Picturing Processions: The Intersection of Art and Ritual in Seventeenth-century Dutch Visual Culture

Abstract

This study examines representations of religious and secular processions produced in the seventeenth-century Northern Netherlands. Scholars have long regarded representations of early modern processions as valuable sources of knowledge about the rich traditions of European festival culture and urban ceremony. While the literature on this topic is immense, images of processions produced in the seventeenth-century Northern Netherlands have received comparatively limited scholarly analysis. One of the reasons for this gap in the literature has to do with the prevailing perception that Dutch processions, particularly those of a religious nature, ceased to be meaningful following the adoption of Calvinism and the rise of secular authorities. This dissertation seeks to revise this misconception through a series of case studies that collectively represent the diverse and varied roles performed by processional images and the broad range of contexts in which they appeared. Chapter 1 examines Adriaen van Nieulandt’s large-scale painting of a leper procession, which initially had limited viewership in a board room of the Amsterdam Leprozenhuis, but ultimately reached a wide audience through the international dissemination of reproductions in multiple histories of the city. I argue that the painting memorialized a storied, yet defunct ritual and, in doing so, inscribed the values of community, civic charity and tolerance within Amsterdam’s cultural memory. Chapter 2 investigates Caspar Barlaeus’s Medicea hospes, a lavishly illustrated book produced to honor the 1638 visit to Amsterdam of Marie de’ Médici, Queen Regent of France. Intended for an elite European audience, the text featured a series of etched and engraved images depicting the Queen’s ritual procession through the city as well as the tableaux vivants and water spectacles staged in her honor. I suggest that Barlaeus and the Amsterdam city council capitalized on Marie’s ritual entry and its subsequent representation in the Medicea hospes as opportunities to aggrandize and disseminate the city’s reputation at home and abroad. Chapter 3 considers paintings and prints of religious processions designed for an open, middle-class market. Often intimate in scale, these images demonstrate an ongoing interest in and demand for depictions of processional subjects, which civic and ecclesiastical bodies routinely subjected to legislation. I focus on scenes of parades held on Twelfth Night and Shrovetide, the two processional rituals most often depicted by Dutch artists, and argue that viewers desired such images for their pictorialization of communal identity and the concomitant cultural values they espoused. Chapter 4 examines Hendrick van der Burch’s unusual painting of the graduation procession of a doctoral candidate at Leiden University. The subject of such an institutional rite of passage, I suggest, would have appealed to residents of the surrounding university neighborhood as a familiar, seasonal marker of celebration and as a symbolic representation of the intersection between academic ritual and the local community. Collectively, the four chapters assert the changing roles, yet continued relevance of Dutch processional images within an increasingly secular, urban and culturally pluriform society.