AS SATISFYINGLY ELATED as I become roaming among the transfiguring masterpieces in the Mauritshuis collection, I still need to succumb to the spell exercised by some indisputably minor paintings: those that depict the interiors of churches. Among the pleasures these images offer, there is first of all a generic pleasure I associate particularly with Dutch painting (I first consciously experienced it before a skating scene by Brueghel) of falling forward into … a world. And that flicker of an out-of-body, into-the-picture sensation I’m granted in the course of scrutinizing the renderings of these large, impersonal spaces populated with very small figures has proved, over decades of museum-going, to be addictive.
So, demagnetizing myself with difficulty from the Rembrandts and the Vermeers, I might drift off to, say, The Tomb of William the Silent in the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft, painted in 1651 by Gerard Houckgeest, a petit maître who was an almost exact contemporary of Rembrandt’s, for some less individualizing pleasures.
The public space chosen for depiction here is one consecrated by two notions of elevated feeling: religious feeling (it is a church) and national feeling (it houses the tomb of the martyred founder of the House of Orange). But the painting’s title supplies the pretext, not the subject. The Tomb of William the Silent is dominated not by the monument, of which only part is visible, but by the strong verticals of the columns
and by the happy light. The subject is an architecture (in which the monument has its place) and, to our incorrigibly modern eyes, a way of presenting space.
All renderings of the large, populated by the small, which disclose the meticulously precise, invite this imagined entry. Of course, savoring the miniaturizing of a public space both deep and wide in a painting is a far more complex pleasure than, say, daydreaming in historical museums over tabletop models of the scenography of the past. Transcription through miniaturization in three dimensions gives us a thing whose aim is that of an inventory, completeness, and which enchants by being replete with unexpected detail—as true of a model railroad or a doll’s house as of a diorama. The painting’s surface gives us a view, which is shaped by preexisting formal notions of the visually appropriate (such as perspective), and which delights by what it excludes as much as by what it selects. And much of the pleasure of The Tomb of William the Silent comes from how bold its exclusions are.
To start with, the painting is not just the view of something but (like a photograph) something as viewed. Houckgeest made other portraits of the interior of the Nieuwe Kerk, including a wider-angle picture of the same site, now in the Hamburg Kunsthalle, and presumed to be earlier than the Mauritshuis picture. But this is surely his most original account of the space, not least because of the features it shares with a photographic way of seeing. For in addition to its illusionist method—that it records the site, with considerable accuracy, from a real viewpoint—there is the unconventionally tight framing, which brings the base of the column looming in the center almost to the picture’s bottom edge. And while the Hamburg version shows three windows, the main sources of light in the Mauritshuis painting are “off.” We see only a dull bit of high window, just below the arched top border of the panel; the potent light which strikes the columns comes from a window beyond the picture’s right edge. In contrast to the panoramic view usually sought by painters documenting an architecture (or a landscape), which takes in more than could be seen by a single viewer, and whose norm is a space that appears comprehensive, unabridged (if indoors, self-contained, wall-to-wall), the space depicted here is one framed and lit so as to refuse visual closure. The very nearness of Houckgeest’s
viewpoint is a way of referring to, making the viewer aware of, the much larger space that continues beyond the space depicted within the borders of the picture. This is the method central to the aesthetics of photography (both still photography and film): to make what is not visible, what lies just outside the visual field, a constituent—dramatically, logically—of what we see.
THE CLOSE POINT OF VIEW, which is the most immediately engaging feature of Houckgeest’s painting, produces an allied impression: of an unusual fullness of the space. Traditionally, church interiors are rendered as relatively empty, the better to achieve the impression of vastness, which was thought to be the church’s most eloquent visual aspect. Architecture was depicted as framing, rather than filling, this deep space, and the lighting ensured that structures looked plausibly three-dimensional; without dramatic lighting, the architectural details tended to flatten out. In Houckgeest’s painting, the foreshortened view—not the light, which is benign rather than dramatic—brings out the three-dimensionality of the architecture. By being so close, and making the architecture so palpable, Houckgeest has forfeited the look that seems redolent of inwardness, aura, emotion, spirituality, as it is found in paintings by his contemporary Pieter Jansz Saenredam, most admired of all the Dutch painters of church interiors, or by an almost equally admired architectural painter of the succeeding generation, Emanuel de Witte. By the standard associated with the “poetic” emptiness of such paintings as Saenredam’s Interior of the Cunerakerk, Rhenen (1655) and de Witte’s Interior of an Imaginary Catholic Church (1668), also in the Mauritshuis, Houckgeest’s painting may seem underevocative, perversely literal. Saenredam’s achievement was to combine the atmospherics of remoteness with accuracy of depiction, depiction of a real church from a real viewpoint, though never from a near one—the eccentric choice Houckgeest has made in The Tomb of William the Silent.
Masking a portion of the real or nominal subject by architectural bulk, or interposing a screen or lattice or other grid-like barrier between viewer and subject, is a perennial strategy of photographic framing,
and it is worth noting that Houckgeest, who has chosen an angle for his view that leaves a good part of the sepulchre behind the column in the center foreground, could have made his framing even more proto-photographic. For the next column to the right, the column that looms largest in the Hamburg version, should still be partly visible in the cropped composition of the Mauritshuis picture—both are painted from the same angle—and would, if it were there, further block our view of the monument. Houckgeest has preferred to be inaccurate, and leave the right side of the picture’s space more open.
To this space, more fully than usual inhabited by its architectural elements, are added a few inhabitants in the normal sense: eight chunky, bundled-up people with covered heads, two of whom are children; one animal; and an allegorical statue on a pedestal, the farthest forward element of the partially obscured monument. We contemplate the space Houckgeest has rendered, which includes, inside the space, these diminutive figures, coming to see or already in position for seeing. In an architecture, looking at an architecture. Giving the measure of an architecture.
Although the people in Houckgeest’s, painting are larger (we are closer) and more detailed than the tiny staffage figures that classical landscape painters added to their panoramic views, they function in a comparable way, establishing the architecture’s heroic scale. By setting scale, human figures also, almost inadvertently, create mood: they look dwarfed by the spaces they inhabit and are, usually, but few. In contrast to three-dimensional model worlds, whose miniaturized representations seem most satisfying when a large number of tiny figures are deployed on the landscape, architectural space as a subject of painting is characteristically, if unrealistically, underpopulated. Indeed, a public space thronged with people is now a signature subject of the “naïve” painter, who, by putting in lots of tiny figures, appears to be making, as it were, a genre mistake. What seems professional in the depiction of the interior of grandiose buildings or of outdoor space enclosed by buildings is that the space, which always looks somewhat stage-like, be sparsely populated. This is the involuntary pathos of many portraits of architecture that are not laden with obvious affect, like The Tomb of William the Silent. All church interiors, even this one, become “metaphysical”
interiors in de Chirico’s sense; that is, they speak of a necessary absence of the human. They cannot help but suggest this pathos, this sense of enigma.
THE PRESENCE OF PEOPLE, if just one person, makes this not only a space but a moment of stopped time. Of course, tableaux in which people are depicted in the throes of some ceremony or way of being busy project a different feeling from those in which they’re resting or gazing or explaining. As befits a church, the mood is calm—but perhaps more than calm: becalmed, indolent, though not suggestive of introspection. We are far from the visions of alienation relished by the mid-eighteenth century, when sublimity was identified with the decay of the grandiose architecture of the past, and staffage was turned into a population of spindly dejected figures stationed among the ruins, lost in reverie. The full-bodied figures in Houckgeest’s painting have a status, not just a size: they are citizens, townspeople. Where they are is where they belong.
Public space, whether rendered in two dimensions or three, is usually shown being used in a variety of representative or stereotypically contrasting ways. In the Dutch paintings of church interiors, the use of the church is often, as it is here, wholly secular. The people in the Nieuwe Kerk we are shown are spectators, visitors, not worshippers. Except for the pair of men entering the picture at the left, they have their backs to us, the viewers, but their mood seems clear. The father in the family group in the foreground with one hand raised, his head partly turned to his wife, seems to be in a posture of explaining. The two men on the far side of the barrier enclosing the sepulchre (one of whom, having turned to speak to his companion, is seen full face) and the child with the dog seem to be just loitering. This most un-Hebraic mode of Christianity does not require the continual re-performing of the separateness of the sacred; space designed for devoutness is fully open to the irreverent accents and mixtures of daily life.
Sacred space that is mildly profaned, grandiose space that is domesticated, made tender—children and dogs (often a child paired with
a dog) are characteristic presences in the Dutch paintings of church interiors: emblems of creatureliness amid the marmoreal splendors. Compare the modest number of such emblems Houckgeest settles for (one dog, two children), having chosen to treat the site at close range, with the variety offered in a conventional wide-angle view, such as de Witte’s Interior of the Oude Kerk, Amsterdam (1659), which has four dogs, one of them urinating at the base of the pillar on the left, and two children, one an infant at its mother’s breast. Graffiti are a related if less regular presence—they, too, would invariably be read as the trace of small children. The most legible of the drawings in red that Houckgeest has recorded on the warm, whitish column in the center is a stick man with a hat (the same hat worn by all six males in the painting), the stereotype of the human figure as drawn by a child. And below, scrawled in the same red chalk or ink, is the painter’s monogram and the date. As if he, too, were an artless vandal.
Devising ingenious locations for the signature or monogram is a strong Northern tradition, of which Dürer was a master, and the Dutch painters of church interiors play a witty variant of the game. In Saenredam’s Interior of the Cunerakerk, Rhenen, the painter’s name, the name of the church, and the date of the painting are to be deciphered, foreground center, as the inscription incised on the tombstone set in the floor. And in several other church interiors Saenredam inserts this information on a column on which there are some crude drawings. A brilliant example is the Interior of the Mariakerk, Utrecht (1641), in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where Saenredam’s inscription (name of church, date of painting, painter’s name) appears on a pillar at far right in three colors, as if these were graffiti made by three different hands, along with several drawings of human figures in the same three inks or chalks. Saenredam’s Interior of the Buurkerk, Utrecht (1644), in the National Gallery in London, is notable because he shows us, standing before the pillar on the far right which has an amusing drawing in red of four figures astride a horse (below which, in another color, is Saenredam’s artfully printed signature), a child, arm raised, who is starting another drawing. (Beside him is a seated child playing with a dog.) One imagines him, far from being engaged in a surreptitious defacing,
embarking on a happy exercise of immature prowess, in the mood of the grinning child displaying his stick-figure drawing in a painting done around 1520, Portrait of a Boy with Drawing by Giovanni Francesco Caroto, in the Museo del Castelvecchio in Verona—one of the other rare, premodern representations of children’s art. Houckgeest’s graffiti-plus-signature in The Tomb of William the Silent is not, then, original. But it is unusual because of its placement—the center of the picture, not on a pillar to the side—and its simplicity, its lack of informativeness. It is just a self-effacing monogram, barely distinguishable from the child’s drawings.
THE GRAFFITI HOUCKGEEST has put on the central column signify childishness but are pieces of visual wit. Two spaces are being described. Two notions of presence. A child has made an inscription on the column; the painter has drawn on the panel—two spaces, logically, that can only be depicted as one space, physically. And two temporal relations of painter to church: as a vandalizing presence in the church anterior to the painting; and as the faithful documentarist of the church who, after recording the architecture as is, signs the document.
Hindsight instructs us that the ironic paralleling of the signature of a painter with the scribbling of a child on a public surface is potentially a very rich conceit, which was to have a long career in the visual arts and has perhaps never been so generative as in recent decades. But this could not begin to happen as long as graffiti were defined only privatively—as immature, embryonic, unskilled. Graffiti have to be seen as an assertion of something, a criticism of public reality. Not until the mid-nineteenth century were graffiti discovered to be “interesting”—the key word that signals the advent of modern taste—by such pioneers of modern taste as Grandville and Baudelaire. A self-portrait Grandville did in 1844 showing himself drawing alongside a small child on a graffiti-covered wall makes a far bigger point than Houckgeest’s paralleling of two kinds of inscription, which are here only traces (their perpetrators are absent).
Houckgeest’s painting describes a world in which the abstract
order of the State, of collective life (represented by gigantic space) is so assumed, so successful, that it can be played with, by miniature elements that represent the incursion of the personal, the creaturely. Public order can be relaxed, can even be mildly defaced. The sacred and solemn can tolerate a bit of profaning. The imposing main column in his portrait of the Nieuwe Kerk is not really damaged by the graffiti, any more than the less centrally located column in de Witte’s painting is ruined by the dog’s peeing on it. Reality is sturdy, not fragile. Graffiti are an element of charm in the majestic visual environment, with not even the slightest foretaste of the menace carried by the tide of indecipherable signatures of mutinous adolescents which has washed over and bitten into the façades of monuments and the surfaces of public vehicles in the city where I live—graffiti as an assertion of disrespect, yes, but most of all simply an assertion: the powerless saying, I’m here, too. The graffiti recorded in the Dutch paintings of church interiors are mute; they do not express anything, other than their own naïveté, the endearing lack of skill of their perpetrators. The drawing on the column in Houckgeest’s painting is not directed at anyone; it is, so to speak, intransitive. Even that red “GH” seems barely directed at anyone.
What this painting shows is a friendly space, a space without discord, without aggression. The grandiose before, innocent of, the invention of melancholy space. Church interiors are the opposite of ruins, which is where the sublimity of space was to be most eloquently located in the following century. The ruin says, This is our past. The church interior says, This is our present. (It is because the beauty of the church was a matter of local pride that these paintings were commissioned, bought, hung.) Now—whether the churches have survived intact, as has the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft, or not—the church interior also says, This is our past. Still, even installed in those temples of melancholy that are the great museums of Old Master paintings like the Mauritshuis, they do not lend themselves to elegiac reverie. Attached as I am to the melancholy registers of space, as found in the architectural portraits done in Italy in the eighteenth century, particularly of Roman ruins, and in images of great natural ruins (volcanoes) and of
space as labyrinth (grottoes), I also crave the relief offered by these robust, unsoulful renderings in miniature of grandiose public space that were painted a century earlier in Holland. Who could fail to take pleasure in the thought of a world in which trespass is not a threat, perfection is not an ideal, and nostalgia is not a compulsion?
[1987]