The Discovery of Nature: Art of the Netherlands & Low Countries. 6

Saenredam’s Stark White Walls: The Disappearance of Art.

The art historian looks at the sheer white walls of churches in Saenredam’s pictures with both dismay and curiosity: the absence of colour seem like a Calvinist premonition of the white room of postmodernist art, where decoration and support fuse together, with little interest to the art visitor unless they are concerned purely with the overlap of art and wall; the curiosity is powered by the thought of what kind of culture would encourage such a plainness in places of early modern worship; what civilisation favours a radiant clarity of this type? A possible answer may lie in an analysis of religion, philosophy and the history of optics. For Kenneth Clark to say that Saenredam’s paintings reflect the Cartesian idea of tidying “up sensations by the use of reason” is partly right: Saenredam's executed a number of finely conceived drawings which suggest a rule-based programme rather than the incertitude of experience or imagination.¹ Saenredam may have been trying to achieve in drawing the quietness and serenity of a closed circle of religious friends like the Quakers and the Quietists mentioned by Clark; but the impulse was not predominantly religious, a problem evoking the “Merton thesis” again, but in a Dutch context. A number of Saenredam’s drawings show how he has manipulated space- and the architectural objects in it- to create multiple views, sometimes a mirroring of the same view. Sometimes, as in the case of Saenredam’s view of the large organ in St Bavo (above), religion is combined within compositional space since the organ is a Protestant symbol within the visual field.²

1Clarke, Civilisation, 211.

2. Alpers, Art of Describing, 68.