Amsterdam Town Hall in Words and Images

The most famous monument of the Dutch Golden Age is undoubtedly the Amsterdam Town Hall by architect Jacob van Campen inaugurated in 1655. Today we stand in awe confronted with the grand Classicist façade, the delightful horror of the sculptures in the Tribunal, and the magnificence of the huge Citizens’ Hall. In the period of its construction, many artists and writers tried to capture the overwhelming impact of the building by, among other comparisons, relating it to the ancient Wonders of the World and by stressing its splendour, riches, and impressive scale. In doing so, they constructed the Town Hall as the ultimate wonder, thus offering a silent, but very powerful testimony to the power and position of the City of Amsterdam and its rulers as equals of the other European regimes.

To fully understand these mechanisms of power, this book relates the Town Hall to other, impressive buildings of the same period—the palace of the Louvre, Saint Peter’s Basilica, and Banqueting House—and their visual and textual representations. Thus, this book gives a broad audience of readers new insights into the agency of magnificent buildings. The Amsterdam Town Hall in Words and Images does not restrict itself to a national scope or a purely architectural analysis, but clarifies how artists and writers all over Europe presented buildings as wonders of the world. This book is pioneering in its analysis of seventeenth and eighteenth-century paintings, prints, drawings, poems, and travel accounts and offers a new understanding of how the wondrous character of these grand buildings was constructed.

Stijn Bussels studies the impact of art and architecture and published widely, in Art History, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, Comparative Drama, and more. He has written two monographs: The Antwerp Entry of Prince Philip in 1549 (2012) and The Animated Image (2013).

Caroline van Eck’s main research interests are art and architectural history and theory of the early modern period and the relation between rhetoric and the arts and architecture. Publications include Classical Rhetoric and the Arts and Art, Agency and Living Presence (2014). In 2016 she was elected to the first established Chair in Art History at Cambridge University, UK.

Bram Van Oostveldt has published widely on the relation between the theatre, the arts and architecture in the early modern Low Countries. He published a monograph on the influence of Diderot in Brussels theatre and on the performing arts in the Austrian Netherlands and now works on the concept of the ‘sublime’ in the cultural politics of Louis XIV.