Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the article "SubIime Architecture: Sacred Interiors Aglow" by Holland Cotter (©2002 by The New York Times Company).

Thanks to Vermeer and Rembrandt, art of the 17th-century Dutch Golden Age is box-office magic. One reason is obvious: both artists are charismatic stylists and humane thinkers. The same is true of Pieter Saenredam(1597-1665), their contemporary and, in the view of many connoisseurs, their equal, but who doesn't enjoy their popular fame. While they painted people, he painted buildings: church interiors in which the human figure was insignificant or absent. In fact, Saenredam is often referred to as an architectural portraitist, whose exacting eye for measurement, light and detail gives his pictures the accuracy of scientific photographs. But are they really so true to life? Or are they, like photographs, a mix of fact, error and wishful illusion?

Like Vermeer, Saenredam was a perfectionist and his output was fairly small. He was also an outstanding draftsman and—this is not true of Vermeer—many of bis drawings survive. All directly related to the paintings, they offer intimate insights into his art and life.

About that life we know both a little and a lot. He was born in Assendelft. After his father died when he was 10, the family moved to Haarlem, where Saenredam stayed for the rest of his life. He studied art but, being financially independent, never had to make a living from it. At 30 he decided to devote himself to architectural subjects, OI perspectives, as they were called. When he died he was buried in the Church of St. Bavo, which he had often painted.

Saenredam's fascination with Dutch churches was real, and intense enough to take him on occasional trips away from Haarlem. The longest was to Utrecht, where he stayed from June to October 1636. His long stay in Utrecht may have been forced by a plague outbreak that hit Haarlem soon after he left. In any event, his time in Utrecht was the most fruitful of his career, when he produced some of his greatest images and a visual record of his activities.

Through his drawings we can trace his whereabouts. We learn that he worked in seven different churches, five of which still exist. A soaring Gothic cathedral, called the Dom, was leveled in 1674; his drawings and paintings are the only documentation of its original appearance. The smaller, older Mariakerk一kerk is Dutch for church—was derelict when he visited and was pulled down in the 19th century. He spent six weeks there, more time than anywhere else, and in his many views of its interior and exterior, he captured its beauties and eccentricities, as if he were portraying a friend, newly met but instantly beloved. It inspired three paintings of its exterior, which are among the supreme masterpieces of Dutch art.

His work routine was the same for each church. First, he made highly detailed on-the-spot sketches of a building, including close-ups of specific features. Later, in the studio, he converted these studies into more polished drawings, adjusting perspective and scale. Still later—in some cases a quarter century later—he turned these drawings into paintings.

Few buildings, at least before photography, were observed with more passionate care. In his on-site drawings, Saenredam seems intent on getting every last little thing down, with epic results. Whole architectural histories can be read in the structural particulars he drew, civic histories in tomb inscriptions he transcribed, histories of religion and fashion in the ornaments he rendered.

Personal and professional stories also come across. Through certain drawings, we can place the artist at a particular church on a particular day, say June 30,1636. An ink-wash shadow fixes the time: 8 a.m.Another shadow to the left has a different angle: 9 a.m.So we see him moving systematically across the page.Over weeks, we see him succeeding and failing, making brilliant decisions or botching a job. Some on-site drawings are awesomely exact; others wildly misjudge spatial dimensions or cram surreal amounts of data into single image. Certain errors of judgment can be corrected later; others are disastrous, resulting in paintings that are architectural fictions.

But fiction is built into this art, just as it is into the portraits of Rembrandt and Vermeer Reality is deliberately adjusted, edited, dramatized, simplified. A church interior cluttered with the unruly stuff of life—benches, gravestones, water-stained stones—is jotted down on paper, then refined into a paint solid, a container of light, golden-brown or dove gray: a utopian vision with one foot on earth and one foot beyond.