Of This Book We Can Tell Many a Wonder
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CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION ‘Of this Book we can tell many a wonder . .’ On 12 February 1642 a learned and merry company assembled in Voorburg, a village on the outskirts of The Hague. It was the festive opening of the new country estate of Constantijn Huygens (1596– 1687) that he dubbed ‘Vitaulium’ or ‘Hof-wijck’ (i.e. ‘Avoid Court’). Outside the Netherlands he is primarily known as the father of the mathematician Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695). In the Netherlands, however, Constantijn Huygens’ fame rests on his role as diplomat and secretary of the Prince of Orange, Frederik Hendrik (1584–1648), but above all as a poet and indefatigable lover and practitioner of the arts and sciences.1 Throughout his long life, which spanned the heyday of the Dutch Golden Age, he was in contact with virtually everyone who counted in the intellectual world: poets, painters, natural scientists. He was on friendly terms with René Descartes, was one of the first to recognise the talent of Rembrandt, and wrote letters of recommenda- tion to the Royal Society for Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, who was an unknown figure at the time. In order to be able to dedicate himself to his pursuits and to escape from the bustle of affairs at the court in The Hague, Huygens had pur- chased a large plot of land just outside the seat of government. Work on a Neo-Classical country house commenced there in 1640. The gar- den that was laid out behind the moat that surrounded the house also corresponded to a strict geometrical pattern. Many guests were to stay in Hofwijck in the ensuing years. Huygens himself spent much time there to devote himself to study, writing poetry, the noble art of gar- dening, and the contemplation of all that grew and flowered there. Hofwijck, however, was more than a haven from the life in The Hague, more than the domain of revelry and drinking. The house 1 On Constantijn Huygens see, for example, Bachrach, Sir Constantine; idem, ‘Role of the Huygens Family’; Colie, Some Thankfulnesse to Constantine; Jardine, The Repu- tation of Sir Constantijn. 2 chapter one and garden were the reflection of a philosophical total concept partly based on Vitruvius’ treatise on the connection between geometrical proportions and those of the human body.2 It is hard for anyone who visits the remains of Hofwijck today, wedged as it is between the rail- way line, motorway and office buildings, to form an impression of the intellectual context in which this work of art was created. Those inter- ested should resort to Huygens’ poetry. In 1653 Huygens published the poem Hofwyck, a text which helps the reader to gain an idea of the conceptions on which the house, and above all the garden, are based.3 Hofwijck proves to be the crystallisation of a complicated system of borrowings and allusions in which Christian symbolism and the clas- sical heritage are the protagonists. In the 2,800 alexandrines of the poem, Huygens takes the reader by the hand and shows him everything that can be seen in the garden—or, more accurately, what it would be possible to see there a hundred years later. That was the time it would take for the trees to grow to their full height and for the groves to reach maturity. There were allusions to the past and present as well as to the future. Numerous notes refer to Seneca, Virgil, Ovid, Pliny, Cicero and the Bible. The poem is accom- panied by a ground plan in which each part of the house and garden has a letter, to which the text is the key. The result is an intriguing system of references: a combination of words and things, of idea and reality. The poem marked the completion of the intertextual and mate- rial programme of Hofwijck, or, as Huygens noted with satisfaction in the last verse: ‘The big web is completed’.4 We learn from the poem that the house represents a human head, and the front windows stand for the senses. The garden alludes to the trunk and limbs. But behind this symbolism of macrocosm and micro- cosm lie further layers of meaning. The opposition between urban and rural life that Virgil celebrated in his Georgics, the doctrine of the ele- ments, the relation between art and nature, and the recollection of the Garden of Eden all form the context from which Huygens’ garden has to be understood.5 The garden, like the poem that described it, is a tis- sue of allusions and can be interpreted in a variety of ways. 2 Van Pelt, ‘Man and Cosmos in Huygens’ ‘Hofwijck’’; De Vries, Wandeling en ver- handeling, 149–215; Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting 1600–1720, 24. 3 Huygens, Vitaulium. Hofwyck. 4 Huygens, Hofwyck, 110. See also: Huygens, Mijn leven I, 155. 5 Cf. Prest, Garden of Eden; De Jong, Nature and Art..