Cathedral of Saint John at 's-Hertogenbosch

Pieter Saenredam specialized in the painting of church interiors characterized by a luminous and detailed treatment of the architecture that carries the elegance of abstract design. In this portrayal of the fifteenth-century Cathedral of Saint John, an inscription on the choir stall in the lower left corner identifies the subject and dates the picture 1646. Saenredam seems to provide an accurate rendering of the spacious and light-filled interior; yet the relationship of this image to the actual site is quite complicated.

In 1629 ’s-Hertogenbosch had been recaptured by the rebel forces of the United Provinces; as a result, the cathedral became a site of Protestant worship and was stripped of all objects associated with Catholic liturgy, including the stained-glass windows. On July 1, 1632, Saenredam visited the church and made four drawings of its interior. One of these shows the whitewashed vaulted ceiling, the elaborate black-and-white baroque altar with statues of the Virgin and Child with Saint John, a curtain where the altarpiece used to be, and the memorial tablets to the Habsburg rulers Philip II and Albert of Austria above the altar. A second drawing depicts the baroque tomb of Gisbertus Masius, a former bishop of ’s-Hertogenbosch, with a life-size effigy of Masius kneeling in front of an altar.

Saenredam did not create this painting until 1646, and in it he altered the reality of the church’s appearance at the time. Not only did he slightly change the proportions of columns and arches to enhance the soaring quality of the Gothic architecture, but he also inserted Abraham Bloemaert’s 1612 painting of the Adoration of the Shepherds on the high altar, a work that actually graced a nearby convent. Priests leaving for exile in the southern Netherlands had carted away the cathedral’s original altarpiece, God with Christ and The Virgin as Intercessors, 1615, also by Bloemaert. Saenredam included the kneeling sculpture of Bishop Masius on the left hand side of the painting, which likely was created at the request of a Catholic patron. Through all of these changes Saenredam resurrected the cathedral as a place of Catholic worship at a time when it had become a Protestant church.