In this chapter

• A Dutch patriarch in the guise of Moses being shown the promised land Thomas de Keyser
• The Catholic priest Leonard Marius Claes Moyaert
• The finding of Moses Paulus Bor
• Christ appearing to the Magdalene as a gardener (copy) Rembrandt van Rijn
• Edna blessing Tobias Aert de Gelder
• The church of Sloten in the winter Jan Abrahamsz. Beerstraten
• The church of St. Lawrence, Rotterdam Johannes Weissenbruch
• Family group as Caritas, with self-portrait Werner van den Valckert

Religion

'Dutch Calvinism' conjures up an image of a nation of pious churchgoers predestined for heaven, smug about it and taking grim pleasure in the prospect of all Papists, infidels and sinners going to hell. We imagine sparsely furnished, scrubbed interiors, selfdenying men and women dressed in black. Bodies, souls, a whole society dedicated to a dour God. The phrase and the image are both so hackneyed that a writer with any claim to originality will want to deflate them as pointedly as possible. Looking more closely, one finds that there is little honour to be had from the exercise. One doesn't even need to brandish a point – a poke of the finger is enough to puncture the cliché, at least as it is applied to the Dutch people as a whole.

Calvinism came to Holland in the Reformation, and captured the hearts of a small part of the population. Many of the Dutch, unhappy with the moral and material abuses of the Catholic church, were eager to join reformed churches, of which Calvinism was one. An estimated ten to twenty percent of the population became Calvinist in the sixteenth century, a figure that increased in later centuries, but never reached fifty percent. What distinguished Calvinism from other Protestant sects is that the others were either too extreme in their politics or too respectful of authority to gain much influence. Calvinism had the right mixture of rebelliousness and authoritativeness to replace Catholicism as a new orthodoxy. In the course of the 1560s and '70s, the governments of the Dutch cities underwent an 'alteration,' in which Catholic officeholders were replaced by Calvinists.

This was part of the beginning of the Eighty Years War of the northern Netherlands against Spain, and it shook Dutch society from top to bottom. Outside the church and government, one of the groups that was shaken most thoroughly were the artists. This was a function not of any social, political or religious peculiarities of artists as a group, but of the nature of their 'product.' Perhaps the most conspicuous difference between the Catholics and the Calvinists was in their attitude towards art in the church. Religious images considered an adjunct to divine service by the Catholics were idols to the Calvinists. Throughout the southern provinces, and here and there in the north, the revolt of the Netherlands was marked by outbreaks of iconoclasm: the breaking of images. Groups of Calvinist activists, often joined by mobs from the street, went into the churches and stripped them of their art. Statues of the saints were tumbled from their pedestals and altarpieces were slashed to shreds, in the name of combatting idolatry. Campaigns of this kind have taken place at other points in history, and for different reasons: in the Byzantine Empire in the eighth century, for the sake of Christian orthodoxy; in England during the Civil War, and during the French and Russian Revolutions, out of antagonism towards the church and the old regime; in China during the Cultural Revolution, to break the hold of the past on the popular imagination. What these occurrences have in .common, in our eyes, is what one could call spiritual terrorism. Those who perform it – more often than not governments – realize that they are touching a particularly sensitive nerve of society with maximum effect, and for a minimum of effort and risk.

(One English iconoclast of the 1640s, William Dowsing, kept a journal which contains calm, bureaucratic reports of activities that make our blood run cold. On January 6, 1643, he noted: 'We broke down about an hundred superstitious pictures and seven Fryars hugging a Nunn; and the Picture of God and Christ; and diverse others very superstitious... and we beat down a great stoneing Cross on the top of the Church.'¹ I quote this for the fascinating reference to a painting of seven friars 'hugging' a nun, which sounds so much like the painting by Cornelis van Haarlem (cat.nr. 11) which was ordered by the town of Haarlem in the wake of its own iconoclasm. Could it be that a similar painting was destroyed in Haarlem?)

Whatever the motives of the Netherlandish iconoclasts, one effect of their acts was to tumble sacred art itself from its pedestal. A part of daily life which was cherished by Christians for centuries could never again be taken for granted. When the Catholic church was re-established in the southern Netherlands, the cult of images returned with it, but in a more self-conscious, carefully controlled form.

In the north, where the Calvinists gained control of the existing churches, the old paintings and statues never returned, nor were new ones ordered. In the Calvinist hierarchy of psycho-spiritual values, the ear took precedence over the eye, the sermon over the painted (let along graven) image. The proper vehicle for transmitting the message of God was the Word. Visual images were fit only to inspire baser feelings, for which the churchgoer had no need. The only paintings one saw on the walls of a Calvinist church were boards with coats of arms or texts like the Ten Commandments, in gold on black – painted, more often than not, over the image of a saint or a Bible story.

To artists, this entailed the loss of the largest single market for their work, at a time when their numbers were being swelled immensely by immigration. But the banning of images from the churches also raised more profound issues. In the Catholic world, many artists are, after all, respected servants of the church, with all the status that brings. The images they make excite feelings of religious devotion, which sometimes can approach idolatry in their intensity.

As the creator of objects which are seen by many as mediators between man and God, the artist himself is a kind of priest. If painters were distinguished from their fellow craftsmen by any one aspect of their profession, this was it. One can imagine how traumatic it must have been for the painters of sixteenth-century Holland to see the spiritual superiority of their work turned into its opposite. What was once a mark of distinction became a sign of shame.

The most extreme response to this reversal of values was that of the Zeeland artist Marinus van Roemerswaele, who at the end of his life participated in the iconoclastic riots in Middelburg. There must have been others like him who repented of their former lives and turned against art. But they were not typical. Most artists, even those who were staunch Calvinists, felt an instinctive horror for iconoclasm, and showed it. Carel van Mander gave expression to the general feeling when he called the iconoclasts 'maniacs.' Not that he argued for the return of sacred art to the churches. He himself was a Protestant, and a refugee from Spanish misrule. He was also too realistic to expect the restoration of art to the church, and too prudent to suggest it. Van Mander had other ideas for undoing the worst damage done to the artist by the Reformation. The loss of the church as patron could be made good by wealthy individuals (in Dutch a patron of the arts is called a 'Maecenas,' after the protector of Virgil and Horace) and by civil governments. As for the spiritual status of the artist, this could be raised to its former height by the practice of 'history painting' at a high intellectual and moral level.

Van Mander's solution remained the canonical one, and was repeated with variations by later writers on art. But it was not the only one. For one thing, not all the churches in the world were Calvinist. Flanders and parts of Germany were still Catholic, and there were Lutheran countries where art was still tolerated in the church. Dutch artists could move to these neighbouring parts of Christendom, as some did. Italy was further afield, yet hundreds of Dutch artists went there, sometimes for years at a time. The reason most often given for the trip south was pedagogical: how could an aspiring young Dutch artist better acquaint himself with the great models of ancient and Renaissance art than by going to Rome? But more than one such aspiring young artist remained until he turned gray, working not in the style of the ancients or of Raphael but in that of the latest trendsetters in modern Italian painting, artists like Caravaggio and Adam Elsheimer. Some adopted the new styles so successfully that their work is still indistinguishable from Italian art of the same period. Colonies of northern artists were a fixture in all the important centres of Italian art, especially Rome. Many of the denizens of that notoriously Bohemian world were Catholics when they came to Italy, or converted once they were there. Rembrandt's first master, Jacob Isaacsz. van Swanenburgh, the son of Isaac Claesz. (see cat.nr.1 ), is an example. He lived in Naples for over a quarter-century before returning home, after his father's death, with a Catholic wife whose existence he had kept secret for seventeen years. He had been working as a painter and running a shop for artists' supplies in Naples.

But there were alternatives closer to home. Not all the churches of Holland were Calvinist. Catholicism was never suppressed completely, and masses were still being held in Amsterdam and Utrecht and The Hague. Catholics were forbidden to pray in buildings that looked like churches from the outside, but they became skilled in turning townhouses into 'secret' places of worship that could accommodate hundreds. It seems certain that many paintings of religious subjects by Dutch artists of the seventeenth century were made for clandestine Catholic churches or for the homes of Catholic priests and laymen. This is a poorly documented area of art history, and a disputed one. Every once in a while, however, one comes across a piece of fairly incontrovertible evidence. The inventory of the goods of the Amsterdam painter Dirck Aertsz. falls into that category. When he died in 1644, the paintings he left behind included a large number of Madonnas, altarpieces, series of the twelve apostles, saints and other paintings that were clearly intended for use in Catholic worship.² Not all of them were made for the home market, it would seem. Quite a few are painted on copper plates, which van Mander tells us were the kind of paintings that Spaniards liked to buy when they left the southern Netherlands for home.³

Another denomination whose members had a penchant for religious art of a. particular kind were the Mennonites. These were the followers of the Frisian Anabaptist Menno Simons. Their creed was just as unpopular with the more middle-of-the-road Reformed churches as it was with the Catholics. Although they had no theological dispute with the Calvinists concerning the evils of idolatry, they seem to have been less worried about their faith being perverted by religious images. One of the more intriguing Mennonites in Dutch art was the Leeuwarden painter and art dealer Lambert Jacobsz., who was actually the leader of his congregation. (The very idea of a Calvinist divine being a professional painter seems impossible). By the eighteenth century the Mennonites had established a leading position in Dutch cultural life. From their midst came Pieter Teyler, who turned his own collection of art, scientific instruments and natural history into a museum, and donated his fortune to a foundation. Both still survive, a testimony to the commitment of Teyler and his successors. Even if one can speak of a certain Mennonite proclivity towards art, however, there is no kind of painting that can be called typically Mennonite.

Greater tolerance towards religious art was also demonstrated by a Calvinist schism known as Remonstrantism, which played a major role in Dutch religious politics, especially in the 1610s. The basic point of doctrinal contention between the Remonstrants and the adherents of the 'true Christian Reformed religion,' as the Calvinists called themselves, concerned predestination: the dogma that God determines the fate of each individual before his or her birth. By rejecting the more extreme forms of this belief (some Calvinists held that God decided before the creation of the universe which future humans were to go to heaven and which to hell), the Remonstrants brought down on themselves charges of Papistry and denying divine omnipotence. In fact, Remonstrantism did occupy an uneasy middle ground between Protestantism and Catholicism. This was just as evident in their more easy-going attitude towards art as in their theology.

Having said all this, it must be stressed that despite their history of iconoclasm and a continuing equivocation in their attitude towards art, the Calvinists remained the most important group in the country, in whose circles -we find the major collectors and patrons of the arts. Moreover, the social and professional boundaries between the various sects were not that sharply drawn. As the English ambassador in the Netherlands, Sir William Temple, remarked in 1688: 'It is hardly to be imagined, how all the violence and sharpness, which accompanies the differences of Religion in other Countrys, seems to be appeased or softned here, by the general freedom -which all men enjoy...'⁴ We have already noted that in his Lives of the Artists, Carel van Mander avoided talking about the government positions of artists. He also avoided talking about their religion. That he himself was probably a Mennonite has to be deduced from outside evidence.⁵ Membership of a particular congregation naturally gave an artist better chances to work for his co-religionists than an outsider (van Mander designed the title prints of the Bibles published by the leading Mennonite printer, for example), but there was nothing to be gained in making the fact known to others. Sectarianism in matters of religion was bad for business. And dangerous. Johannes Torrentius, who claimed that his Rosicrucianism gave him magical powers as an artist, ended up in prison. He lost the 'general freedom which all men enjoy' by insisting too strongly on his specialness.

This public reticence in matters of religion disappeared in the nineteenth century, when Catholicism came back into the open, and everyone had to stand up and be counted. The religious art of that age often does betray the adherence of its maker to one or another of the prevailing denominations.

One of the great concessions that the Calvinists won from the States General was ownership of all the churches in the country. On the one hand, this was a nearly mandatory consequence of the recognition of Calvinism as the 'public church' (not the state church), but on the other, it was downright unhandy. The churches of the Netherlands had been built during the middle ages for the entire populations of cities and their surroundings, at a time when there was only one cult in Christendom. Now they came into the hands of a minority group \which moreover was very strict about who was welcome to pray with them. And the Dutch were not such great churchgoers to begin with. The Englishman Fynes Moryson, visiting Holland in 1593, noted in his journal that the churches were 'seldom full, for very many Sectaries, and more marchants proeffering gayne to the duties of Religion, seldome came to Church, so as in Leyden a populous City, I often observed at tymes of divine service, much more people to be in the market place than in the Church.'⁵

After iconoclasm, the churches were as devoid of decoration as of people (Moryson found them 'without beauty on the inside'), and for the first half-century of the Republic were a loss to the art of painting. A turning point came in 1627, with the creation of a new genre, the church portrait. The Haarlem artist Pieter Saenredam was at work on the illustrations for a book on his home town. One of them was a view of the interior of the church of St. Bavo, the former cathedral, on the main square. Saenredam, as systematic and scrupulous an artist as ever lived, sat himself down in the middle of the nave and drew a perfectly symmetrical perspective view of the church. For the print, he added a congregation, the lonely little crowd Moryson leads us to expect, standing and sitting on temporary 'formes sett about the Pulpitt in the naked body of the Church.' A twelve-line poem in the lower margin asks us to admire the building for the way its elements seem to grow out of each other, and to respect it as a place where 'sound and pure doctrine' is taught.⁶

A year later, Saenredam used the drawing as the basis for a painting of exactly the same view.⁷ Instead of the worshippers, however, the interior is now occupied by a small number of wealthy burghers parading through the building in their Sunday best. The impulse behind the creation of the painting was probably not far removed from that for the drawing and print: a manifestation of civic pride, enriched with antiquarian interest, aesthetic admiration and religion. There may even have been a Calvinist strain of dogmatism implied: the 'sound and pure doctrine' of the author of the book on Haarlem, the minister Samuel Ampzing, was of the harsh Counter-Remonstrant variety.

The whitewashed, undecorated interiors of the churches of Holland provided the ideal backdrop for sentiments and messages of many kinds. Saenredam himself made one painting, for example, which embodies a theological message devised by the first owner of the painting – Constantijn Huygens, Frederik Hendrik's secretary.⁸ Other artists imbued their church interiors with national as well as civic and religious feeling: the painters of the New Church in Delft often managed to include in their views the famous grave monument of William of Orange, the father of his country. Ruminations on life and death are evoked by church interiors that include open graves (the dead were still buried beneath the church floor in the seventeenth century) and gravediggers, with or without the skulls of Dutch Yoricks.

One of the exceptional aspects of church portraiture is that it beautified the medieval past. Today the middle ages and its relics are one of the most popular aspects of western culture, but in the seventeenth century that was far from being the case. The architects of Holland were dismayed by all those vast outmoded hulks of churches whose overcapacity stood in the way of new commissions for churches in the classicistic style that was sweeping Europe. They missed no opportunity to cast a slur on the 'senseless Gothic curlicues' of the old churches. One of these critics was the amateur architect that Huygens also was, and it is a special tribute to Saenredam that his painting of one of those Gothic monsters hung above a doorway of Huygens's classicistic new house (see below, under cat.nr.22).

Another painter favoured by Huygens was the young Rembrandt. Around the time that Saenredam began making his church paintings, Rembrandt was commissioned by Huygens and his master Frederik Hendrik to paint a series of religious paintings for the stadholder's cabinet in The Hague. They depicted the passion of Christ – the Raising of the Cross, the Descent from the Cross, the Ascension, Entombment and Resurrection – and were based on famous paintings of the past by Titian and Rubens. Huygens recognized Rembrandt's unique talent for depicting emotions, and wished to help the young artist develop a new mode of religious art that would bring glory to the Dutch court. However, the relationship was not a lasting one. For reasons that had more to do with politics and personalities than clashing opinions on art, the patron and painter grew apart. It was in his work for the patricians of Amsterdam that Rembrandt created the biblical paintings that are regarded by many as the greatest works of religious art ever made.

In the subjects of some of them, there is a hint of sectarianism. For instance, in the 1620s and '30s and again in the 1650s, Rembrandt painted scenes taken from the book of Tobit. (See the painting by Rembrandt's late pupil Aert de Gelder, cat.nr.24.) This apocryphal book -was the object of a dispute between the Calvinists and all the other Dutch denominations. In the new Calvinist Bible translation, the States Version, Tobit was preceded by a belittling 'Warning to the Reader' which said that it was being printed only in order to avoid controversy. The controversy was with the Mennonites in particular, who had a special affection for the book. It seems likely that Rembrandt made his paintings of Tobit for patrons who were not Calvinists, and that they had a somewhat provocative character. If so, they have long since lost that part of their meaning for the observer. Instead of provocative sectarianism, they have come to stand for a universal religiousness that does not shut out any kind of believer. They do not even shut out non-believers. In the universality of their appeal, they speak to each in his own tongue, of the things he holds most dear.

The nearly sacred humanism of Rembrandt's art is certainly one of the most enduring values attached to Dutch art. The phenomenon points up an intriguing historical truth. After iconoclasm, as we saw, the artists of Holland worried about the moral standing of their pursuit. Art derived so much of its worth to the Christian world from its subservience to religion that thinkers like van Mander were afraid that a secular art of painting would be indistinguishable to the burgher from the 'arts' of carpentry and glassmaking.

The worm has turned. Religion, in the past centuries, has been put on the defensive, while art – with Rembrandt in the fore – has held its own and more as a spiritual value in our culture. The reversal had gone halfway by 1880, when Vincent van Gogh, the son of a Reformed minister who had decided to devote his life to humanity through art, wrote in a letter to his brother: 'Someone loves Rembrandt, but seriously – that man will know there is a God, he will surely believe it.... To try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God.'⁹ In the hundred years since, the attempt to understand the great artists has gained so much importance, and godliness has lost so much, that van Gogh's words now sound almost patronizing towards Rembrandt.

1. Quoted in Freedberg 1985, p.41, note 10.
2. Bredius 1915-1921, vol.2, The Hague 1916, pp.601-609.
3. Miedema 1981, p. 38.
4. Temple 1693, p. 205.
5. Jacobsen Jensen 1918, p.282.
6. Exhib. cat. Pieter Jansz. Saenredam, Utrecht 1961, nr.31.
7. De Bavo te boek 1985, p. 83, in a chapter by Pieter Biesboer on paintings of the church. Until recently the painting, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was thought to have been made around 1635. A recent restoration revealed the date 1628.
8. Schwartz 1966-1967.
9. Van Gogh, vol. I, p. 198 (letter 133).