Object data
terracotta
height 90 cm × width 49.5 cm × depth 22 cm × weight 56.8 kg
height 96 cm × width 54 cm × thickness 17 cm (frame)
Artus Quellinus (I) (workshop of)
Saturn, Model for a High Relief in the Amsterdam Town Hall (now Royal Palace) at Dam Square
Amsterdam, c. 1652 - c. 1653
Technical notes
Modelled in relief and fired.
Condition
Most of the sickle in Saturn’s left hand is missing. A break can be seen above the ankles, with crumbling discernible on the shoulder of the Janus Head.
Provenance
…;1 ? from the artist,2 ? transferred to the Town Hall (now Royal Palace) at Dam Square, Amsterdam, 1664;3 transferred to the Stadstekenacademie (at two or three successive locations), Amsterdam, 1808;4 transferred to the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten (old Exchange of Hendrick de Keyser), Amsterdam, 1821;5 transferred to the Oude Mannenhuis, Amsterdam 1837;6 transferred to the Town Hall at the Prinsenhof, Amsterdam, 1878;7 on loan to the museum, since 18878
Object number: BK-AM-51-13
Credit line: On loan from the City of Amsterdam
Copyright: Public domain
Context
The great wealth and might of the city Amsterdam – the most important merchant city of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century – manifested itself in grand public works and countless other public and private buildings. This was especially true of the new town hall on the Dam Square, for which initial plans were already being made as early as 1639. The building’s design was aimed to reflect the power and prosperity that Amsterdam had come to acquire since the closing of the Scheldt in 1585, an event that cost Antwerp its leading economic position in the Low Countries.9 The existing town hall, which dated back to the Middle Ages, had become too small to accommodate the rapidly growing civic governmental apparatus and was therefore to be replaced by a new and spacious ‘urban palace’. To carry out this ambitious plan, the city’s burgomasters chose the architect Jacob van Campen (1596-1657).10
In its design, decoration and style, the new Amsterdam town hall was to glorify both the city and its governing council by mirroring illustrious examples from antiquity and its own day: the ancient Roman Republic and the modern Republic of Venice.11 Designated as the central themes were the three mainstays of Amsterdam’s economic success: good and fair governance, peace and prosperity. The Amsterdam city regents were bestowed the honorary title of vredesvader (father of peace), an appellation alluding to the seminal role these men played in negotiating the Peace of Münster, the treaty of 1648 that ended the war with the Spanish and signalled a new period of unparalleled prosperity.12 Through the classicist style of its architecture and the themes depicted in painted and sculptural decoration, this new monumental addition to the city was meant to convey Amsterdam’s standing as a worthy successor to ancient Rome, the geographic source of the Roman Republic’s past power and glory.13 Albeit less explicitly, Amsterdam also wished to mirror itself on the Republic of Venice. Both cities had begun as fishing villages and grown to become powerful merchant centres with international allure. Both cities also boasted a stable government firmly grounded on republican principles.14 Lastly, the decoration programme of the new Amsterdam town hall drew a parallel between the Israelites in the Bible and the present-day inhabitants of the Dutch Republic. Just as the Israelites – also long oppressed by a heathen religion – were led out of Egypt, so too had the Dutch liberated themselves from the yoke of the Spanish king and Catholic idolatry. The inhabitants of the Dutch Republic had God to thank for their freedom and fortune.15 All of these associations were to be unified in the new town hall’s realization, made manifest for both the city’s own burghers but also countless visitors from abroad.
In 1648, the Flemish sculptor Artus Quellinus I (1609-1668) – then one of the most successful and talented sculptors in the Low Countries16 – was hired to devise the sculptural programme of the planned town hall. Having been trained as he sculptor by his father in the Baroque milieu of Rubens in Antwerp, Quellinus travelled to Rome in 1635, where he entered the studio of the Flemish sculptor François du Quesnoy (1594-1643).17 In the words of Du Quesnoy’s biographer, Sandrart: ‘Quellinus made himself very useful when in Rome and there he studied the art of Antiquity with success.’18 Accordingly, the sculptor’s work displays both elements of Du Quesnoy’s austere Classicism and Rubens’s Baroque. Yet the Amsterdam burgomasters’ decision to place the town hall’s sculptural decoration in Quellinus’s charge was not simply based on his style and qualities as a sculptor: his international experience, knowledge of antique sculpture and ability to run a large studio were also important factors.19
The architect of the planned town hall, Jacob van Campen, was ‘artistic director’ of the decoration programme of the building’s exterior and interior in close consultation with his patrons. A number of fairly primitive pen-and-ink sketches and discernible details on the wooden, scale-model maquette show that, especially in this regard, Van Campen had very clear ideas of his own.20 Quellinus’s task was to transform these ideas and simple sketches into clear and detailed three-dimensional designs. Several terracottas in the Rijksmuseum illustrate this specific stage of the design process. Presented for approval to both Van Campen and the burgomasters charged with making the final decision, these models can be described as vidimi (vidimus (Lat.) = we have seen) in the purest sense. A subsequent stage in this process entailed the detailed realization of these sketch models into working models – scale models, possibly followed by so-called modelli grandi – to be used in the studio for the final execution of monumental sculptures in marble and bronze.
Given the monumental scale of sculptural production accomplished in a relatively short period of time, Quellinus is certain to have had a large workshop to accommodate his many assistants. While information regarding the distribution of tasks remains scant, the diverse modelling on the surviving terracottas rules out the possibility of a single sculptor working on his own. Variations in the level of finishing can also be observed. The first group of terracottas can be described as bozzetti: loosely modelled sketches functioning as preliminary, plastic explorations of a theme or composition (cf. BK-AM-51-10). The second group consists of finished modelli – the aforementioned vidimi – from which the cast replicas were made that served as models in the studio. This category of works can sometimes be identified as such by measuring marks: points, lines and grids drawn in the wet clay to facilitate the design’s reproduction and enlargement in marble or bronze.21 The third and final group consists of various replicas likewise made in Quellinus’s workshop but ultimately destined for the free market, e.g. as council members’ gifts to friends or as souvenirs privately commissioned by the burgomasters and their retinue to commemorate their role in the building of the town hall.22
Entry
This Saturn is one of the terracotta sketches and models made by the Antwerp sculptor Artus Quellinus I (1609-1668) and his assistants in preparation for the sculptural decoration of the new Amsterdam town hall, today the Royal Palace on the Dam Square (for an extensive history of the town hall, its significance and decoration programme, see ‘Context’). After the project’s completion, Quellinus’s Amsterdam studio was closed in 1664. At this time, the city’s burgomasters ordered that all of the remaining works and presentation models be transferred to the new town hall. With this move, the ensemble of fifty-one pieces officially became the property of the city of Amsterdam.23 A number were transferred to the Rijksmuseum in 1887/88 on a long-term basis. All other works are today preserved at the Amsterdam Museum.
Saturn is depicted on the present model as an old man, standing with a sickle in his left hand while wiping his mouth with one end of the cloth wrapped around his body. Lying at the god’s feet are sleeping children, soon to be devoured. Saturn’s gesture suggests that one child has already suffered this fate. Various attributes can be discerned in the background: a cut sheath of wheat, a wheeled plough and a Janus Head. The relief’s iconography can partly be traced to Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, of which the first Dutch-language translation was published in in Amsterdam in 1644. Ripa instructed that Saturn be represented as an ‘old, ugly, dirty and sluggish Man, with the head wrapped in a tattered cloth (…) He is shown with a scythe, because Time mows and eliminates all things (…) The child he devours, symbolises that Time destroys those same days [of youth], of which he is father and progenitor.’24 Ripa makes no reference to Janus’s two faces – symbolizing the past and future – or the wheel with the plough, the latter possibly referring to the oxen charged with pulling Saturn’s chariot.
The definitive version of the present terracotta belongs to a series of eight marble reliefs depicting planetary gods, mounted in the galleries on both sides of the central hall, the Burgerzaal (Citizens’ Hall). The gods were positioned between the doorways to the various office chambers and between the passages to the stairwells.25 The iconography of these reliefs can in part be traced to Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, of which a Dutch-language edition was published in Amsterdam in 1644.26 The reliefs refer to the specific functions of each of the adjoining spaces and together form a cosmological system linked to the statues on the pediments of the building’s façades and the large inlay maps of the Eastern and Western hemispheres in the floor of the main hall. In this manner, Amsterdam and its town hall were symbolically portrayed as the centre of the world and the cosmos.27 As the ruling god of Melancholy, arising from his association with financial matters, the definitive marble version of Saturn is situated between the doors to the Kamer van de Assurantiemeesters (Chamber of Insurance) and the Desolate Boedelkamer (Bankruptcy Chamber) in the north-east corner of the town hall’s north gallery. One of these two doors also leads to the town hall’s bell tower, as such underscoring the god’s role as the personification of Time.28
The present terracotta relief is an alternative, unexecuted design for the Saturn in the planetary series. Compared to the definitive version executed in marble (cf. BK-AM-51-14), Saturn is depicted less convincingly, as previously observed by Fremantle and Halsema-Kubes. Fremantle and Halsema-Kubes emphasized the superior qualities of that model when compared to the present, alternative version, in which both detected the strong influence of the town hall’s architect, Van Campen.29 The hourglass is absent, whereas on the other model it figures prominently as a symbol of Time. Also missing is the iconographic motif of Saturn devouring his children shown explicitly – one finds no more than subtle references in the form of sleeping babies and the gesture of the wiping of the mouth. Lastly, the background of the model is framed by an egg-and-dart moulding, a motif encountered only on the alternative, likewise unexecuted model for the Jupiter (BK-AM-51-15).
Vlaardingerbroek ascribed the present terracotta to Rombout Verhulst, whom he described as an independent sculptor working on the town hall – in competition with Quellinus – versus being a studio assistant or collaborator.30 Nevertheless, the Verhulst attribution founders on insufficient stylistic grounds, with little more than circumstantial evidence to support the notion of competition between the two sculptors. Nevertheless, Vlaardingerbroek’s suggestion that the alternative Saturn was made by another hand than that of Quellinus himself deserves serious consideration.31
There is no mention of a terracotta model of Saturn in the surviving town hall account books. The 1651 accounting lists only an Apollo and a Diana measuring ‘three feet high’, each for the amount of sixty guilders.32 Together with the documented execution of the marble Saturn relief in 1653-54, this supports a most plausible dating for the original model circa 1651-53.33 If assuming it was a rejected preliminary design, the present model would have to date from around 1651-52, i.e. prior to the creation of the marble version. Following Vlaardingerbroek’s line of thought, by contrast, this so-called ‘alternative’ is instead to be seen an invention of Rombout Verhulst, made more or less around the same time as Quellinus’s design, circa 1651-53.
Ploos van Amstel’s so-called Notitie from 1769 mentions ‘the Saturn’,34 but to which of the two designs this is referring remains unclear. An undated list compiled before 1806 (1802/03?) cites two Saturn figures, possibly referring to both designs.35
Frits Scholten, 2024
Literature
J. Leeuwenberg with the assistance of W. Halsema-Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1973, no. 296, with earlier literature; K. Fremantle and W. Halsema-Kubes, Beelden Kijken: De kunst van Quellien in het Paleis op de Dam/Focus on Sculpture: Quellien’s Art in the Palace on the Dam, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Royal Palace) 1977, pp. 66-67, fig. 78; M. Jonker et al., In beeld gebracht: Beeldhouwkunst uit de collectie van het Amsterdams Historisch Museum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1995, no. 105; H. Vreeken, ‘Quellinus’ boetseersels voor het zeventiende-eeuwse stadhuis op de Dam’, in M. Jonker et al., In beeld gebracht: Beeldhouwkunst uit de collectie van het Amsterdams Historisch Museum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1995, pp. 38-59, esp. pp. 52, 55 (fig. 65b); H.J. Wiggers, ‘De stad Amsterdam en haar vroegste beeldencollectie’, in M. Jonker et al., In beeld gebracht: Beeldhouwkunst uit de collectie van het Amsterdams Historisch Museum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1995, pp. 60-75; F. Scholten, Artus Quellinus: Sculptor of Amsterdam, Amsterdam 2010, fig. 29; Pieter Vlaardingerbroek, Het paleis van de Republiek, Zwolle 2011, pp. 108, 110, fig. 129 (as by Rombout Verhulst)
Citation
F. Scholten, 2024, 'workshop of Artus (I) Quellinus, Saturn, Model for a High Relief in the Amsterdam Town Hall (now Royal Palace) at Dam Square, Amsterdam, c. 1652 - c. 1653', in F. Scholten and B. van der Mark (eds.), European Sculpture in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20035757
(accessed 10 December 2025 23:49:46).