Art history from Holland
Rembrandt suffered from a rare condition that has not yet been diagnosed. He had an aversion to spires and sometimes to towers, lopping them off his depictions of buildings we know to have had them. Schwartz worries the issue.
Continue reading “390 What did Rembrandt have against spires?”
Country life in the Dutch Republic can be said to have started in the village where Loekie and I have lived for fifty years. The protection from overdevelopment that we enjoy had its origins in the conversion of farmhouses to country homes in the 1620s. Looking more closely at the circumstances, Schwartz finds that the impulse to do so came from two Amsterdam brothers-in-law, out to impress their wives’ wealthy father.
The Temple Mount in Jerusalem exercises a bewitching lure over Jews, Muslims and Christians. Not even the famously sober Dutch Calvinists could escape its spell. At least four seventeenth-century churches in the Republic were identified in form with the Temple. So was the Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam. As similar as these features of the churches and the synagogue may look, the meanings they convey are antithetical.
Cleaning up his desk is a luxury Schwartz cannot well afford. Doing it anyway, he came across a note from a Swede he met last year. The story behind it, concerning mysterious stone patterns in the brick tower of Strängnäs Cathedral, is told here, with an appeal to the reader to solve the mystery they pose.
Continue reading “283 The four sides of the church tower of Strängnäs”