Amsterdam

by Russell Shorto

  Where in other European capitals through the Middle Ages buildings were large, often taking up a city block, with a common courtyard, and housed extended families along with servants and tenants, the Dutch kept things more intimate. Even wealthy households were small: the house contained the family and maybe one or two servants. This, as Rybczynski argues, led the Dutch to pioneer, in their canal-side dwellings, a new concept, that of the home as consisting of a man, a woman, and their children.

  Another innovation followed from this. Elsewhere the border between public and private space was vague, partly because many people who were not related to one another often lived in the same house. Canal houses in Amsterdam would typically have a workshop just below street level and a room for receiving customers above this; the common courtesy was to remove your shoes not on entering these rooms but on going upstairs, into the area above the public space. Rybczynski argues that this taking off of shoes defined a border between public and private. The upstairs, where the bedrooms were, became, perhaps for the first time, home. Here was the intimacy of the hearth, the tiny bedroom with beds tucked snugly into closetlike corners, chairs that had some element of comfort to them. Here were fresh-cut flowers in vases and, of course, paintings on the walls. Here was gezelligheid, the untranslatable Dutch word that means something beyond coziness.

  This, I think, is what attracts those thirteen million visitors to Amsterdam. A word you hear from tourists wandering the canal zone is charm. It’s so charming. The last time I was in Paris I found myself subconsciously comparing it with my adopted city. There is no doubt that Paris wins the grandiosity contest; but at the same time that grandiosity—the high-walled temples of stone that populate nearly every part of the city, each lined with life-sized figures of French heroes, men of stone gesturing importantly to no one at all—feels a little silly. It certainly feels of another time, a time when the church or the state would mount these grand physical statements as emanations of its power. Paris’s grandiosity is to Amsterdam’s canal house cityscape what mythological figures are to ordinary people. Amsterdam relates to who we are today: it is, in a sense, where we began, we as modern people who consider individual human beings to be more important than institutions. These sleepy canal-side streets, with boats moored on one side and gabled brick houses on the other: this is the cradle of our focus on ourselves. It can’t help but seem charming to us.

  Maybe it’s not surprising then that many of the city’s museums are in canal houses and were once homes. There is Rembrandt’s former house and that of the impressionist painter Willem Witsen. The Canal House Museum is in a building on the Herengracht that was in the eighteenth century the home of a banker named Jan Willink, before whom John Adams, emissary of his nascent government, appeared in an attempt to secure a loan to keep the American Revolution going. The Anne Frank House—where she and others were in hiding during the Nazi occupation—represents a different sort of living experience.

  There was another Amsterdam house I had long wanted to see inside, but it involves some extra complication, since the family that has been associated with its interior since the seventeenth century still lives there. After a chance meeting and a bit of cajoling, I pulled my bicycle up one afternoon in front of a monumental structure along the Amstel River and found my new acquaintance—a man named Jan Pieter Six—waiting for me. He was in his early sixties, florid of face, with a tight mass of gray hair, round horn-rimmed glasses, and a lintje—a small ribbon signifying his having received a Dutch knighthood—pinned to the lapel of his immaculate suit. We stepped through the street-level doorway of the house and, as they say, into another world. This was traditionally the servants’ entrance: delftware tiles—blue-and-white renderings of birds and cityscapes, dating to the seventeenth century—lined the walls of the hall and the kitchen, which lacked only an open hearth to signal its golden age heritage.

  Here we met Jan Six’s cousin, also in his sixties, an equally distinguished-looking man, though more casually dressed, as he was after all in the comfort of his home. His name, improbably enough, was also Jan Six. His father, the previous occupant of the house, was Jan Six. His eldest son, who was not home at present but whom I would meet later, is named Jan Six.

  The arresting and arrestingly repeated name was the reason I had come to this fifty-six-room semipalace. Besides being a private abode, it is, and has been since 1915, the home of the Six Collection, arguably the world’s grandest collection of art in a private house. The collection, which was begun in the 1600s, had, by the turn of the twentieth century, reached a staggering enough degree of grandeur that its caretaker, Jan Six, great-grandfather of the man in whose kitchen I shared a typical Dutch lunch of brown bread, cheese, and milk, sought out the Dutch government for help in managing it. The result, which has been squabbled over ever since, becoming at times a matter of debate in the national parliament, is an arrangement whereby the collection is in the hands of a private foundation that is owned by the family, which has a legal contract with the Dutch state whereby the government provides a subsidy to maintain the collection and the family promises not to sell anything and to open the house to the public on a limited basis (as of this writing on weekday mornings between ten and noon). Thus a tour group might find a family member in pajamas stealing around a corner. The fuss over the arrangement continues to the present. Over our lunch, Jan Six held forth with some vim for the benefit of his cousin Jan Six about a government minister’s recent call that care of the house should be taken once and for all out of the hands of the family, on the grounds that they were not in a position to professionally oversee it. “Haven’t we been doing a pretty good job of keeping things for four hundred years?” he said.

  The Six Collection was once even grander: at one point it contained two of Vermeer’s most famous paintings (The Milkmaid and The Little Street). The existing collection still overwhelms you. There is a Frans Hals. There is a Bruegel. There is a letter from George Washington to a Six. In one room you find a nineteenth-century diadem of pearls in a case and, above it, on the wall, a portrait of one of the Six wives—Lucretia Johanna van Winter, who sat in 1825 for the French artist Alexandre-Jean Dubois Drahonet—in which she is wearing the same diadem. A red ceremonial sash worn by the mayors of Amsterdam in the seventeenth century has been valued at more than $300,000; it sits nearly lost in the background of a display case chock full of silver, jewelry, seventeenth-century drinking glasses, and miniature paintings.

  As wondrous as the collection itself is, I particularly wanted to see the drawing room of the house, which gives a glimpse of a moneyed existence in golden age Amsterdam: of what home would have felt like. It turns out to feel surprisingly comfortable. Wealth meant formality, but the vast chairs, covered in thick floral tapestries, are gracious and inviting. You can rest in them. The walls are cased in gold-colored wallpaper, which fairly strokes you with its emanations of opulence. The room speaks to you. The world is harsh and almost unremittingly cruel, it says, but here you may pause and be well and content.

  The room spoke these things to one man in particular. He came from a family of cloth dyers but used a smart marriage and political connections to lift himself to the level of a society maven. The marriage was to the daughter of Nicolaes Tulp. And as a tastemaker of Amsterdam’s golden age, he became the patron of the city’s greatest painter, Rembrandt van Rijn. His name, of course, was Jan Six.

  Before their falling out (following the pattern that dogged his career), Rembrandt drew his friend Six, and etched him, and, most famously, painted him. The portrait of the original Jan Six, the undisputed highlight of the collection, is actually slightly visible from the sidewalk outside the house, if you crane your neck and shield your eyes from the daylight glare. It hangs in the first-floor parlor. Under the latest agreement with the national government, the Rijksmuseum has the right to move it seasonally to its more public space. Otherwise, this picture that has been called the greatest portrait of the seventeenth century lives with the fa
mily.

  The canvas shows a man in middle age, wealthy, dressing to go out. He is nearly ready. He wears an immaculate gray cloak with an orange coat draped over a shoulder; he has one glove on. The greatness, art critics say, is most clearly expressed in the hands. The gloved hand is almost a cartoon, patently a painted hand, a mock-up. The other also is composed of a few quick strokes, yet it is somehow living human flesh, pink-white, with blood beating in blue veins. It shocks with its daring to seem to be alive. Similarly, the gray cloak is perfect but the orange coat is roughly done, its buttonholes just dabs, slurs of paint; it has been said that one can see Rembrandt’s fingerprint in one of these, an indication that he actually rubbed the paint onto the canvas. This image is not real, and of course you know perfectly well that it’s not real, those slurs of paint say. But again with the face, you cannot but let yourself be tricked. It is an actual human’s face: pale skin, mottled with age and cares and living, the eyes not meeting yours but staring into a middle distance, as if the evening’s destination is not of interest to the man depicted—this man of prominence whose life is so much a part of Amsterdam’s golden age—but something else on his mind is taking precedence. It’s this interplay between realism and obvious plasticity that makes this, perhaps, the first modern painting. The artist both wants you to believe in the illusion and at the same time insists on breaking the illusion, on the grounds that maintaining the illusion throughout would be the ultimate falsehood: which you might say is the definition of the modern in art.

  Later, I met Jan Six XI, son of the current master of the Six Collection, who is himself a dealer in Dutch seventeenth-century painting. He told me that he and his father are engaged in an ongoing battle about Rembrandt’s portrait of their ancestor, as well as that of the original Jan Six’s mother, on the opposite wall. The dispute is not about money or public access. It is about frames. The paintings are encased in gilt frames that were made for them in the nineteenth century and, Six the Tenth maintains, suit the period of the room. Six the Eleventh says that seventeenth-century taste would only have stood for black lacquer and that the family has a duty to return the paintings to the sort of stately, sober frames that Rembrandt intended for them.

  The grandeur of the Six mansion is a far cry from the typical Amsterdam canal house. I had already long before gotten an excellent sense of that. The first year I spent in Amsterdam, I lived with my then wife and our two daughters in a solid example of one of these simple, ur-modern homes, on the Reguliersgracht, one of the canals that extend radially from the central canal ring. Many writers have remarked on the similarity between canal houses and ships and have related the development of the one to the other. The Dutch were a seagoing people, and these homes jut upward like seventeenth-century sailing vessels. They comprise a warren of tiny rooms, linked by corkscrew staircases and narrow passages. Such was the house we lived in. The staircase even had, in place of a handrail, a rope that you clung to.

  The house was built around 1680, or at the very end of the period in which the great canal ring was constructed. Maps from a year or so earlier show three vacant lots, side by side, along the canal. The lots were bought by a little DIY real estate consortium consisting of a stonemason, a carpenter, and a diamond cutter. They built the three houses almost identically, and each man, with his family, took one. Mine was the home of the diamond cutter. The front room, looking out onto the canal, was probably his workshop and office. I took it in turn as my office and wrote a book there.

  Thanks to the shifting of the wooden piles in the foundation over the centuries, the floor of the living room listed so severely that my daughter Eva, who was eight at the time, found it spectacular that she could not set a ball in the middle without its rolling sharply to one wall. When of an evening you looked out the tiny window in the attic, which was my daughter Anna’s bedroom, you almost couldn’t help but imagine yourself a citizen of late seventeenth-century Amsterdam: a person of no great importance, perhaps, but one who could feel lucky and content, able to make your own way in the world, with your belly full and your head singing softly with beer, and the light from Jan van der Heyden’s streetlamps playing on the surface of a canal that brought the wide world to the doorstep of your own private home.

  CHAPTER

  6

  “THE RARE HAPPINESS OF LIVING IN A REPUBLIC”

  It may have been in the aftermath of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem’s Second Temple in the second century AD that Jews first settled in what in Latin was called Hispania and Greek geographers referred to as Iberia: the peninsula that became Spain and Portugal. Then again, some traditions date it to half a millennium earlier. Whatever the origins, over many centuries the Iberian Jews developed a culture that was distinct from that of Jews elsewhere, inflected by Arabic, Spanish, and Portuguese flavors. Under successive rulers and ruling faiths—Visigoths and Moors, Muslims and Christians—they endured a panoply of persecutions, but somehow they flourished and produced their own golden age. One result of this period was a rich tradition of searching for meaning, which took religious, philosophical, and mystical directions. Life began to change for the worse in the 1300s, when the Catholic Church in Spain launched a policy of forced conversions. Many conversos truly did convert, and they and their descendants became Catholics. Others—called Marranos or Crypto-Jews—lived a lie, practicing one faith in secret and another for show. Then in 1492, with the defeat of the last Muslims on the peninsula, first Spain and then Portugal dealt with their remaining internal “enemy” by simply ejecting the Jews. A new diaspora began, with more than 100,000 people wandering the earth in search of homes. Sepharad is what Jews in late antiquity called the Iberian peninsula, and the roving descendants of those who had settled in Spain and Portugal became known as Sephardim.

  The Dutch Republic, in the midst of its eight-decade war of independence against Spain, became a haven for Sephardic Jews. Amsterdam provided a welcome—of sorts. Just as it had done with various Protestant sects in the early 1500s, and as it would do with Catholics after Catholicism was booted out as the city’s official faith, Amsterdam at first allowed Jewish families to settle provided they didn’t worship openly. In 1615, however, the States General gave official Dutch sanction to the Jewish religion, and four years later Amsterdam’s Jews were allowed to practice their faith in the open. Crypto-Jews threw away their crucifixes and rosaries and began to be themselves again. Meanwhile, more and more Sephardic Jews—many of whom were traders—poured into the city, attracted by its relative tolerance and free-trading spirit. The neighborhood where the Sephardim settled looked and felt like the former Jewish quarter in Lisbon. Cumin and turmeric scented the air. Children on the streets hollered to one another in Portuguese. There were synagogues, and the Jewish schools, where children studied Hebrew and the Torah, were considered the best in Europe. Businesses prospered; families grew.

  Miguel d’Espinoza was the head of one of these families. Applying his connections in Spain and Portugal to Amsterdam’s shipping network, he built up a trading company that imported raisins, olive oil, and other Mediterranean products. With his second wife, Ana Deborah, he had three children. Their first was a daughter whom they named Miriam. Then came a son, Isaac, who died as a teenager. Their third child, who like his brother and sister was probably born at the family home in Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter, became one of the world’s greatest philosophers.

  Over time his first name evolved from Portuguese (Bento) to Hebrew (Baruch) to Christian European (Benedict). History trimmed D’Espinoza to Spinoza. He was the first true philosopher of modernity, the first to argue systematically that religion and politics should be pulled apart (an idea that was pretty much viewed as insanity at the time), and an early advocate of democracy, though he later retreated from insisting that democracy was the only acceptable form of government in much the same way that some political thinkers in our day have. He anticipated the movement to separate superstition from faith in the Bible by looking at it as a historical docum
ent, and he argued that religion should keep its nose out of scientific inquiry. His take on one of philosophy’s thorniest problems—that of the relationship between mind and brain—matches up with much of what scientists today have deduced from empirical study. Bertrand Russell called Spinoza “the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers.” In his time, and for a century after, he was one of the most hated. His has been called “a free man’s philosophy.” He was the first and maybe the greatest philosopher of liberalism, who made it his life’s work to comprehend what “freedom” means and how individuals can be free.

  Spinoza did all of this precisely because he was born in Amsterdam: because he was born into a transplanted Sephardic Jewish community trying to establish itself in a place where the forces of liberalism—individual freedom in its various guises—were rooting themselves. He took in the events of his time, the history and deeds of the city where he was born, and distilled that experience into a philosophy. Thus condensed and packaged, it became part of the genetic code of the modern centuries: it helped make them modern.

  Spinoza was born in 1632, at the same time that Rembrandt was moving from Leiden to Amsterdam, into the academy of his patron Van Uylenburgh, right on the other side of the block of houses that comprised the main part of the Jewish quarter. It was the heart of the Dutch golden age, but Spinoza grew up in the protective cocoon of Portuguese Jewry. He went to a Jewish school a few doors from his house, next to the synagogue, where he studied Hebrew, the Talmud, and laws pertaining to Jewish observance. His first step outside that world came after his older brother died when Spinoza was seventeen, followed soon after by his father. The boy was forced to leave school to help run the family business alongside another brother. The new name of the import firm—Bento y Gabriel D’Espinoza—adds a dimension to his biography that is not often taken into consideration. Among other factors influencing Spinoza’s development, he was also a businessman operating in the teeming, liberal, free-trading city that had invented some of the basic elements of capitalism.