Interior of the Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam

Emanuel de Witte was, with Pieter Jansz. Saenredam, the most important painter of Dutch church interiors in the seventeenth century. He only began to depict such subjects around 1650 while residing in Delft, having begun his career in his native Alkmaar painting portraits and history subjects. Upon moving to Amsterdam in the early 1650s, de Witte began to depict the interiors of its principal churches. The city’s Nieuwe Kerk, for which no fewer than a dozen depictions ranging in date from 1656 to 1683 are known, was among his favorites (see Mankes, op. cit., nos. 82-92; see also W. Liedtke, Architectural Painting in Delft, Doornspijk, 1982, p. 115, no. 239). The present painting is the artist’s largest depiction of the Nieuwe Kerk. Only the example of 1683 in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, approaches its impressive scale (fig. 1).

The fifteenth-century Nieuwe Kerk is located on Dam Square, beside what is now the stately Royal Palace, in de Witte’s time the city’s new town hall designed by Jacob van Campen. Construction on the church began in 1380, when the Bishop of Utrecht authorized the city to build a second place of worship because the thirteenth-century Oude Kerk could no longer accommodate the city’s growing population, and finished in 1408. It was consecrated the following year and the first services were held in 1410. Several fires damaged parts of the church within a few decades of construction, and it was almost entirely destroyed in 1645, after which it was rebuilt in the Gothic style. The church serves as the final resting place for several naval heroes, including Michiel de Ruyter (1607-1676), as well as the poet and playwright Joost van den Vondel (1587-1679).

The view in this painting is taken from the church’s southern aisle, de Witte’s favored vantage point for his depictions of the Nieuwe Kerk, looking from east to west. At right is a view to a portion of the choir, while in the left foreground can be seen the former Chapel of Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows. The Eggert and Marksman’s Chapels can be seen in the opening slightly further on. Together, these form three of the ten radial chapels that belong to the oldest parts of the church. As its name suggests, the Eggert Chapel was dedicated to Willem Eggert, master builder of the church, by his son, Jan, following the elder Eggert’s death on 5 July 1417. When the building became a part of the Dutch Reformed church in 1578, the radial chapels ceased to have their originally intended functions and were turned into a carpentry workshop, storage room for the gravedigger, boiler house and kitchen for the church sexton. The organ in the church’s south transept is visible through the columns at the left.

In the Dutch Republic, churches served as a manifestation of faith and community and were the site of many of life’s seminal events: baptism, marriage and, as in the painting’s foreground, burial. Here, the stone slab has been removed as a gravedigger in a simple white shirt shovels out dirt. A second gravedigger in conversation with a gentleman elegantly dressed in black gestures toward his companion. At its peak, the Nieuwe Kerk contained an estimated 10,000 graves, for which the deceased paid a substantial fee.

In addition to the gravediggers, several other figures, among them a burgher and his dog, stroll in the painting’s staid background. A second dog lifts his leg and relieves himself on the column in the right foreground. De Witte may have adopted this humorous detail from the work of his Delft contemporary Hendrick van Vliet, who frequently included it in his own paintings of church interiors. Indeed, stray dogs were such a menace to the church-going public that, from the fifteenth century on, the city council employed a hondenslager, or dog catcher, to remove these disruptive animals from the church’s interior.