The Story of Civilization: Volume VII: The Age of Reason Begins

by Will Durant

  The most attractive figure in the literature of the Netherlands in this age was Constantijn Huygens, a Dutchman with all the versatility of the Italian Renaissance. His father, Christian Huygens, was secretary to the Council of State at The Hague; his son, Christian Huygens, was to be the greatest of Continental scientists in the age of Newton; between them Constantijn well maintained the family’s remarkable progression of ability. He was born at The Hague in 1596. There and at Leiden, Oxford, and Cambridge he received an ample education. He wrote Latin and Dutch poetry, excelled in athletics, and became a good musician and artist. At twenty-two he joined a diplomatic mission to England, played the lute before James I, and fell in love with John Donne, whose poems he later translated into Dutch. At twenty-three he was sent on a diplomatic mission to Venice; on his return he nearly lost his life scaling the topmost spire of the Strasbourg cathedral. In 1625 he became secretary to a succession of stadholders; in 1630 he was appointed to the Privy Council. Meanwhile he issued several volumes of poetry, distinguished by grace of style and delicacy of feeling. His death at the age of ninety (1687) marked the close of the Netherlands’ most brilliant age.

  VII. DUTCH ARTS

  The Dutch Protestants felt that medieval church architecture and decoration had been forms of indoctrination perpetuating legends and discouraging thought; they decided to worship God with prayer and sermons rather than with art; the only art they kept in their ritual was song. So their ecclesiastical architecture aimed at an almost stark simplicity. Even the Catholics raised no memorable churches in the United Provinces. Overseas merchants, in the sixteenth century, brought in, perhaps from Syria or Egypt, the idea of bulbous cupolas; the fashion spread from Holland and Russia into Germany, and became a feature of Central European baroque.

  Businessmen, not the clergy, dominated Dutch architecture. And first of all they built themselves sturdy dwellings—almost all alike, not instilling fear, like the Florentine palace, nor arousing envy; the luxury and art were all inside, and in the flower gardens carefully tended. Their civic buildings allowed more ornament and pride. Lieven de Key brought French, German, and Renaissance elements into a remarkable harmony in the Rathaus, or town hall, that he built for Leiden. The Hall of the Butchers’ Guild at Haarlem, also by Lieven de Key, is as proud as a Gothic cathedral. The town hall at The Hague shows the classic style completely domesticated in Holland.

  The Michelangelo of Dutch architecture and sculpture in this age was Hendrik de Keyser, who became city architect of Amsterdam at the age of twenty-nine (1594). There he designed the Westerkerk, the Exchange, and the East India House, all in Italian-Dutch Renaissance style. At Delft he built the town hall and the monument to William I; and in 1627, at Rotterdam, he cast in bronze his masterpiece, the noble statue of Erasmus which for some years sat calmly intact amid the ruins of the Second World War. Some of the loveliest Dutch structures dating from this period lost their lives in that failure of statesmanship.

  Pottery shone among the minor arts. In Rotterdam and Delft tiles were an industry that good taste made an art. Delft raised its faïence to a place in nearly every home in the Netherlands. About 1610, soon after the opening of Dutch trade with the Orient, Delft potters began to imitate Chinese ware, and produced a thin blue majolica called Hollandsch porseleyn.100 Soon half the West-European world displayed Delft pottery on its walls or shelves.

  The one major art in the Netherlands was painting. Never elsewhere in known history—not excepting Renaissance Italy—did an art win such pervasive popularity. For the years between 1580 and 1700 the art catalogues list fifteen thousand Dutch paintings.101 Italian influence dominated Flemish art, but in the northern provinces the successful resistance to Spanish power aroused a nationalistic spirit and pride that needed only the wealth derived from overseas trade to produce a cultural explosion. Art was turned into new channels of domesticity and realism by the almost complete withdrawal of ecclesiastical and aristocratic patronage. The new patrons were merchants, burgomasters, lawyers, corporations, guilds, communes, hospitals, even almshouses; hence the portraits, group pictures, and genre. Nearly every Dutch city had its school of artists, nourished by local patronage: Haarlem, Leiden, Utrecht, Amsterdam, Dordrecht, Delft, The Hague. Simple citizens who in other lands might have been, in art, illiterate dependents of the Church, adorned their homes with pictures, sometimes bought at considerable cost; so a baker proved his good taste by paying 600 florins ($7,500?) for a single figure by Vermeer.102 Secularization was almost complete: saints went out as subjects, merchants came in; the home and the fields triumphed over the church. Realism flourished; the bourgeois sitter appreciated a little idealization of himself and his wife, but dykes and dunes, windmills and cottages, sailing ships and cluttered docks pleasantly refreshed, on the walls, the memory of actual and common things. Jolly topers, tavern tipplers, even bordeeltjes were welcomed into homes that a century earlier might have shown saintly martyrs, historic heroes, or pagan gods. Nudes were out of style; in that damp climate, with those stout forms, nudity was no delight. The Italian cult of beauty, refinement and dignity seemed out of place in this new environment, which asked nothing more of art than the reproduction of daily life and familiar scenes.

  There was a sad side to this picture of a nation mad about pictures: the artists who painted them lived for the most part in poverty and low esteem. In Flanders the Archduke, the lords, and the bishops paid their chosen artists well. But in Holland the painters, competing individually, produced for the common market, and they reached customers largely through dealers who grew up between producer and purchaser and who knew how to buy cheap and sell dear. Dutch artists rarely received high prices: at the crest of his fame Rembrandt earned only 1,600 guilders by The Night Watch, van Goyen only 600 by his View of The Hague and much less for the rest; Jan Steen painted three portraits for twenty-seven guilders, Isaac van Ostade sold thirteen of his pictures for a like sum. Many Dutch artists had to do extraneous work to butter their bread: van Goyen sold tulips, Hobbema was a tax collector, Steen kept an inn.103 The artists themselves were so numerous that they glutted their market. A list of the famous ones would fill pages, and a list of their treasured works would crowd a book. Shall we thank them in a footnote?V

  VIII. FRANS HALS: 1580–1666

  His ancestors had lived for two centuries in Haarlem; his father was a magistrate there; but for unknown reasons Frans was born in Antwerp; not till he was nineteen did he return to live in Haarlem. We hear no more of him till 1611, when the registry of a Haarlem church notes the baptism of Herman, son of Frans Hals and his wife Anneke. The next record is from a police court (1616), telling how Frans Hals, arrested for undue beating of his wife, was severely reprimanded, and was dismissed on his undertaking to be more gentle and to avoid drunken company. Seven months later Anneke died; five months thereafter (1617) Frans married Lysbeth Reyniers; nine days later she gave him the first of ten children.104 He has left us an admirable picture of himself and this second wife.105 She lived with him through his remaining forty-seven years, putting up with all his impecuniosity and drunken bouts. There was nothing very attractive about him except that he was a great painter and a jolly soul.

  He was already thirty-six when he achieved a major success, The Banquet of the Officers of St. Joris’ Shooting Guild106—the first of the five Doelen pictures that give Hals his rank. The doelen were the headquarters of volunteers who practiced marksmanship, held competitions and social gatherings, and served as communal militia. Occasionally the officers of such guilds would pay an artist to paint their portraits as a group, each individual insisting that his prominence in the picture should be proportioned to his grade in the company and his contribution to the cost. Here, then, are these officers, decked out in their best finery, gathered around a feast, with one of them carrying the colorful standard of the company. Hals earned his fee, for each of these heads is an individual and powerful portrait, each different, each a biography and a masterpiece.

  We d
o not hear of another such assignment till eleven years later, but in the interval he produced pictures that are among the prizes of Dutch art: The Herring Seller107—again a history in a face; The Merry Trio and Junker Ramp and His Girl, both in New York; the famous Laughing Cavalier108—self-confidence incarnate, with all his fortune on his back in ruff and frills and flowered cloak, and a smile almost as subtle as La Gioconda’s. And in this period (1624?) Frans painted his Self-Portrait109—a strong and handsome face, with wistful eyes denying the pride of the fine clothes and folded arms. The man was a bruised shuttlecock between the hunger for perfection and the thirst for drink.

  In 1627 came the second Doelen group, another Officers of St. Joris’ Guild110 not so clear and bright as the first; Hals deliberately turned for a time from the easy brilliance of strong colors to the more difficult manipulation of the minor keys—half tones, gray shadows, softer outlines. Another Doelen of that year, St. Adriaen’s Shooting Guild,111 is also in subdued tones. The shooters must have been pleased, for they commissioned Hals to paint them again (1633);112 now the artist recalled his colors and displayed his genius for making every face interesting and unique. In 1639 he painted still another Officers of St. Joris’ Guild,113 but here the individual is lost in the crowd. All in all, these Doelen are among the outstanding group pictures of all time. They illustrate the emergence of the middle class into proud prominence in Dutch history and art.

  In his second period (1626–50) Hals painted portraits that cry out for remembrance: The Jolly Toper,114 under a hat large enough to cover a multitude of drinks; The Sand Runner,115 disheveled and ragged and charming; The Gypsy (or La Bohémienne), smiling and bulging in the Louvre; The Jester in Amsterdam; the fanciful Balthazar Coymans in Washington; and, as the climax of this maturity, Hals’s supreme picture, The Regents of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital,116 so like, so unlike, Rembrandt’s Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild, painted twenty-one years afterward.

  Frans’s incalculable carouses, though they do not seem to have injured his art, had hurt his standing even in a land and a time that took occasional intoxication as an ode to joy. He continued to paint pictures that would have made any artist famous: Hille Bobbe,117 “the witch of Haarlem”; the disenchanting Descartes118—enormous eyebrows, enormous nose, eyes saying “Dubito”; and (painted at the age of eighty) Young Man in a Slouch Hat.119 But meanwhile disasters multiplied. In 1639 Hals’s son Pieter was sent to an insane asylum at municipal expense. In 1641 his wayward eldest daughter, at her mother’s request, was put into a workhouse. By 1650 Frans was destitute. In 1654 the local baker sued him for a debt of two hundred gulden, and attached the painter’s goods. In 1662 the broken old man applied for and received poor relief. Two years later the Haarlem council voted him a yearly pension and an immediate gift of three loads of peat to fire his hearth.

  Probably as additional alms he was given, in this year 1664, a commission to paint two pictures: The Regents of the Almshouse and The Women Regents of the Almshouse. The male group shows the unsteady hand of the artist’s eighty-four years; many features are daubed in vaguely. But in the companion piece, the Regentessen, the old skill has surprisingly returned; here are five souls drawn out into their obedient faces, five old women wasted with unwanted tasks, prim and stern with their puritan code, forgetting the joys and frolics of their youth; yet through those grim features somehow shines a timid kindliness, a weary sympathy. These final pictures, last flames of the painter’s fire, now, with the great Doelen canvases, hang in the Frans Hals Museum that Haarlem built on the site of that almshouse.

  He died a pauper (1664), but he was given honorable burial in the chancel of St.-Bavon’s in the city whose fame rests upon a long-resisted siege and the works of her greatest son. For two centuries thereafter he was almost forgotten. His pictures sold for pittances, or by auction, or not at all. If historians of art remembered him it was to note the narrowness of his range—no religious pictures, no mythologies, no histories, no landscapes, no nudes; or the apparently careless haste of his method—no preliminary sketches, but rapid daubs and slashes of color that relied on suggestion and the beholder’s memory to fill in details. Today a possibly exaggerated acclaim balances that long neglect, and one generous critic considers Hals “the most brilliant executant of portraits the world has seen.”120 Where time, the safest judge, so vacillates in its judgment, let us be content to admire.

  IX. REMBRANDT HARMENSZ VAN RIJN: 1606–69

  He was born at Leiden to a prosperous miller, Gerrit Harmens, who added “van Rijn” to his name, probably because his house overlooked the Rhine. The artist must have loved his father, for he painted him eleven times or more: in lordly hat and chain,121 and as a money-changer,122 and as A Noble Slav123—a strong, well-modeled face bristling with character—and, in 1629, as a man sombered with age.124 His mother too he pictured a dozen times, most memorably in the Old Woman of the Vienna Gallery, worried and worn. In the Rijksmuseum at Amsterdam we see her poring over a Bible. If, as some believe, she was a Mennonite, we can better understand Rembrandt’s predilection for the Old Testament, and his closeness to the Jews.

  At fourteen he entered the University of Leiden. But he thought in other forms than ideas or words; after a year he withdrew and persuaded his father to let him study art. He did so well that in 1623 he was sent to Amsterdam as pupil to Pieter Lastman, who was then rated the Apelles of the age. Lastman had returned from Rome to Holland with a classic emphasis on correct drawing; from him, probably, Rembrandt learned to be a superlative draftsman. But after a year in Amsterdam the restless youth hurried back to Leiden, eager to paint after his own fashion. He drew or painted almost everything that he saw, including hilarious absurdities and shameless obscenities.125 He improved his art with fond experiments in self-portraiture; the mirror became his model; he has left us more self-portraits (at least sixty-two) than many great painters have left paintings. Among these early autoritratti is a charming head in The Hague: Rembrandt at twenty-three, handsome of course (for all mirrors show us handsome), hair carelessly tossed about with young superiority to conventions, eyes alert and proud with the confidence of proved ability.

  In fact, he had already established himself. In 1629 a connoisseur paid him a hundred florins for a picture—quite a fee for a young competitor in a land where painters were as numerous as bakers, and not so amply fed. His first themes, after himself and his parents, were Biblical. Jeremiah Mourning the Destruction of Jerusalem126 has the mystic aura that distinguishes Rembrandt’s religious pictures, and Simeon in the Temple127 catches completely the spirit of Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine. So many commissions came from Amsterdam that Rembrandt went back to it in 1631 and lived there the rest of his life.

  Within a year of his arrival he painted one of the world’s masterpieces, The Anatomy Lesson of Professor Nicolaes Tulp.128 There had already been several anatomies in Dutch painting. No precedents were broken, no modesty violated, when the distinguished surgeon, four times burgomaster of Amsterdam, commissioned Rembrandt to picture him giving a demonstration in anatomy in the Hall of the Surgeons’ Guild; he planned to present the painting to the guild as a memorial to his professorship. It was probably Dr. Tulp who chose the seven “students” to share the picture with him—obviously not pupils but men of maturity and standing either in medicine or in another field; and Rembrandt made full use of the opportunity to show faces illuminated with character and intelligence. The cadaver seems unduly inflated, and two of the onlookers are posing for posterity; Dr. Tulp himself takes the affair quite calmly, as one inured and confident; but the two men peering over the head of the corpse are curiosity and attention vivified; and the play of light upon flesh and ruffs announces Rembrandt’s specialty.

  Commissions now flowed in—in two years, forty. With money in his pocket and hunger in his blood, the artist was ripe for marriage (1634). Saskia Uylenborch had a lovely face, dancing eyes, hair of silk and gold, a comfortable figure and fortune; what could be lovelier than the S
askia in Cassel? She was the orphaned daughter of a wealthy lawyer and magistrate. Perhaps her cousin, an art dealer, had induced her to sit to Rembrandt for a portrait. Two sittings sufficed for a proposal. Saskia brought a dowry of forty thousand guilders, which made the future bankrupt one of the richest artists in history. She became a good wife despite her money. She bore patiently with her mate’s absorbed genius; she sat for many pictures, though they revealed her expanding form; she let him deck her out in strange costumes for the rosy Flora now in London and the simpler, wistful Flora in New York. We see his happiness in a Dresden painting where he holds her on his knee, irradiates the canvas with his smile, and raises a tall tumbler to his physical and financial ecstasy.