In this chapter

• Henricus Antonii Nerdenus
• Joannes Drusius
• Sibrandus Lubbertus
• Meinardus Schotanus
• Johannes Coccejus
• Zacharias Huber Bernardus Accama
• Tiberius Hemsterhuis Jan Palthe
• Albert Schultens Hieronymus van der Mij
• Nicolaas Ypey Tibout Regters
• Bavius Voorda Tibout Regters
• Gisbertus Voetius Nicolaes Maes
• Anna Maria van Schuurman Michiel van Mierevelt
• The anatomy lecture of Dr. Sebastiaan Egbertsz. de Vrij Werner van den Valckert
• The physician as God; The physician as angel; The physician as man; and the physician as tje devil Werner van den Valckert
• The scholar Adriaan van Beverland with a prostitute Arie de (attrib.) Vois
• The surgeon-barber Jacob Fransz. Hercules and his family Jacob van Heemskerck
• An academic ceremony in Leiden Hendrick van der Burgh
• Two officers of the Amsterdam surgeons' guild Jurriaan Pool
• The doctor's visit Cornelis Troost
• The newborn child being admired by its father Cornelis Troost
• The meeting hall of Kunst Wordt door Arbeid Verkregen Paul Constantijn La Fargue
• View of Delft Hendrick Vroom

Scholarship, science and medicine

A fitting text for an essay on the relationship between painting and scholarship in Holland is provided by the historian Johannes Isacius Pontanus, professor of medicine and philosophy in Harderwijk, who introduced the painters of Amsterdam, in his Historical description of the widely-famed merchant city Amsterdam (1614), with the words: 'Painting is closely related to scholarship.' In his family, this was literally the case. His brother Pieter Isaacsz. was well-known as a painter and as one of the leading art dealers of Amsterdam. How correct he was in general, however, is a matter for debate, or even worse: a matter of opinion.

One of the problems with his thesis is illustrated by the difference the reader may have noticed between the form of his name and his brother's. In the style of the period when they were born, neither of them had a family name. They were given a Christian name, and after it came a patronymic. Because their father's first name was Isaac, the brothers both had the patronymic Isaacsz., standing for Isaacszoon, son of Isaac. When the younger brother, Jan, went to-university and became a professional scholar, however, he followed the common practice of scholars in his time and Latinized his name, to Johannes Isacius. ('Pontanus' was an epithet alluding to Johannes's birth at sea.)

That is at the root of the problem: scholars were Latinists and painters were not. Scholars were citizens of the Republic of Letters. They communicated with each other throughout Europe in the universal language of learning, and shared a vast common store of knowledge. At the age of seven a future scholar would begin studying the classics while the future painter would be grinding pigments. If a painter expected to be able to conduct an intelligent conversation with a scholar on any subject but painting, he had a lot of catching up to do. One of the very few Dutch painters who regularly Latinized his name was Jan Lievens, of whom the learned Constantijn Huygens says that he could hold his own in discourse on 'the most miscellaneous subjects.' But Lievens was the younger brother of a Latin teacher, Titus Livius, and he himself an incurable boaster. The intellectual gap between painters and scholars is hard to imagine today, when many artists have the same kind of background in the liberal arts as specialist scholars, and may even hold the same academic rank. (Not in The Netherlands, though, where the creative arts are still kept out of the universities.)

The artists with whom some scholars did have regular contact were the draughtsmen and engravers who worked on book illustrations, which were reluctantly accepted as instruments for the transmission of knowledge. Engravers were expected to be literate, and to have at least a rudimentary understanding of the works for which they provided title plates or figures. This narrow basis for professional collaboration was cultivated energetically by a few Dutch scholars, though most had no desire to have their books illustrated or to have any other kind of contact with art.

The prejudice had many roots, the deepest of which was intellectual mistrust. In the section on religion we noted that the Calvinists valued texts above images as vehicles for imparting knowledge. This standpoint also prevailed at the universities, most of which were bulwarks of Calvinism. The issue was not only theological, however, but also cognitive. Texts are built up from discrete elements which can be examined minutely for technical correctness and truth to fact. Pictures can seldom be analyzed this way. Even those which appear to be models of straightforward description break down, under close observation, into mere spots and strokes of colour. Whatever lifelikeness they possess is plainly an illusion. To the lovers of strict interpretation that Dutch scholars tended to be, this in itself was enough to discredit painting as a partner for learning. The art of drawing, in which a line on paper may correspond to the measurable contour of an object in nature, was regarded with somewhat less suspicion. These are manifestations of what one could call 'cultural class.' (Before dismissing them as the biases of a quaint age long past, reader, you may want to ask yourself why you believe that reading a book is a more worthwhile activity than watching television.)

Social class played less of a role. Painters, like scholars, tended to come from the upper middle ranks of society; families like those of the brothers Jan and Pieter Isaacsz. and Jan and Titus Lievens were not all that exceptional. The brother of Lievens's own master Joris van Schooten was a professor at the University of Leiden – the first one to teach in the vernacular rather than Latin.

Professional stigma, on the other hand, was an important divider. When an academic got drunk or was involved in a scandal, he disgraced his calling. A painter who misbehaved was only living up to expectations. Whether or not the stereotype was earned I cannot say. But it certainly existed. The pious Mennonite father of Govert Flinck prayed to God that his son would not become a painter, 'most of them being bohemians and wantons.' (One of the rare university professors who was also a serious artist, the botanist, classicist and etcher Joannes Brosterhuysen, was constantly in trouble for excessive drinking and for living in sin with his housekeeper.) Even young men to whom this was only an added attraction may have been put off by another aspect of the painter's image: that he wore a smock and always had dirty hands, like a common worker.

A form of painting which university professors did consider appropriate for the adornment of their buildings "were portraits of themselves. This characteristic feature of the Dutch academic environment, which has continued as a living institution to our day, is represented in the exhibition with seven portraits from one of the most handsome of these series, that of the former University of Franeker in Friesland, and three from Leiden (cat.nrs. 57-66).

The relative lack of interest displayed by scholars in painters was mutual. In the exhibition is included the only known Dutch seventeenth-century painting of an academic ceremony (cat.nr.76). When Dutch artists of that period showed scholars at their work, they usually fell back on old stereotypes of the philosopher or alchemist. Men of letters who were not professional scholars would sometimes have themselves painted with attributes of learning, but scholars did so rarely.

The very institutions of their profession kept artists at a distance from scholars. The older guilds of the Republic usually lumped the painters together with the housepainters, glaziers and other less creative craftsmen. (Engravers, on the other hand, often belonged to the booksellers' guild, which of course was an important institution for universities and their professors.) There was a perennial striving on the part of artists to rise above their colleagues 'of the big brush,' to found academies and confraternities where they could be among themselves and talk about the higher things in art and life. But this movement was kept in check by other forces. When they left the guilds, painters had to establish new ties with the civic authorities for the protection of their rights, and this was not a simple matter. Moreover, most Dutch painters really did have more in common with their colleagues in the broad-based guild than with the serious students of culture in the academies.

It was not until the Age of Reason and beyond that societies were established, outside the strictly professional sphere, for painters and scholars. The most successful example is the eighteenth-century Teylers Foundation, whose survival to our day, complete with its cabinet of art and science, must be considered a miracle. More typical was the Royal Institute, founded in 1808, and still the leading learned society of the Netherlands, whose Fourth Division, for artists, was disbanded in 1851.

Ties between painters and the world of medicine were not all that much more fruitful. The medical faculties were among the first departments of the universities to make their peace with draughtsmen and engravers for the illustration of handbooks, but seldom turned to painters for any purpose but portraiture. The surgeons of Amsterdam, who were less academic than the university anatomists of Leiden, struck a fascinating compromise. They initiated the practice of portraying themselves not at a meal or as a row of heads, but as listeners at a lecture of the guild anatomist (cat.nr.69). This tradition offered painters a chance to demonstrate the value of their art as an aid to learning. The most ambitious attempt in this direction was Rembrandt's Anatomy lecture of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632), which shows the surgeon dissecting an arm. The choice of this limb has been interpreted by William Heckscher, in his book on the painting, as a demonstration that manual dexterity lies behind the miracles performed by the surgeon as well as the painter. If there was one group of surgeons in the country which would have been susceptible to this heretical argument, it would have been the Amsterdam surgeons' guild. The guild anatomy theatre was located in the same former city gate where the painters' guild had its headquarters, and many members had an interest in the arts.

The medical profession was divided between university-trained doctors and unlettered popular practitioners who were often barbers as well as surgeons (cat.nr.75). The latter were more important for painters, if only because serious paintings of the medical profession are few in number compared to the many genre paintings making fun of barber-surgeons, quacks and their patients. Even the academically trained doctors seldom get a chance to show off their expensive knowledge. When a physician appears in a painting of a Dutch household, he has nearly always been called in to diagnose a feverish young woman, which he does by holding up a flask of her urine to the light. In ways that are sometimes witty and sometimes coarse, the painter manages to suggest to the viewer that the young lady is lovesick or pregnant. In this function, the doctor was called by the homespun name 'The piss-inspector.'

Bodily functions and the suspicion of illicit sex are also the subjects of a pair of medical paintings by the foremost eighteenth-century Dutch painter, Cornelis Troost (cat. nrs. 78-79). On a visit to a lady patient of middle age, a doctor is demonstrating to the complete household the proper motion for administering an enema with a syringe. In the companion painting, the doctor attends a woman newly delivered of a baby which her soldier husband holds up beside his own reflection to assure himself of the paternal resemblance. Troost was an actor on the Amsterdam stage and a painter of decors, and many of his works reveal his involvement with the theatre.

The theatre was in fact a middle ground between the worlds of painting and of learning. Although playwrights and poets who wrote in Dutch rather than Latin were not necessarily considered scholars themselves, many of them were taken seriously by the world of learning. And they in turn collaborated in various ways with painters. The best example is Jan Vos, who was the protégé of one of the founding professors of the university of Amsterdam, Caspar Bartholomeus, and who, as director of the town theatre, was always working with painters. That did not speak for itself.

Before the middle of the seventeenth century, theoretical writings about art invariably ranked poetry above painting. The art of painting did not even have a muse for itself among the nine who surrounded Apollo on Parnassus. They brought 'to humanity the purifying power of music, the inspiration of poetry, and divine wisdom.'¹ Next to that, the sensual pleasure provided by painting does not make a very elevated impression. In poetry the divine and human spirit is made manifest in the word, while painting turns spirit into matter. In the rhetoric of art theory, painting was the tenth, non-canonical muse, who was accommodated on Parnassus thanks to the obligingness of the real arts. Re-translated into terms of everyday life, this meant that a poet who associated with painters was slumming. Jan Vos did not think it was beneath his dignity, but many more did.

Support of a much heavier calibre came from abroad, from France. There, the claims of painting were accorded full recognition with the inclusion of painters in the new Academy, founded in 1648. The first full-scale treatise on painting written in Holland after that year, by the painter Samuel van Hoogstraten, came out in 1678 under the title Introduction to the Academy of Painting (Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst), and it was divided into nine books, each corresponding to a muse. Painting had become the mistress of Parnassus.

The debate concerning the place of painting among the arts and sciences touched some essential aspects of the artistic life. To the eye of the twentieth-century viewer, the issue seems to have been resolved by history in the favour of painting. The work of seventeenth-century Dutch painters is still prized by all the world and traded for fortunes of money, while the poets of the period have been pushed off to a stuffy corner of specialist scholarship. But that is not an answer to all the questions in the debate, some of which have flared up again in our own time in a discussion between Dutch and American scholars. They disagree on the balance between the intellectual and sensual components of Dutch painting. To their clash of opinions we will return in the final section of the exhibition.

1. The Oxford classical dictionary, 1973, p.704.