The Nave and Choir of the Mariakerk in Utrecht, Seen from the West

Entry

This large interior of the nave and choir of the Mariakerk in Utrecht is one of Saenredam’s most ambitious works. The gold brocade imitation tapestries on the piers make it more colourful than many of his church interiors, which are generally done in a more muted palette.¹³ Two women and a man on the left draw the viewer’s eye to the relief of a bull. That relief, which is attributed to the Utrecht artist and canon Jan van Scorel, is now in the Centraal Museum in Utrecht.¹⁴ The inscription below the relief alludes to the construction of the church, the foundations of which supposedly rest on bulls’ hides.¹⁵

The subject of this work is related to that of Saenredam’s equally lavishly decorated, 1638 interior of the same church in Braunschweig.¹⁶ There, too, a group of two women and a man stand in front of the relief, although they are not as prominent as in the Amsterdam painting. According to Gudlaugsson, the figures in the Amsterdam and Braunschweig paintings, as well as in a few others by Saenredam, are the work of the painter and architect Pieter Post. This suggestion has been accepted by several other authors.¹⁷ However, this attribution of the staffage to Post is not very convincing. Plomp, one of the few to reject Gudlaugsson’s theory, demonstrated that one of those attributions, at least, was incorrect.¹⁸

The preliminary study for the painting in the Rijksmuseum, dated 9 July 1636, is in Edinburgh (fig. b).¹⁹ The drawing shows the interior from a slightly wider and lower angle than the painting. No construction drawing has survived. Examination with infrared reflectography in 1970 revealed a grid pattern on the ground (fig. a).²⁰ This shows that Saenredam departed from his usual practice of indenting his construction drawing, but instead drew the composition on a different scale.²¹

The work described here is one of the three paintings by Saenredam that in 1725 were hanging in the house occupied in the 17th century by Constantijn Huygens (1596-1687), the private secretary to the stadholder in The Hague.²² This, combined with the fact that Huygens and Saenredam were in touch with each other, and that in 1649 Huygens wrote a four-line poem in which he referred to the inscription below the relief of the bull, makes it likely that he was the first owner of the painting.²³ As the patron, Huygens may also have had a say in the iconography, as Schwartz has argued.²⁴ Jacob van Campen, a friend of Saenredam’s and the architect of Huygens’s house, may have acted as intermediary.²⁵

On the pier in the right foreground are several children’s drawings of women and a walking bird, done in various colours. Similar drawings are found in a few other paintings by Saenredam: two interiors of St Bavo’s in Haarlem dated 1636,²⁶ and a painting of the Buurkerk in Utrecht dated 1644.²⁷ It is unclear how these scribbles should be interpreted, and the speculations by Alpers and others vary.²⁸

In 1827 this painting was being used as an overdoor.²⁹ This probably entailed altering its dimensions, for some time after entering the museum it was found to have been enlarged at the top and on the left. Those additions, which were already present in 1827, were removed during conservation in 1959.³⁰ Since the dimensions of the work in the sale of 1725 match the present ones, the additions must have been made after that date.³¹

Gerdien Wuestman, 2007

See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
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This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 260.