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THE KENNER OF ALL THINGS

In 1578, the twenty-seven-year-old Christiaen Huygens was appointed as one of four secretaries to Prince William of Orange.* It was a position for which he was well qualified, coming from one of the most important families in Brabant and having trained dutifully in the law, and an honour to enter the service of the man who only months before had triumphantly brought several new provinces into alliance with Holland and Zeeland, and who would soon be acclaimed as the ‘father of the fatherland’.

Christiaen was born ‘between ten and eleven o’clock in the evening’ on 22 April 1551, according to his son’s family memoir, in Terheijden, close to the city of Breda, where the House of Orange-Nassau held court. The infant’s father was already dead by then, and his mother was to die when he was just five years old.

By this time, William had inherited estates from his birthplace at Nassau in the Landgraviate of Hesse as well as the city of Orange in France and various lands in Holland, Flanders and Brabant, where the Lutheran boy had received a Roman Catholic education. Most of the territory that is now the Netherlands had been ruled from Spain under the Habsburg dynasty of Charles V since the beginning of the sixteenth century, with provincial governors known as stadholders appointed by Spain. In 1559, at the age of twenty-six, William was appointed by King Philip II of Spain as the stadholder of Holland, Zeeland and Utrecht.

Here, he sought to balance the competing religious interests, maintaining the loyalty to the Catholic Church demanded by the provinces’ Habsburg Spanish rulers while also tolerating Protestant worship. Despite William’s considerable political skill, which earned him the byname ‘the Silent’, it proved an impossible task. Ever bolder displays of Protestant devotion led in 1566 to the iconoclastic fury known as the beeldenstorm and, in the following year, to the violent reassertion of Spanish control under Philip’s hated governor-general the Duke of Alva.

With Protestants fled abroad or driven underground by Alva’s fanatical terror, the Low Countries were now primed for revolt. William, who had withdrawn to Germany, at first held back from armed conflict, but he soon found himself the focal figure of the resistance, gradually knitting a coalition between towns, cities and provinces that paid due heed to their religious and commercial particularities. However, the Dutch proved unable to match Alva in battle during the opening skirmishes of the Eighty Years War. After several years of advance and retreat, sieges and strategic floodings, the Spanish controlled the Catholic southern Netherlands while the north was consolidated in its Protestantism. William believed the best hope for regaining control of Brabant and other southern areas was to promote a regime that would permit both Catholic and Protestant worship, and in September 1578 in Brussels he proclaimed a ‘Religious Peace’.

It was into this divided world that Christiaen Huygens cautiously entered. He was able to show that he possessed the necessary qualities for a diplomatic secretary on a particularly delicate mission in 1581. According to a story related by his son Constantijn, the Spanish ambassador in London had engaged a Dutch spy, one Willem Janszoon van Hooren, on the promise that he would secure for the Spanish the port of Vlissingen, then an English garrison. The man’s ten-year-old son was held as a bond in London while he sailed for Vlissingen. When van Hooren double-crossed the ambassador and informed William of the plot, Huygens was quickly briefed to go to London and obtain the boy’s freedom. As he moved to leave the room, Huygens paused at the door and became tangled in the rope-and-pulley arrangement used to hold it open. William laughed that it was a warning: Christiaen must mind not to end up on the rope doing his job. Fortunately, the daring mission was a success. Huygens managed to detain the ambassador in conversation while an accompanying soldier seized the boy; the attack on Vlissingen was averted.

On 10 July 1584, William I of Orange was shot at the foot of the stairs in his Delft residence, the Prinsenhof, by a Burgundian Catholic, the first assassination of a head of state with a handgun. By this time, however, Huygens had demonstrated loyalty and ability, and he continued in service as secretary to William’s successors in the House of Orange, and established a family career path that would be followed first by his son and then by his grandson for more than a hundred years, so that eventually it must have seemed there had never been a time when the Huygenses were not tied to the Dutch royal house.

If Constantijn Huygens inherited his diplomatic vocation – and his fine-boned looks – from his father, then his affinity for art came undoubtedly from his mother. On 26 August 1592 Christiaen married the thirty-year-old Susanna Hoefnagel. The Hoefnagels were a leading Antwerp family of painters. Susanna’s brother Joris became famous for detailed cityscapes and miniatures. His highly accurate depictions of natural history, especially insects, give him some claim to be called the father of scientific illustration. His son Jacob followed in his father’s steps and became the court painter to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in Prague.

These parents must have set a remarkable example to their children by the circles in which they moved, but they also took unusual steps to guide the education of their four daughters and especially the two sons, Maurits, born in 1595, and Constantijn, born a year later on 4 September 1596. They imitated the ‘attractions of children’s games’ to make instruction in music, singing and dancing, and later in writing and languages, more appealing. French was memorized by reciting prayers in the language, while natural conversation was encouraged by arranging classes with French Huguenots exiled in The Hague. It was a model that worked well for Constantijn Huygens, and he later adopted the same methods in the education of his own children.

Painted by Pieter Isaacsz around 1605, a splendid harpsichord lid in the collection of the Rijksmuseum shows the mythical Maid of Amsterdam, her hand poised proprietorially on a globe, surveying a scene of riches from the continents of the world. A bounty of exotic people and produce and elaborate cultural treasure has washed up seemingly on the Dutch shore, for the lid is also the shape of the country. The work is called Amsterdam as the Centre of World Trade.

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, Dutch arts had begun to prosper in the wake of the Revolt, stimulated by an influx of refugee artists and the rapid expansion of trade, leading to a flowering of art on a scale not seen anywhere before or since. Works of art and decorative objects were no longer the exclusive preserve of aristocrats but now the prerogative of merchants and artisans.

But caveat emptor, and caveat venditor, too: not all artists were any good, and not all buyers were motivated by fine feeling. To navigate this cornucopious new world would require artistic judgement and discernment, and Constantijn Huygens’s education gave him these skills across a range of arts. Along with riding, swordsmanship and correct dress, the gentleman of the day cultivated not simply an interest but a comprehensive knowledge of the arts – he aimed to become a kenner, a connoisseur, one who truly knows. To appraise a painting properly one had to be able to paint; to appreciate a piece of music one had to be able to play, and preferably to compose. And Constantijn could. ‘I would have achieved a certain repute among artists of the middling sort,’ was his own verdict on his ability as a painter. In time, he would pass on a sense of the value of such hard-won authentic knowledge to his children.

His earliest education at home laid the groundwork: he learned languages, singing and dancing from the age of four. At six, he began on the viol, and other instruments soon followed. Huygens’s facility with a quill pen also came early on, important for a man who is thought to have written up to 100,000 letters during his long diplomatic career. His small, neat handwriting, unpretentious and businesslike, displayed his calligraphic skill, but was also essential, as Huygens was often required to write on tiny scraps of paper that could be tightly folded and sent secretly. Soon he began writing verse too, at first in Latin, inspired by his reading of the Roman poets, and later in French and Dutch.

Drawing and painting he learned from Hendrik Hondius, a noted cartographer and engraver, whose cold architectural style nevertheless did not much appeal to Huygens, who would have preferred to be instructed by the freer hand of the painter Jacques de Gheyn II. He explored various applied arts too, even trying ivory-carving, for which he had his own lathe. Through masters such as these, the young Huygens acquired a thorough knowledge of artistic theory and practice that would later enable him to put forward promising artists for patronage and to acquire and commission works for his employers at the court. He became a kenner.

It is hard to translate this word adequately. Superficially, kenner corresponds exactly with our (and the French) connoisseur, but that word has become debased in contemporary usage and no longer carries the implication of practical expertise in addition to scholarly interest. The word is most useful as a term of distinction from the ill-disciplined and often uninformed enthusiasm of the amateur or liefhebber, of whom there were great numbers in the newly rich land. These were the kind of people whose pursuit of aesthetic novelty would leave them with burnt fingers in the notorious tulip mania of 1637, and who were disparaged by real artists and critics such as Samuel van Hoogstraeten. But even the liefhebber was better than the naamkoper, who bought art solely on the strength of the artist’s name.

The painting liefhebber might occasionally dabble, but the kenner knew how to grind pigments, mix paints and use a brush, and was able to apply this detailed knowledge not only to paint, but for example to establish the authenticity of works and to resolve questions of attribution. His procedure was based, therefore, not purely on visual analysis, but involved a more complex sensorium in which his motor memory of using a brush was activated by the sight of brushstrokes on the canvas.

Constantijn Huygens was called upon to employ this skill on many occasions. Most notably, he was able to identify the supreme talents of the young Jan Lievens and Rembrandt and help them towards early commissions. But he was also able to detect professional malpractice. When the Flemish painter Gonzales Coques, commissioned by Frederik Hendrik of Orange for a series of paintings on the theme of Psyche, presented works that he had subcontracted to a lesser artist, Huygens was able to show, to the hilarity of the court and to Coques’s acute embarrassment, that the works did not bear the right ‘kennelyke’ hallmarks of the artist, and were in fact copied from some prints after Raphael.

The range of Huygens’s artistry must have done much to augment his work as a diplomat, whose professional life is so much concerned with orchestrating the exchange of refined gifts. On occasion, he was even able to employ his own creative powers directly. He always believed that his ability as a musician was a significant factor in gaining him access to influential people. But he also made material offerings. A short verse addressed to the specialist in floral still lifes, Daniel Seghers, indicates that Huygens felt himself proficient enough to dare to enclose a small painting or drawing of his own with a letter to the artist dictated by Frederik Hendrik thanking him for a painting of a vase with flowers.

Cast a compassionate eye on my wilted blooms,

Flower maker under God. They could not presume

To be anything Seghers-like . . .

Huygens clearly regarded his artistic facility as something to be nurtured lifelong. He went to his cousin Jacob Hoefnagel to learn the art of painting watercolours, for example, and as an old man he took up the guitar in addition to his other instruments. Such a high level of accomplishment naturally brought the reward of creative satisfaction for its own sake, too. Simply turning to a new medium may have helped Huygens overcome a creative block in another. Spoilt for choice in his creative faculties, Huygens may also have fretted that too much prowess displayed in one art might cause people to underprize him in others.

In addition, Huygens was able to exert an enviable degree of control over his aesthetic environment. He commissioned portraits of himself and members of his family from fashionable artists such as Antoon van Dyck, Jan Lievens, Caspar Netscher and Michiel van Mierevelt, and owned other works by painters as varied in style as Rembrandt and Pieter Saenredam. These were hung in the house on the Plein in The Hague, designed to Huygens’s expertly informed brief by two of the best Dutch architects of the age.

The ‘embarrassment of riches’, to reuse the phrase taken by Simon Schama for his thrilling study of Dutch culture in the seventeenth century, was a discomfort keenly felt in the increasingly Calvinist republic. An informed knowledge – a kennis – of the world’s cultural treasure offered a kind of possession that did not offend against public frugality. But correct Reformed conduct was not to be equated with simple abstemiousness; too many Dutch were too wealthy for that. This is where the discernment of the kenner counted for something. Luxury objects would be deemed more acceptable if they were ‘authentic’ rather than merely pretentious. The house that Huygens built on the Plein was large and grand, but it was not as ostentatious as it might have been. Indeed, its restrained classical style appeared almost severe.

The pursuit of science provided a more discreet way to squander one’s riches. Telescopes and astrolabes, instruments for mensuration and drawing, collections of minerals and stuffed animals, all made a display of serious living and learning. Huygens had not neglected the sciences in his education, studying aspects of physics, medicine and alchemy. He knew enough about them to be able to help Descartes in making telescope lenses, and he was later closely involved in his sons’ astronomical activities. He had his own scientific interests, too, for example in herbal medicines. He also developed a fancy for perfumery, copying down long lists of the spices and other ingredients needed to mix them and distilling his preparations, presumably in some kind of home laboratory.

Constantijn Huygens was one of the last of the generalists who could legitimately claim to be proficient in many fields. The enormous expansion of the arts and sciences during his lifetime would see to it that this was no longer a realistic aspiration for his children. Christiaan was to be one of the first specialists, becoming as close to being a professional scientist as was then possible.

At Leiden University, Constantijn Huygens broadened his learning still further. He acquired a solid grounding in medicine and the sciences as well as in aspects of philosophy and theology. He heard leading exponents of Latin verse such as Daniel Heinsius and Caspar Barlaeus, with whom he would later find himself in sportive rivalry. But he found many of his fellow students to be arrogant and boastful young men who scoffed at their more virtuous peers; perhaps Huygens himself came across as a little superior and priggish. He did form some friendships, however, including one with Cesar Calandrini, with whom he shared lodgings and who later moved to London and became a stern Calvinist priest.

After graduation, Huygens hoped to go to England too, making use of family contacts in The Hague at a time when various English representatives sat on the Dutch Council of State following the two countries’ alliance against Spain. He got his chance in the summer of 1618, travelling with Sir Dudley Carleton, the English ambassador in The Hague. With boils and carbuncles on his feet and fearing the plague, he hobbled round picture collections, visited Windsor and Greenwich, Oxford, Woodstock and Cambridge, embraced his friend Calandrini, and wrote home with verses and complaints about the costs of travel and medical care. Coming from a new-minted republic, Huygens was keen to see what a real king was like, and on 10 July his curiosity was satisfied when James I paid his customary annual visit to Huygens’s host in England, the long-serving Dutch ambassador Noël de Caron, in order to sample the ripe cherries in the garden of his residence in Lambeth, a ritual that involved the setting up of carpeted steps to the tree so that king could reach the best fruit.

A few weeks later, Huygens journeyed with Caron to the king’s palace at Bagshot in Surrey, where they stayed for a week. He wrote to his parents enclosing some venison pâté from a deer that the king had hunted during the course of one long day until it blundered into a pond and was captured. He gave an unsparing description of the beast’s demise, ‘from which you might deduce that it should be eaten with reverence and attention’. He also described how on this occasion he found himself playing his lute for James,

in which – I know not what right-hand demon encouraged me to make something worthy of the ear of a great king – I acquitted myself well enough for half an hour that this prince, little given to music, was forced to interrupt his card-game to listen to me, as he did with good grace, without sparing his usual remarks to assure me of the contentment that he took, even doing me the honour of speaking to me with a kind and smiling face. Upon my having kissed his hand, I took my leave in all good style, well satisfied with the good success of my little business. Here was an Iliad in the space of half an hour.

In the autumn, Carleton was sent back to Holland in response to a new religious and political crisis there. Making his own way back to The Hague, Huygens was able to sit in on some of the meetings at the Synod of Dort (Dordrecht), the international Protestant convention that consolidated points of doctrine in the Dutch Reformed Church and made it a canonical aspect of the faith that humans are fatally and irremediably sinful creatures. The event prompted a poetic confession from Huygens himself, who interleaved his verses with the lines of the Apostles’ Creed. Under the line ‘He will come again to judge the living and the dead’, he wrote in celestial images:

When water, air and earth shall tremble and shake,

When sun and moon both their brightness shall forsake,

When heaven is without light, and stars no longer shine

Of the living God shall these things be the sign.

Huygens must have proved his worth in England, because he was selected to accompany another diplomatic mission the following year when the States General signed a treaty with that other trading European republic, Venice, in December 1619. The tour was a formative experience for Huygens, opening his eyes and ears to the art, architecture and music of Italy in ways that would transform his own creativity. In Vicenza, he visited the Teatro Olimpico by the architect Andrea Palladio, while at St Mark’s in Venice he heard Claudio Monteverdi conducting his own compositions.

By January 1621, Huygens was in London once more, having been officially taken on as a secretary in the Dutch embassy to England. The Dutch aim was to enlist James’s help in bolstering Protestant Bohemia, where his son-in-law had been deposed as king, against the expansionist ambitions of the Habsburg empire. However, since England did not want to provoke Habsburg Spain, it was a hopeless cause. Huygens’s task was to take notes in the international conferences and bilateral meetings between diplomats, but his duties also took in a ceaseless round of entertainments, from jousting tournaments to ballets, that reflected the historical moment, poised between the medieval and the modern worlds.

As tensions rose with the spread of the Thirty Years War in central Europe and the renewal of Dutch attempts to shake off their Spanish oppressors, the diplomatic stakes increased, too. Following a brief return to The Hague, Huygens went back to England, trying to put the Dutch side of the argument in disputes that had arisen between the rival English and Dutch Indies trading companies, and hoping to turn James away from his growing rapprochement with Spain, which now included the prospect of his son Prince Charles’s marriage to a Spanish princess. For him, it was a routine marked by continual frustration, with only occasional indications that it might be worthwhile to stick at it. One such moment came when he was sent out to apply for an audience with the king at his hunting lodge in Royston, Hertfordshire. He was surprised to emerge from the meeting with a knighthood bestowed upon him. On the ride back to London, however, he and his horse were forced off the road by a passing convoy of carts and became trapped until they were rescued. Later in life, it was his deliverance from this mishap rather than the royal honour for which he gave thanks.

Undoubtedly, Huygens owed his rapid preferment in England not only to his own considerable charms and abilities but also to the influence of the aged Caron, who had cemented the Anglo-Dutch alliance with Queen Elizabeth I as long ago as 1585 and had retained his post under her successor. Huygens was quick to acknowledge such help when it was given, which facilitated his further rise up the social ladder.

He nevertheless viewed his profession with a certain ironic detachment. In a verse reflecting on his embassy trips to England, he described the job of an ambassador:

He is an honest Spy; abroad a canny dealer;

And here an all-round dangerous indweller;

A Prince’s longest Arm; an uninvited guest,

Who must locate their place however among the best;

Compare this with the famous remark of the Huygenses’ sometime neighbour in The Hague, Carleton’s predecessor as England’s ambassador-extraordinary to the Dutch Republic, Sir Henry Wotton, that ‘an ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country’.

The life of even a junior member of an embassy team was not entirely devoid of pleasures, however. Huygens used his leisure time to expand his social and musical network, meeting leading figures such as the composer Nicholas Lanier and the foremost lutenist of the day, Jacques Gautier. He also took the opportunity while in London to improve his knowledge of the sciences, in which he knew he was still comparatively wanting.

He started at the top by seeking out the sixty-one-year-old Sir Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam, whose literary works he had long admired. The prolific lawyer, natural philosopher and historian had risen to the position of Lord Chancellor under King James, but had been recently disgraced by a scandal for which he was briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London. Fortunately, his output as a writer and thinker remained largely unaffected by his travails in public affairs. Novum Organum, the work that set out his scientific method based on observation, experiment and inductive reasoning, had been published in 1620, and when Huygens met him he was at work on New Atlantis, the utopian novel which would describe a ‘Salomon’s House’ of scientific knowledge – an imaginary prototype of the later Royal Society – and catalogue examples of the marvellous innovations that a new approach to science might bring.

Huygens had ‘always possessed a kind of holy awe’ for Bacon, even if he felt that the Englishman might have been more modest in the titles he chose for his works. He most admired the astounding breadth of his writing, from histories to the law, science and religion, and essays on many other topics. He quoted approvingly and at length from Bacon’s argument in the early sections of Novum Organum that science in the early seventeenth century was suffering from a kind of stasis in comparison with its flowering in the classical period. But although in the end Huygens met Bacon several times, the encounters proved a cruel letdown. He found that Bacon was ‘not to be outdone in arrogant presumption and affectation’. In Huygens’s presence, Bacon adopted a distracting and pompous way of speaking and gesticulating, which the young diplomat observed was not something he did when he was with his friends, among whom he behaved completely naturally. Although Huygens emerged from these audiences with his respect intact for Bacon’s ‘exalted learning’, such that he helped to arrange the translation of some of his later works into Latin, he could only hope to erase his image of the man himself. ‘I do not believe that personal acquaintance has done any great man’s name more harm,’ he wrote in his youthful autobiography.

Huygens fared better with Cornelis Drebbel, the Alkmaar-born inventor who had lived in London since 1605 except for one long sojourn in Prague. Drebbel impressed the courts of King James and Emperor Rudolf alike with his seemingly impossible inventions, which included an apparent perpetual motion machine, a rudimentary magic lantern capable of projecting images, and even a harpsichord powered by the heat of the sun. His fair, handsome appearance and understated manner were at odds with what people expected to see in a trickster, and they were intrigued as much by the man himself as by the demonstrations he put on. He had little trouble in gaining patronage in both cities, and was set up by his English benefactors with a laboratory at Eltham Palace not far from Greenwich.

Though he was largely without formal education, Drebbel’s scientific range was vast. His inventions relied variously on mechanical, hydraulic, thermal and chemical means. He was also a proficient engraver and cartographer, producing a fine map of his home city on copper before he left it for ever. He only ever obtained one or two patents, so it appears that his main interest was in showing off his inventiveness rather than profiting by it, and for all the support he enjoyed he struggled to make a living.

Drebbel’s most astonishing coup de théâtre took place on the River Thames, or rather under it, around the time that Huygens arrived in London in 1621, when he demonstrated a passenger-carrying submarine. Contemporary accounts are vague, but the vessel was probably based on an upturned boat sheathed in animal hide and greased to make it waterproof, with leather-jointed holes for rowlocks through which the crew of eight could stick their oars in order to propel themselves underwater. There was supposedly space for sixteen passengers aboard. It seems that the floor of the submarine was open to the water, the craft relying upon the pressure of the air trapped within it and very careful seamanship to maintain its stability.

Although Huygens did not witness the demonstration directly, he later reported:

One invention to set against all the others is the little boat in which he happily dived under the water such that the King, the court and several thousand Londoners held their breath. When they had not seen him for more than three hours, so the story goes, most thought that he had fallen victim to his own piece of art, until he surfaced again at a great distance from the place where he had dived.

It was said that the vessel could remain submerged for up to twenty-four hours. How the submarine crew were supplied with air for any extended length of time without a tube to the surface has remained a mystery. Robert Boyle, the foremost chemist of the following generation, thought highly of Drebbel – ‘that deservedly famous Mechanician and Chymist’ – and understood that he had employed ‘a chymicall liquor’, whose composition he would not disclose, which was able to manufacture ‘a certain Quintessence (as Chymists speake) or spiritous part’ of air within the craft. Drebbel was well acquainted with the leading alchemists of his day, and knew, for example, that saltpetre could be heated to release the life-sustaining gas that would not be isolated and named as oxygen for another 150 years. It has been widely assumed that this was the reaction he used to maintain a breathable atmosphere aboard. However, there are other chemical possibilities. In 1690, Constantijn Huygens the younger was in London when he was visited by an elderly daughter of Cornelis Drebbel, who told him about her father’s famous submarine and explained that he had used a ‘pipe with quicksilver’ to supply the air. This hints that Drebbel may have employed a different reaction – the thermal decomposition of mercuric oxide into mercury metal and oxygen gas, the very reaction used by Joseph Priestley to isolate ‘dephlogisticated air’ in 1774.

For a man so excited by scientific spectacle, it is hardly surprising to find that Drebbel was also interested in optics. As he prepared to return to London from Prague in 1613, he hoped to regain the king’s favour with a gift, which he claimed to be his own invention, of ‘an instrument by which letters can be read at a distance of an English mile’ – or five, six or seven miles, or eight or ten, as his effusive description continued. Telescopes were already in widespread circulation in the courts of Europe by this time, but it is likely that Drebbel had effected some improvements of his own, having originally learned to grind lenses in Alkmaar with Jacob Metius. He may have been the first to use a machine to assist in the grinding process to produce standardized lenses. He was also a fine blower of glass, able to make the intricate glass components for his perpetuum mobile. In the early 1620s, Drebbel modified a telescope by introducing two convex lenses, which converted it into a primitive microscope. A different arrangement of lenses enabled him to entertain Londoners with projected images on a wall in early magic-lantern shows.

Constantijn Huygens met Drebbel briefly in the spring of 1621, and was struck by his great knowledge, which he likened to that of Pythagoras and Empedocles. The men were able to meet more frequently when Huygens returned to London for a longer stay the following year, forming both a friendship and a beneficial master–pupil relationship as Drebbel inducted his fellow expatriate into the mysteries of the physical sciences. It is ‘very probable’ that Huygens learned the techniques of lens-grinding from Drebbel at this time. He also bought from him spectacles for himself and for others, as well as a telescope and a camera obscura, which he took back with him to The Hague at the end of his posting.

They must have made a curious pair, Huygens with his trim dark beard and sharp features, and the strapping, ill-read Drebbel with his shaggy blond hair, careless of social hierarchies. It is odd on the face of it that a junior diplomat always ambitious for promotion should spend time with such a conspicuous and erratic individual. Constantijn’s father even wrote to warn his son to stay away from Drebbel, but Constantijn replied: ‘I laughed at your last in which you were pleased to warn me about Drebbel’s magic, and accused him of being a wizard.’ He amusedly reassured his father on that score, and indicated that Drebbel might possess secrets that could prove useful in the war that was expected to resume in the summer, and promised to bring back a camera obscura for their neighbour, the painter Jacques de Gheyn II, ‘which is certainly one of the masterpieces of his sorcery’.

The camera obscura is essentially a dark space with a lens or pinhole in one side through which a bright outside scene is projected – reversed and inverted – as an image on to a two-dimensional surface. Leonardo da Vinci gave one of the first accurate descriptions of such a design. Drebbel’s version was a ‘lightly constructed instrument’ designed for portability, with a closed chamber in which the image appeared, thanks to an additional mirror, in its correct orientation on a white translucent screen. Drebbel must have used a lens of exceptional clarity, for Huygens was deeply impressed by the quality of the images he saw. ‘It is impossible for me to put the beauty into words for you,’ he told his parents. ‘All painting is dead in consequence, because here is life itself, or something higher.’

He was equally swept away by Drebbel’s microscope. ‘Nothing will exhort us more strongly to the worship of the infinite wisdom and power of the Creator than to enter into this other treasure-house of nature,’ he wrote. He longed to know what artists, such as de Gheyn, who had died by the time he was writing, would have done with such an instrument. ‘If de Gheyn sr. [II] had lived longer, he would presumably have made it his task to delineate the smallest objects and insects correctly with a very fine brush. I had already begun to push him that direction and he had a mind to it. He would collect them in a book and give it the title “The New World”.’

How serious de Gheyn himself ever was about these possibilities cannot be known. What is clear is that Huygens immediately intuited – with his topical allusion to the Americas then being opened to colonial exploitation by the Dutch and others – that the terra nova of the microscopic realm was above all a treasure-house for the eye. It is notable that Huygens regarded both devices in terms of the uses that artists might find for them rather than as tools for the scientific investigation of nature. While the camera obscura was indeed more widely – and less secretively – employed by Dutch painters after Huygens’s demonstration of it in The Hague, the scenes revealed under the microscope remained for a long time too murky, and perhaps too alien and distasteful to Calvinist propriety, for artists to consider them as proper subjects.