The most famous monument of the Dutch Golden Age is undoubtedly the
Amsterdam Town Hall by architect Jacob van Campen inaugurated in 1655.
Today we stand in awe confronted with the grand Classicist façade, the
delightful horror of the sculptures in the Tribunal, and the
magnificence of the huge Citizens' Hall. In the period of its
construction, many artists and writers tried to capture the overwhelming
impact of the building by, among other comparisons, relating it to the
ancient Wonders of the World and by stressing its splendour, riches, and
impressive scale. In doing so, they constructed the Town Hall as the
ultimate wonder, thus offering a silent, but very powerful testimony to
the power and position of the City of Amsterdam and its rulers as equals
of the other European regimes.
To fully understand these mechanisms of power, this book relates the
Town Hall to other, impressive buildings of the same period-the palace
of the Louvre, Saint Peter's Basilica, and Banqueting House-and their
visual and textual representations. Thus, this book gives a broad
audience of readers new insights into the agency of magnificent
buildings. The Amsterdam Town Hall in Words and Images does not
restrict itself to a national scope or a purely architectural analysis,
but clarifies how artists and writers all over Europe presented
buildings as wonders of the world. This book is pioneering in its
analysis of seventeenth and eighteenth-century paintings, prints,
drawings, poems, and travel accounts and offers a new understanding of
how the wondrous character of these grand buildings was constructed.
