh. cat., ed. Carry van Lackerveld (Toronto and Amsterdam: Art Gallery of Ontario and Amsterdams Historisch Museum, 1977) pp. 14–41, for the sources of the Dutch cityscape, which effectively begins in the School of Delft around 1650. Its main precedents are to be found in a topographical tradition of city profiles and individual monuments that lack the concern for an integrated urban experience found in works like the well-known Views of Delft by Carel Fabritius (National Gallery London) and Johannes Vermeer (Mauritshuis, The Hague). 3 –Mikhail M. Bakhtin, ‘Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel: notes toward a historical poetics’, in The dialogic imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson, Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) pp. 84–85. See also Gary S. Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: creation of a prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990) pp. 366–375. Also see David R. Smith, ‘Realism and the boundaries of genre in Dutch art’, Art History, 32, 2009, pp. 84–85. 4 – Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics (1929, 1965), trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) p. 106: ‘Always preserved in a genre are undying elements of the archaic. True, these archaic elements are preserved in it only thanks to their constant renewal, which is to say, their contemporization. A genre is always the same, yet not the same, always old and new simultaneously. Genre is reborn and renewed at every new stage in the development of literature and in every individual work of a given genre. This constitutes the life of the genre. Therefore even the archaic elements preserved in a genre are not dead but eternally alive; that is, archaic elements are capable of renewing themselves. A genre lives in the present, but always remembers its past, its beginning’. Bakhtin added these thoughts when he revised the book at the urging of his followers in 1965. 5 – Ivan Gaskell, The Thyssen-Bornemisza collection: 17th-century Dutch and Flemish paintings (London: Sotheby's Publications, 1990) pp. 290–292, no. 63. The picture bears the inscription ‘Gerrit Berckheyde. Huchtenburgh’ apparently by a later hand. Presumably, this acknowledges the assistance the obscure painter Johan van Huchtenburgh (1643–1733), perhaps in the painting of the figures. The painting is still in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection but was not included among the 800 works transferred to the Villahermosa Palace in Madrid in 1992. 6 – Katherine Fremantle, The baroque town hall of Amsterdam (Utrecht: Haentjens, Dekker, and Gumbert, 1959) p. 55. 7 – Cynthia Lawrence, Gerrit Berckheyde (1638–1698) (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1991) pp. 52–56, takes note of the symbolic connotations of justice and other civic virtues that the Town Hall carried in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, particularly as vested in this frontal view. Rolf Fritz, Das Stadt and Strassenbild in der holländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: E. Hardt, 1932) p. 87, was one of the first to draw an analogy between the Dam Square and a theater. 8 – Arnold Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen (The Hague, 1753) v. 3, pp. 80–82. See also, Helga Wagner, Jan van der Heyden, 1637–1712 (Amsterdam and Haarlem: Scheltema & Holkema, 1971) p. 29; Peter C. Sutton, Jan van der Heyden, exh. cat., Bruce Museum (Greenwich, CT: Bruce Museum, 2006) pp. 36–37. 9 – Max Byrd, London transformed. Images of the city in the 18th century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978) p. 11. Byrd, pp. 8–9, draws a sharp polarity between Defoe and his contemporary Alexander Pope, whose Augustan vision of London in his poem Windsor-Forest is far more idealized and touched by myth in ways that seem comparable to van Campen's image of Amsterdam in the Town Hall. Byrd cites passages in Defoe's Tour thro’ the whole island of Great Britain of 1722 in which he dismisses idyllic urban visions like Pope's in favor of plain fact. 10 –Wagner, Jan van der Heyden, p. 60, no. 7; Sutton, Jan van der Heyden, pp. 37–38. Lyckle de Vries, Jan van der Heyden (Amsterdam: Landshoff, 1984) pp. 19–20, notes in reference to the Wallace Collection painting that van der Heyden painted no frontal views of the Town Hall. 11 – See Jonathan Bikker, ‘The town bookkeeper and fellow Mennonites: notes on some of the original owners of van der Heyden's paintings’, in Sutton, Jan van der Heyden, pp. 184–189, on the artist's wealth, his independence, and records of contemporary collections of his works. 12 – Sutton, ‘Jan van der Heyden's inventions’, in Sutton, Jan van der Heyden, pp. 73–81. 13 – Sutton, Jan van der Heyden, p. 23. 14 – George S. Keyes et al., Masters of Dutch painting. The Detroit Institute of Arts (London: D. Giles Limited, 2004) pp. 104–106, no. 41; Sutton, Jan van der Heyden, p. 168, no. 25; Wagner, Jan van der Heyden, no. 210. The ox is the more traditional title; the other, more descriptive title comes from the museum's catalogue. 15 – Keyes, Masters, p. 104, notes that there were laws banning livestock traffic on Amsterdam's canals. 16 – Sjraar van Heugten, ‘Grazende modellen. Aspecten van het Nederlandse veestuck’, in Meesterlijk vee. Nederlandse veeschilders 1600–1900, ed. C. Boschma, exh. cat., Fries Museum (Leeuwarden: Fries Museum, 1988) p. 12. 17 – One undisputed sign of van der Heyden's primacy in the two artists’ ‘joint’ paintings is that the cityscape always precedes the staffage in these works. Likewise, in this picture it is the urban setting, not the ox, that establishes the essential incongruity and the overriding subject. See Wagner, Jan van der Heyden, pp. 59–60; Sutton, Jan van der Heyden, pp. 56–57, 224, no. 48. On the subject of Manet's relationship to some of the more ironic forms of Dutch realism, see Smith, ‘Realism and boundaries’, pp. 83–85. 18 – J. Paul Hunter, Before novels: the cultural contexts of 18th-century English fiction (New York: Norton, 1990) p. 40: ‘… perhaps because the novel emerged when it did, just as the urban consciousness began to focus the overwhelming sense of solitariness among the many, it developed early a generic ability … to record poignantly the modern perception that … whatever the relationship between people, there is always a sense of incompleteness, isolation, and frustration that approaches despair’. On questions of country versus city in early novels, see especially pp. 97, 110–111, 126–127, 140–141. For a wide-ranging discussion of the theme in literature and in life, see also Raymond Williams, The country and the city (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) especially pp. 46–67, 142–152. 19 – Bakhtin, ‘Epic and novel’, in The dialogic imagination, p. 6: ‘in the era of the novel's creative ascendency — and even more in the periods of preparation preceding this era—literature was flooded with parodies and travesties of all the high genres (parodies precisely of genres, and not of individual authors or schools) — parodies that are the precursors, “companions” to the novel, in their own way studies for it’. In this respect one can look on van der Heyden's cityscapes as genuine ‘precursors’ of the novel. 20 – Alan Chong, ‘In ‘t verbeelden van slachtdieren. Associates en betekenissen, verbonden aan het Hollandse veestuck in de 17de eeuw’, in Meesterlijk vee, pp. 56–82, surveys the meanings of the Dutch cow, which in addition to its political and patriotic connotations include associations with Terra, Spring, Summer, abundance, and classical and biblical associations as well. 21 – See, in particular, Potter's monumental, multi-paneled painting, The life of the hunter, of about 1650 in the Hermitage, in which 12 generically and thematically quite varied hunting scenes surround two larger panels of the judgment and grisly execution of the hunter and his hounds by the animals who have been their victims. Amy Walsh, Edwin Buijsen, and Ben Broos, Paulus Potter. Schilderijen, tekeningen en etsen, exh. cat. (The Hague: Mauritshuis, 1994) pp. 127–135, no. 24, note that the victory of the hunted over the hunters belongs to the age-old theme of the world upside down and that this particular subject has a rich tradition in graphic art, on which Potter drew. It also works as a political parable, since hunting and warfare were often compared, with the hunter likened to the victorious warrior. The reversal of fortune involved in this subject thus carries implications of political reversal as well. 22 – David A. Levine, ‘Die Kunst der “Bamboccianti”: Themen, Quellen und Bedeutung’, in ‘I Bamboccianti’: niederländische Malerrebellen im Rom des Barock, exh. cat., ed. David A. Levine and Ekkehard Mai (Cologne: Wallraf-Richartz Museum, 1991) pp. 14–33; idem, ‘The art of the Bamboccianti’, dissertation, Princeton University, 1984, pp. 1–69. 23 – See, for example, his print Two buffalos with a herdsman from this series, which shows the same heavy, impassive earthiness and vacant stare as The ox and the same pointedly peripheral human presence. See Clifford S. Ackley, Printmaking in the age of Rembrandt, exh. cat. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1981) pp. 122–124, no. 75. On van Laer's influence on Paulus Potter, see Walsh, Paulus Potter, pp. 25–31. 24 – Catherine Levesque, Journey through the landscape in 17th-century Holland (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994) pp. 117–120, notes that the Dutch tendency to invest in landscape and nature motifs as symbols of national identity and moral rectitude reflects their need to create images of community ‘in a region with no historic principle of union, a lack of solidarity between rulers and ruled, and an influx of recent immigrants …’. 25 – See in particular W.B. Smits-Veldt, ‘De wijze herder. Morele instructie in 17de-eeuwse Nederlandse pastorale poëzie’, De nieuwe taalgids, 82, 1989, pp. 385–401, who takes note of the interchangeability in this literature of the pastoral shepherd and the ordinary Dutch farmer. Also see Peter King, ‘Dutch landscape art and literature in the 17th century’, Dutch Crossing, 31, 1987, pp. 6–19. 26 – Gary Schwartz and Marten Jan Bok, Pieter Saenredam: the painter and his time (1989) (London: Abbeville Press, 1990) pp. 189–192, no. 13. See also, most recently, Anne van Suchtelen and Arthur K. Wheelock, Dutch cityscapes of the golden age, exh. cat. (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2009), 170–173, no. 40. 27 – Sutton, ‘Van der Heyden's inventions’, in Jan van der Heyden, p. 75. 28 – Walter Liedtke, A view of Delft: Vermeer and his contemporaries (Zwolle: Waanders, 2000) pp. 39–79, 221–226. 29 – Bakhtin, ‘Epic and novel’, pp. 3, 39. In this regard, he also observes on p. 8 that the novel is the only genre resistant to classical literary theory as laid out in Aristotle's Poetics. 30 – Ibid., p. 22. 31 – Ibid., p. 7. 32 – To pursue the literary analogy, Bakhtin observes that the novel rarely coexists comfortably with other genres, in that its contemporary, realistic frame of reference almost inevitably contradicts the more closed, poetic structures of the traditional genres. When they mix together, the result is either parody, stylization, or both. See ibid., pp. 4–7. 33 – Wagner, Jan van der Heyden, p. 54, discusses the relatively low number of dated works in the artist's oeuvre and the frequent difficulty of assigning reliable dates to the undated ones. 34 – Ibid., p. 32, no. 79. 35 – Rosalie L. Colie, The resources of kind: genre theory in the Renaissance, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973) pp. 7–33, 75–128. See also Smith, ‘Realism and boundaries’, pp. 81–82, 85–92, 96–98. Bakhtin, ‘From the prehistory of novelistic discourse’, in The dialogic imagination, pp. 52–53, makes a similar point when he argues that every genre has its characteristic ‘parodying double’. Also see n. 9. 36 – Sutton, Jan van der Heyden, p. 47 et passim. 37 – De Vries, Jan van der Heyden, pp. 22–23: ‘Dit slecht gedefinieerde woord verklaart niet veel, maar het helpt ons te begrijpen waarom er zoveel in lompen gehulde bedelaars zijn afgebeeld in de Gouden Eeuw, zoveel ruönes in de tijd van Jacob van Campen en zoveel woeste wouden in de periode waarin de ene droogmakerij na de andere ontstond. Jan van der Heyden heeft het oude idée omtrent schilderachtigheid niet geheel verloochend, ook al blijkt hij vol bewondering te zijn voor de moderne, classicistische bouwkunst. Allerlei oude en vervallen zaken heeft hij met aandacht geobserveerd en vastgelegd. Hij heeft ze op een geraffineerde manier verenigd met moderne, stralend nieuwe delen van de stad. Wat oud, beschadigd en onvolmaakt was werd dus niet ontkend, maar het werd opgenomen in het geödealiseerde beeld van een stad waarin verleden en heden beide gevoelens van trots en “vaderlandsliefde” kunnen does ontluiken’. 38 – Eddy de Jongh ‘ ‘‘ ’t Gotsche krulligh mal”. De houding tegenover de gotiek in het 17de-eeuwse Holland’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 24, 1973, pp. 85–145, discusses this controversy at length, drawing on the example of Erwin Panofsky, ‘The first page of Giorgio Vasari's “Libro”. A study on the gothic style in the judgment of the Italian Renaissance. With an excursus on two façade designs by Domenico Beccafumi’ (1930), in Meaning in the visual arts (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1955) pp. 169–235. See especially de Jongh's remarks (pp. 92–99, 112–114, 127–128 et passim) on the prominent voices defending the gothic style against classical polemics by major humanists like Constantijn Huygens, who coined the phrase ‘t Gotsche krulligh mall’ — ‘the curly gothic foolery’ — in his eulogy for van Campen in 1657 (p. 85). 39 – Wagner, Jan van der Heyden, no. 93. 40 – See Sutton, ‘Images of the interior of the Royal Palace’, in The Royal Palace of Amsterdam in paintings of the golden age, eds. Jan Peeters, Peter C. Sutton, Eymert-Jan Goosens, Deirdre Carasso (Zwolle: Waanders, 1997) pp. 19–29. De Jongh, ‘t Gotsche krulligh mal’, pp. 87–88, 129–130, takes note of the new classical architecture's associations with wealth and sophistication. 41 – Wagner, Jan van der Heyden, p. 29, sees a stylistic influence from de Hooch on van der Heyden's work during these years. See also Wolfgang Stechow, Dutch landscape painting of the 17th century (London: Phaidon, 1966) p. 126. 42 –See especially Thomas von der Dunk, ‘Hoe klassiek is de gothiek? Jacob van Campen en de toren van de Nieuwe Kerk te Amsterdam: een nieuwe benadering van een oude questie’, Jaarboek Amstelodamum, 85, 1993, pp. 49–90; de Jongh, ‘t Gotsche krulligh mal’, pp. 114–122. See also Koen Ottenheym, ‘Architectuur’, in Jacob van Campen. Het klassieke ideaal in de Gouden Eeuw, eds. Jacobine Huisken, Koen Ottenheym, Gary Schwartz (Amsterdam: Architectura & Natura Press, 1995) pp. 187–189; W. Kuyper, Dutch classicist architecture (Delft: Delft University Press, 1980) p. 74. 43 – Simon Schama, The embarrassment of riches: an interpretation of Dutch culture in the golden age (New York: Knopf, 1987) pp. 290–371. 44 – See Nanne van Zijpp, Geschiedenis der doopsgezinden in Nederland (Arnhem: Van Loghum Slaterus) pp. 145–156. 45 – Sutton, Jan van der Heyden, p. 23. 46 – One of them was Govaert Flinck, who painted a picture of Marcus Curius Dentatus and the Samnite ambassadors for the Burgomasters’ Council Room in the Town Hall. But the story from Plutarch of this Roman consul from the third century B.C. exemplifies the virtues of simplicity and incorruptibility expected of proper burgomasters, so it is possible that Flinck, a student of Rembrandt, might have claimed that his hero practiced Mennonite virtues. See Fremantle, Baroque town hall, pp. 69–71; Albert Blankert, ‘Art and authority in 17th-century Amsterdam: paintings for public places by Ferdinand Bol and others’ (1975), in Selected writings on Dutch painting (Zwolle: Waanders, 2004) pp. 49–64. A much more equivocal figure in this regard is the poet Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679), who began life as a Mennonite, but, perhaps following his muse, converted to Catholicism in 1641. Subsequently, he became the Town Hall's eloquent defender in his long dedicatory poem ‘Inwijdinge van “t Stadhuis t” Amsterdam’ (1655), in De werken van Vondel, v. 6, ed. J. van Lennep (Amsterdam, 1861) pp. 661–697. See Reinder P. Meijer, Literature of the low countries (Cheltenham: Stanley Thornes, Ltd, 1978) pp. 126–141. 47 – There is also evidence of the artist's convictions in his still lifes, which are in some ways easier to interpret. The library still life in Budapest, painted in the last couple of months of his life, shows all the marks of a wealthy, learned, well-lived life. But on a table on the right lies a Bible open to the first page of the book of Ecclesiastes, which begins ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity’. See de Vries, Jan van der Heyden, p. 52; Jochen Becker, ‘Das Buch im Stilleben — das Stilleben im Buch’, in Stilleben im Europa, exh. cat. (Münster: Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst and Kultur, 1980). p. 462; Sutton, Jan van der Heyden, pp. 206–208; Gaskell, Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, pp. 302–304. 48 – Wagner, Jan van der Heyden, p. 32, nos. 86 and 87; de Vries, Jan van der Heyden, pp. 20–22; Sutton Jan van der Heyden, pp. 148–153, nos. 18 and 19. 49 – De Vries, Jan van der Heyden, p. 22, rightly observes that mill stones would only have been found near the windmills on the city's perimeter. 50 – Lawrence, Gerrit Berckheyde, p. 52, notes that Berckheyde's pictures tend to single out the newest, most ‘modern’ buildings in Amsterdam, such as the domed Lutheran church or the mansions of the Herengracht, as well as the Town Hall. Wagner, Jan van der Heyden, pp. 41–43, notes van der Heyden's marked preference for the older sections of the city. 51 – Lawrence, Gerrit Berckheyde, p. 64. It is worth noting that Dutch artists at first found Amsterdam's canals difficult to paint, just because of their curves and surrounding foliage. This is the lesson one might draw from one of the earliest canal views, Jan Wijnants’ View of the Herengracht of ca.1661 in the Cleveland Museum of Art, which looks directly down the canal to produce a neat vertical axis of overlapping bridges that brings order to the messily leafy canal sides. See Stechow, Dutch landscape, p. 127. 52 – Kuyper, Dutch classicist architecture, pp. 66, 74–81, 100–101; Ottenheym, ‘Architectuur’, in Jacob van Campen, pp. 165–167, 189–199. 53 –On journalism in Dutch culture and its subversion of prevailing epic and heroic narrative modes in the seventeenth century, see Smith, ‘Willem Buytewech as a journalist: perspectives on description and narration’, Konsthistorisk tidskrift, 60, 1991, pp. 169–188. 54 – Hunter, Before novels, p. 23. 55 – Bakhtin, ‘Prehistory of novelistic discourse’, pp. 44–68. 56 – Ibid., 54–56. See also Smith, ‘Realism and boundaries’, pp. 84–92. Bakhtin's polyglossia may in some respects correspond to what Reindert Falkenburg, ‘Calvinism and the emergence of Dutch 17th-century landscape art — a critical evaluation’, in Seeing beyond the word. Visual arts and the Calvinist tradition, ed. Paul Corby Finney (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999) pp. 356–364, calls ‘semantic openness’ in the iconographical and doctrinal variability of Dutch landscape art. He usefully offers this term as an alternative to Lyckle de Vries's notion of ‘iconographic erosion’ as an explanation of the increasingly less programmatic character of symbolism in Dutch art in the course of the seventeenth century. Where de Vries sees indifference to meaning, Falkenburg sees ambivalence, though he appears to me to be overly fixed on doctrinal definitions of Calvinist views of landscape. See de Vries, ‘Jan Steen, “de kluchtschilder”’, dissertation, University of Groningen, 1977, pp. 80–89. Given Jan van der Heyden's roots in the art of landscape (see below), Falkenburg's terminology appears equally applicable to his cityscapes. 57 – Wagner, Jan van der Heyden, pp. 40, 94, no. 121; Sutton, Jan van der Heyden, p. 120, no. 8. 58 – For other examples of such an interplay between architectural sculpture and livelier, more informal living beings nearby, see Sutton, Jan van der Heyden, pp. 164–166, no. 24, p. 184, no. 30, and pp. 202–204, no. 37. 59 – Bakhtin, ‘Epic and novel’, pp. 11–12, 30–31, 38–39. 60 – Wagner, Jan van der Heyden, pp. 35–36. 61 – Lawrence, Gerrit Berckheyde, pp. 42–43. 62 – See Bakhtin, ‘Forms of time’, pp. 120–123, on the ‘chronotope of the road’ and its relation to the theme of the ‘path of life’. On themes of road and pilgrimage in Dutch landscape, with which van der Heyden would have been well familiar, see Levesque, Journey through the landscape; Boudewijn Bakker, ‘Levenspelgrimage of vrome wandeling? Claes Janszoon Visscher en zijn serie Plaisante Plaetse’, Oud Holland, 107, 1993, pp. 97–115; Falkenburg, Joachim Patinir. Landscape as an image of the pilgrimage of life (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1988). 63 – Susan Donahue Kuretsky, ‘Dutch ruins: time and transformation’, in Time and transformation in 17th-century Dutch art, exh. cat. (Poughkeepsie, NY: Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, 2005) pp. 17–48. See also Levesque, ‘Haarlem landscapes and ruins: nature transformed’, in ibid., pp. 49–62. 64 – Kuretsky, Time and transformation, pp. 245–247, no. 70; Wagner, Jan van der Heyden, no. 158. Sutton, Jan van der Heyden, pp. 176–178, no. 28, notes that the artist's View of the Tiber River with the Tiber Island, near Trastevere in Vienna is directly based on a drawing of the site by Daniel Schellinks, whom van der Heyden would have known through family connections. This is particularly tangible evidence of his ties to Dutch Italianate artists in the face of the fact that he himself appears never to have traveled to Italy. 65 – On pastoralism as inversion in Dutch art, see Smith, ‘Rembrandt's metaphysical wit: The three trees and The Omval’, Word & Image, 21, 2005, p. 15. See also, more generally, Paul Alpers, What is pastoral? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) pp. 24–25, 50–51, 68–69, 81–93 138–146, 161–178; Judith Haber, Pastoral and the poetics of self-contradiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) pp. 1–52; David M. Halperin, Before pastoral: Theocritus and the ancient tradition of bucolic poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983) pp. 161–189, 217–248. 66 – Sutton, Jan van der Heyden, p. 47, notes the attractions of the country life for wealthy Amsterdammers as a partial explanation for this incongruous scene, but that hardly solves the questions it raises, as he acknowledges. On the country, person as outsider, see Hunter, Before novels, pp. 138–141, 149–150. On the theme of the country and the city, see n. 18. 67 – Levine, ‘Die Kunst der “Bamboccianti”’, pp. 19–29; idem ‘Art of the Bamboccianti’, pp. 158–285; idem, ‘The Roman lime kilns of the Bamboccianti’, Art Bulletin, 70, 1988, pp. 569–588. On van Laer's ironic approach to art itself, see also idem, ‘Pieter van Laer's Artists’ tavern: an ironic commentary on art’, in Holländische Genremalerei im 17. Jahrhundert: Symposium Berlin 1984, Jahrbuch Preussicher Kulturbesitz, Sonderband 4, 1987, pp. 169–191. 68 – See Levine, ‘Die Kunst der “Bamboccianti”’, pp. 23–25; idem ‘Art of the Bamboccianti’, pp. 24–48, on the use of irony, paradox, and inversion in the treatment of high-classical themes and formal structures by van Laer and his followers. 69 – Wagner, Jan van der Heyden, p. 40. 70 – Sutton, Jan van der Heyden, p. 166, appears to downplay the idea that van der Heyden's beggars might entail a social commentary by seeing them as a convention: ‘… the motif of almsgiving is one of the most common of figural interactions in all of van der Heyden's works’. It is true that beggars were a pervasive fact of life in seventeenth-century Europe, but that does not answer the question of why van der Heyden chose to include them so often and so prominently in his scenes. 71 – Wagner, Jan van der Heyden, p. 42. 72 – On Vrel, see Clothilde Brière-Misme, ‘Un “intimiste” hollandaise: Jacob Vrel’, 1 and 2, Revue de l'art ancien et moderne, 68, 1935, pp. 97–114, 157–172; Sutton, Masters of 17th-century Dutch genre painting, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1984) p. 352; Michiel C.C. Kerstenand and Daniëlle H.A.C. Loken, Delft masters, Vermeer's contemporaries, exh. cat. (Delft: Stedelijk Museum Het Prinsenhof, 1996) pp. 103, 177–181. 73 – Apart from the paintings illustrated here, see, for example, van der Heyden's View of a city square with Weidenbach Cloister and St. Pantaleon, Cologne in Sutton, Jan van der Heyden, pp. 156–157, no. 21. In addition to the ruined cloister facing the church across the square, the scene features a poor mother with two small children in the foreground shadows, while in the sunlight directly behind her, a well-dressed couple ignores a beggar boy, making the resulting trio of two adults and a child a kind of ‘counter-family’. 74 – For suggestive insights into the nature of van der Heyden's stance as outsider, see Georg Simmel's classic essay ‘The stranger’ (1908), in The sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. and trans. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950) pp. 402–408. Simmel defines the stranger as ‘the person who comes today and stays tomorrow … the potential wanderer’. Moreover, ‘to be a stranger is naturally a very positive relation; it is a form of interaction … The stranger, like the poor and like sundry “inner enemies”, is an element of the group itself’ (p. 402). Mobility of some sort — as in the chronotope of the road — is the central trait that ‘embodies that synthesis of nearness and distance which constitutes the formal position of the stranger. For, the fundamentally mobile person comes in contact, at one time or another, with every individual, but is not organically connected, through established ties of kinship, locality, and occupation, with any single one’ (p. 404). Which is to say that the stranger retains an essential freedom from fixed social bonds and definitions even while maintaining social relations. This definition seems to correspond quite closely to Jan van der Heyden's position as an engaged bystander in the urban life he portrays. See also Leo Braudy, ‘Daniel Defoe and the anxieties of autobiography’, Genre, 6, 1973, 76–97, for related perspectives on the separation of the individual from social norms and its role in the emergence of novelistic realism. 75 – On van der Heyden as a landscape painter, see Wagner, Jan van der Heyden, pp. 47–50; de Vries, Jan van der Heyden, pp. 43–48; Sutton, Jan van der Heyden, pp. 55–57. 76 – Lawrence, Gerrit Berckheyde, pp. 40–42. 77 – Wagner, Jan van der Heyden, pp. 30–32. 78 – See Smith, ‘Realism and boundaries’, pp. 103–109. For anthropological discussions of liminality as a symbolic structure, see Arnold van Gennep, The rites of passage (1908), trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960) pp. 1–13, 19–25, 57–61, 157–159; Victor Turner, Dramas, fields, and metaphors: symbolic action in human society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974) pp. 23–57, 231–298. Also see Bakhtin, Dostoevsky's poetics, p. 170. 79 – In addition to the works discussed and illustrated here, I count at least 14 cityscapes that feature doorways on the edge of the composition: Wagner, Jan van der Heyden, nos. 33, 45, 52, 56, 59, 63, 73, 75–77, 103, 112, 120, 150. There are also many other pictures featuring city gates and other, more prominent and more central thresholds. 80 – Ibid., p. 39, no. 85. 81 – Sutton, Jan van der Heyden, p. 126, no. 10. To be sure, Berckheyde painted several later, similar views of the Town Hall, probably under van der Heyden's influence. But in the latter's versions, the Dam Square is usually as crowded and as sociable as in his frontal views (figure 1), effectively confirming the Town Hall's classical public ethos. 82 – See Pieter Spierenburg, Elites and etiquette: mentality and social structure in the early modern Netherlands (Rotterdam: Erasmus Universiteit, 1981) pp. 22–26; Norbert Elias, The court society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1983) pp. 78–116. 83 – Sutton, Jan van der Heyden, p. 126, no. 10; Wagner, Jan van der Heyden, no. 2. 84 – Sutton, Jan van der Heyden, p. 130, no. 12; Wagner, Jan van der Heyden, no. 4. There is a quite similar view of this scene in the Kunstmuseum Basel (Wagner, no. 3). 85 – Sutton, Jan van der Heyden, p. 200, no. 36; de Vries, Jan van der Heyden, p. 39; Wagner, Jan van der Heyden, no. 122. 86 – The other paintings in which the church at Veere appears are in the royal collection, London (Wagner, no. 72), the Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe (Wagner, no. 74), the Mauritshuis in The Hague (Wagner, no. 75), the Kaufman collection (Wagner no. 91, Sutton, no. 16), the Johnson collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Wagner, no. 76), and in another unnamed private collection (Wagner, no. 73). See also Sutton, Jan van der Heyden, p. 142. 87 – Jan Luiken, ‘Elk breng zyn Ziel, Gelyk een grooten buit’, in Beschouwing der Wereld (Amsterdam, 1708) pp. 403–404, for example, lines 25–30: ‘En dag, aan dag verschynt het klaar,/ Dat ‘s werelds goed geen rykdom waar,/ Wanneer de Dood tot alle staaten,/ Met schrik van zyn gestrenge hand,/ Het leven uit de tyd verband,/ Daar elk, het al moet achter laaten … ’ (‘And from day to day appears it clear,/ That this world's goods no riches were,/ When Death to all ranks,/ Terror from his strong hand brings,/ Life banished out of time,/ Because each must leave all behind …). For Luiken's more optimistic heavenly vision, see lines 34–42. The biblical citations are to Deuteronomy 5: 29; Psalms 1: 5, 6; 5: 5–7; 37: 16; 62: 10; Ephesians 2: 12; 1 John 5: 19; and Ecclesiastes 12: 13, which ends; ‘… Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man’. I am indebted to Catherine Levesque for calling my attention to the similarity between Luiken's print and van der Heyden's painting and to their common roots in Mennonite piety.
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