«Archaeological Impulse» by Peter Saenredam and Arnold Buhelius: the Views of an Artist and an Antiquarian on the Monuments of Medieval Architecture

Abstract

In the first half of the 17th century, artists from the Northern Netherlands, such as Pieter Saenredam of Haarlem, implemented innovative ideas in architectural painting and engraving. While the followers of Vredeman de Vries continued the mannerist tradition in depicting architectural fantasies, Saenredam turned to the real-life Romanesque and Gothic churches and town halls. The search for new artistic imagery occurred against the backdrop of a widespread passion for collecting material evidence of the past and composing texts dedicated to old buildings. The article compares the visual representation of images of Dutch medieval architecture based on the manuscripts of the Utrecht antiquarian Arnoldus Buchelius and the works of the Haarlem master of church “perspectives” Peter Saenredam. The purpose of the article is to assess the influence of text and graphic sources on the perception of Dutch monuments of the Middle Ages that were preserved at the time the images were created. The emergence of early modern Dutch architecture and its representation largely took place through the genre of chorographic literature, in which medieval structures were seen not as a sign of a “barbarian past”, but rather as the surviving legacy of a heyday. The popularization of paintings depicting monuments of the Middle Ages contributed to the consolidation of a limited repertoire of compositions: “portrait” format, panorama, urban profile, hybrid view. Turning to epistolary sources allows us to study in more detail the specifics of the search for new artistic forms of Northern Dutch artists of the post-Reformation period, evaluate the contribution of antiquarians to this process and expand the methodology for studying architectural painting and graphics.

Keywords

Dutch antiquarianism; chorography; architectural painting and graphics; post-Reformation art; Pieter Saenredam; Arnold van Buchel;

References

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НАУЧНЫЕ ТРУДЫ
Санкт-Петербургской
академии художеств

Issues of the Foreign Art Development

When citing an article, use a bibliographic reference:
«Archaeological Impulse» by Peter Saenredam and Arnold Buhelius: the Views of an Artist and an Antiquarian on the Monuments of Medieval Architecture // Scientific Papers of St Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts'69. . Issues of the Foreign Art Development. 2024 СПб. : СПб. акад. художеств, 2024. 184 с. C. . https://doi.org/10.62625/2782-1889.2024.88.82.002

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