The Rijksmuseum Research Library and Print Study Room are host to national and international researchers who are working with the collections. Today, Michel van Duijnen, the Rijksmuseum’s current Johan Huizinga fellow, is sharing some discoveries and observations around our collections.

By Michel van Duijnen

Few maritime paintings are more spectacular than Cornelis Claesz. van Wieringen’s rendering of the 1607 Battle of Gibraltar in the collection of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam [Ill. 1]. The eye of the viewer is immediately guided towards the exploding Spanish ship which fills the right side of the painting. Wreckage, rigging, breechloaders, and dismembered bodies are thrown high up into the sky. This sight is a uniquely violent interpretation of war at sea: no other maritime painter had ever shown in such explicit terms the impact of a gunpowder explosion on the human body.

For the attentive viewer, however, a different, perhaps more sinister kind of violence unfolds in the foreground of the painting [Ill. 3]. Here, a drowning Spanish soldier approaching a sloop full of Dutchmen is greeted with a raised oar, on the verge of being beaten back down into the waves. This violent scene did not simply sprout from the painter’s imagination. Dutch pamphlets on the crushing victory at the Battle of Gibraltar (1607) triumphantly reported about the merciless battle plan of Admiral Jacob van Heemskerck, who had ordered for sloops to scour the bay to make sure no fleeing Spaniards would make it to the coast alive. With the destruction of most of the Spanish ships, a veritable bloodbath unfolded, with Spanish casualties numbering up in the thousands.

Despite the straightforward documentary evidence that Dutch soldiers and sailors killed fleeing Spaniards, the description of Van Wieringen’s scene in the digital collection of the Rijksmuseum is somewhat apologetic: ‘Op de voorgrond proberen zeelieden zich in sloepen te redden’ [On the foreground, sailors try to save themselves in sloops]. Yet the overpassing of this type of explicit violence is hardly a twenty-first century phenomenon. In fact, it has an interesting pedigree in an 1880 drawing in the Rijksmuseum collection after the Van Wieringen painting made by Pieter van Looy [Ill. 2]. Van Looy made a number of pen drawings after Dutch seventeenth-century maritime paintings, of which six are now found in the Rijksmuseum. In his rough copy of the Van Wieringen painting, Van Looy decided against the abundant presence of dismembered Spaniards, and the different figures blown high into the sky still have all four limbs firmly attached to their bodies [Ill. 6]. Yet Van Looy also decided that the vicious Dutchmen in the foreground were somewhat problematic and changed the scene with the sloop accordingly. Instead of the oarsman beating a Spaniard down into the waves, Van Looy portrayed a sailor throwing out a rope towards a drowning man [Ill. 4]. Surely a more wholesome sight, but one that was decidedly not found in the original Van Wieringen painting.

As a cultural historian, I find the changing interpretations of Van Wieringen’s oarsman in the course of the centuries just as fascinating as the painting’s original seventeenth-century context. For this purpose, the museum has a wonderful object documentation collection which provides information on the history of these paintings within the collection of the Rijksmuseum: on the kind of descriptions that accompanied exhibitions, on their use in educational programmes, as well as on the media-exposure they received. The documentation folders always pique my interest and can be full of little surprises – old photographs, newspaper articles, and handwritten notes. But they also show how widely descriptions and interpretations of one single object can diverge from one another, as the Van Wieringen painting so clearly illustrates. I wonder, what visitors today see when they glance at the painting: a helpful Dutchman reaching out to a drowning sailor, or a heavy oar coming down on the head of a helpless man?

Bio

Michel van Duijnen is a cultural historian specialized in the visual culture of violence in the early modern period. His PhD-dissertation concerns the role of violence in late 17th-century Dutch print culture, specifically the high quality and explicit book illustration produced in Amsterdam workshops. As a Johan Huizinga Fellow at the Rijksmuseum, Michel analyses the imagination of violence in 17th-century Dutch maritime paintings. Focusing on a number of unique works from the Rijksmuseum collection, his project investigates the extremely graphic portrayal of violence characteristic for early seventeenth-century Dutch maritime art. As large paintings of naval warfare were often commissioned by (maritime) authorities, such explicit visual elements raise important questions concerning the glorification of violence, the self-image of the Dutch Republic as a military power, and the unique place of naval warfare in Dutch visual culture.

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