"The eye, the senses and the mind": Marten Kretzer and his Konst-kabinet

Gary Schwartz

In memory of Michael Montias

In 1650 a rhymed description was published of an Amsterdam collection of paintings owned by a man named Marten Kretzer. The poet was Lambert van den Bos (1620-98), an apothecary, educator and language virtuoso who had recently embarked on a long, difficult career in writing.1 Before running aground in old age and ending his days in poverty, van den Bos brought forth a prolific production of plays, poetry, history, journalism and translations. After publishing, at the age of 21, a Dutch translation of the Greek comic epic the Batrachomyomachia (The battle of the frogs and the mice), in the course of the 1640s he had seen his first plays staged in the Amsterdam town theater and had written several epic poems on themes from recent history. One of his commercial successes was the translation in 1648 from the Italian of a book by Alessandro Giraffi on the revolt in Naples in 1647 led by Mas Aniello, which went into five printings.2 By and large, however, van den Bos lived not from his past writings but from his next one, in the form of commissions.

MARTEN KRETZER AND THE ARTS The earliest appearance in the documentary record of Marten Kretzer (15983-16704) shows him in a remarkable light. The time was mid-August 1635, on the approach run to the bull market in tulips of 1636-37. We find Kretzer engaged in the purchase of two tulip bulbs, to be paid for with “eleven paintings by various masters and a print by Lucas van Leyden.”5 The seller, Jan Hendricxsz. Admirael, accused Kretzer of failing to deliver all but one painting. Kretzer proclaimed his willingness to come up with the goods, but only after he had obtained assurance that the bulbs were as advertised. This may not have been an entirely sincere condition, since it could not be confirmed until the bulbs flower the following spring. Both Admirael and Kretzer traded in art as well as tulips. The two commodities have a number of things in common. They make a direct appeal to the senses, but their value is dependent on less unequivocal qualities as well. It takes connoisseurship to distinguish the chaff from the corn and market knowledge to know which items are rare enough to command high prices. The marketing of bulbs and works of art depends less on price competition than on creating by rhetorical means a widely shared conviction that this tulip is superior to that, this master to another. This set of properties – sensual pleasure, commercial interest, superior knowledge and the power of the word – also marks Kretzer’s later activities. We hear no more about his trade in tulip bulbs, but all the more about his involvement in art collecting, the art trade, art appraisal and the theatre. Kretzer’s father, Bartelt Cretser, was a soldier from "Oxenfort" (presumably the Bavarian town of Ochsenfurt, near Würzburg, where a number of Kretzers live to this day) who fought for the States army in the 1580s.6 After the tulip-bulb dispute, the outcome of which is unknown, Kretzer manifested himself mainly in connection with the arts. Between 1644 and 1649, he served three one-year terms

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 1 on the board of the Amsterdam town theatre: 1644/45, 1647/48 and 1648/49.7 During this period several plays were dedicated to him by their authors. Two were comedies: Leon de Fuyter's Verward hof (Confusion at court, a translation of the Spanish play El palacio confuso; premiere 19 September 1647) and Arnold Boelens' Bedrogen vrijer (Deceived lover; 18 January 1649), jointly dedicated to Kretzer and his fellow board member Jan Meures. The posthumous edition of Jan Harmensz. Krul's tragedy with a happy ending Tirannige liefde (Tyrannical love; 25 November 1647) has a dedication by Symon Engelbrecht to "Geeraerd Brand, Marten Kritzer en Kaspar Venkel" as the incumbent theatre board. Two other authors credited Kretzer with having provided the material for plays of their own: van den Bos for the comedy Lingua (14 September 1648, to be discussed below) and the actor-author Adam Karelsz. van Germez for Eduard of d'eerbare weduwe (Eduard or the virtuous widow; 27 November 1657). Kretzer volunteered his organizational talents to new as well as existing bodies. The director of the theatre, Jan Vos, cited "Kretser's advice" as the inspiration for the forming of the Brotherhood of Painting that had a celebratory gathering on 21 October 1654. In a publication of Thomas Asselijn's play "Broederschap der Schilderkunst," written for and produced on that occasion, the Brotherhood is said to have been founded by "M. Kretser, B. van der Elst, N. van Heldt Stockade, [and] J. Meures." The two well-known painters Bartholomeus van der Helst and Nicolaes de Helt Stockade are here sandwiched between two former members of the theatre board who had earlier been joined in the dedication by Arnold Boelens.8 Although poets had no formal place in the Brotherhood of Painting (as opposed to the abortive Union of Apelles and Apollo of 1653), the involvement of Asselijn and Vos as well as Kretzer and Meures reveals it to have had a bridge function between the dramatic and visual arts. In the field of painting it would be a mistake to consider Kretzer a well-meaning amateur. The guild of St. Luke, of which he must have been a member, called him in at least three times to perform appraisals of important painting collections.9 Among them was the collection of the dealer Johannes de Renialme (ca. 1600-1657).10 On that occasion Kretzer and the painter Adam Camerarius signed the record appraisal of 1500 guilders for Rembrandt's Christ and the woman in adultery. In one newly discovered document Kretzer is actually referred to as a “fijnschilder” – a painter in the highly detailed mode associated with Gerard Dou.11 A close association of Kretzer with at least one painter – the still-life and genre painter Pieter van den Bosch (1612/13-after 1663), a fijnschilder himself – is firmly documented.12 On 4 January 1645 he and van den Bosch signed a contract that Abraham Bredius, who published it in 1934, called “curious”: “Pieter van den Bosch will be beholden, as he committed himself (and Mr. Kretzer has accepted), to come to the house of the aforesaid Mr. Kretzer every day from the coming first of February until 1 February 1646, on long days (except Sundays, two days at Christmas, two at Pentecost, two at Easter, one at Ascension as well as any special days of penitence may be decreed by the States-General during this period [none were]), from seven in the morning until seven o’clock in the evening, and on short days from dawn until dusk, and during this time to work conscientiously and diligently (to the best of his ability) painting any and all pieces as the aforesaid Mr. Kretzer may order

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 2 and desire from him.”13 Should van den Bosch find the strength to work during his time off, he was required to offer the results to Kretzer at the same rate he earned during the week. This may sound overdemanding (Bredius pitied the poor painter), but a work week of 72 hours was not unusual at the time. Moreover, van den Bosch's pay was exceptionally high: 23 guilders for the first 51 weeks and 27 for the last week, or 1200 guilders in total, in a period when even the most skilled hired workers, such as ship's carpenters, earned barely half that amount.14 The contract places Kretzer on the high side of the scale between "mecenaat" (benevolent patronage) and exploitation. At the same time it reveals how business-like patronage could be. The agreement was certified by an Amsterdam notary with his own interests as collector and patron, Joris de Wijze. Fifteen years later de Wijze himself entered into a similar relationship with Emanuel de Witte, and this time it was Kretzer who did the paper work. On 30 April 1670 Kretzer declared that he was the one who, in his own home, had drafted the contract governing the relations between the notary and the painter. De Witte was to live in with de Wijze and to receive from him 800 guilders a year as well as room and board, presumably in exchange for his entire production.15 The arrangement probably commenced around 1660; a time limit is not specified. The amount of the emolument goes once more to show that Kretzer was far from parsimonious in his patronage of Pieter van den Bosch. The same conclusion can be drawn from a number of similar contracts from these years. In 1649 the Haarlem painter Gerardus Berleborch put his colleague Lambert Jansz. to work for a year on terms of this kind for a total of 240 guilders.16 In 1663, in Bergen op Zoom, Maria Willeboirts Bosschaert took on the services of the young painter Jacobus van den Creke for six months at the substandard rate of 24 guilders in all.17 Further light on deals of this nature is shed by a document in the archives of the Haarlem guild of St. Luke. In 1642 a heated debate was going on concerning the attempt of the township and the guild to regulate and curb public sales of art. The old guard, led by Frans Pietersz. de Grebber, submitted a 29-point petition in favor of a liberal policy towards art sales. Points 15-16 read as follows: For should the same [anti-sale measures] be put into practice ..., in the first place this will force various art-lovers ["liefhebbers"] who (in order to encourage beginning artists in their art) now purchase most of their work, to keep their hands in their pockets. Otherwise they will have no way of disposing of the pieces they buy. As a result, should young artists be left with their pieces and be required to live from their art, they will despair of their progress in art and turn to something else.18 One difference between the situation described in the Haarlem document and the Amsterdam contracts in which Marten Kretzer was involved is that neither Pieter van den Bosch nor Emanuel de Witte was particularly young when they hired themselves out to their respective patrons. The discrepancy may well be due to a rhetorical ploy in the petition, camouflaging commercial interest as an idealistic gesture towards youthful artists. The petition broaches a question very germane to the activities of a patron like Kretzer: how do "art-lovers" (Abraham Bredius's designation of Kretzer as a "gentleman-dealer" is equally appropriate, although the index to Michael Montias’s book on the Amsterdam art market lists him as

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 3 “collector, art dealer?”) sell the paintings they buy for other reasons than to keep them? Judging by his lowly subject matter, one would be inclined to think that the natural market for work by van den Bosch was correspondingly low, and that the way for a gentleman-dealer to reach it would be via those "vendu" and barroom sales so dear to the heart of Frans Pietersz. de Grebber. If conventional wisdom on the subject were accurate, that is what one would expect of a painter of unpretentious still lifes. In the event, nothing could be further from the truth. For once, we have pertinent information, and as is so often the case, it directly contradicts common-sense assumptions. On 19 August 1650 Johannes de Renialme, the most expensive art dealer in Amsterdam, wrote a letter to the Great Elector of Brandenburg to offer the prince two still-life paintings by van den Bosch. To indicate their dimensions he referred to two still lifes of oranges by the same artist that the Elector already owned (and which presumably, in view of his familiarity with them, had passed through the hands of de Renialme).19 The fact that the Great Elector was buying work by Pieter van den Bosch at all meant that the artist was positioned high in the market.20 In the Netherlands as well, van den Bosch was effectively placed at the very top of the market. A fruit still life by him was in the Arundel collection when it was sold in Amsterdam in 1684.21 If van den Bosch was a painter of downstairs subjects, the value of his work seems to have been established upstairs – and several flights up at that. These pieces of evidence – Kretzer's contract with van den Bosch and the jobbing of van den Bosch's paintings to the Grand Elector – fit into a pattern that matches the marketing abroad of Gerard Dou's paintings. This phenomenon was generally known from 1642 on, when Philips Angel publicized it in his address to the Leiden Guild of St. Luke. Following an account of high patronage through the ages, from Alexander the Great and Apelles to the Venetian town government and the painters of Venice, we read: "And in order not to go abroad, but to remain in our fatherland, even within our walls, we find [in Leiden] the exquisite, outstanding Gerrit Dou, who receives for the right of first refusal on his pieces 500 Carolus guilders a year from the Honorable Mr. Spierings."22 Petter Spiering Silvercron, "mecenas, ... resident of Sweden in The Hague from 20 October 1637 to 11 September 1649 and from 5 August to 4 December 1651, was not only the political agent of Queen Christina but also one of those who collected all manner of precious objects and rarities for her. She had other such agents, such as the Amsterdam resident Appelbom, who operated in the same way. They bought items of all kinds for their mistress, partly for her collection and partly in order to deal in them."23 In contracting van den Bosch, Kretzer was setting up the same kind of arrangement Spiering had with Dou. The relation with Friedrich Wilhelm, illuminated by de Renialme's letter, may not have proceeded from the initiative of the prince, but in terms of art sales it worked in something of the same way. As Spiering was to Dou on the one hand and Christina on the other, so were Kretzer and de Renialme (in partnership or not) to van den Bosch and Friedrich Wilhelm. Middlemen between Dutch painters and foreign rulers, financing their own transactions. It is interesting to note that both painters specialized in common, secular subjects: van den Bosch in an international mode of still-life painting and household scenes, Dou in his own brand of moralized scenes from everyday life. In addition to de Renialme, Kretzer also had other partners in the art market. When Baertge Martens, widow of the framemaker Herman Doomer, died in 1678, her estate included a list of open

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 4 accounts. Among the bad debts were 19 guilders owed by Marten Kretzer (eight years after his death) and 170 owed by "the same [Kretzer] in company with Gaesbergen."24 Because of the nature of the debt, we may assume that Kretzer's partnership with the otherwise unknown Gaesbergen had to do with trade in paintings. Perhaps he was one of the channels through which Kretzer put the products of his patronage into lower reaches of the market.

THE TONGUE AND THE FIVE SENSES Marten Kretzer and Lambert van den Bos had found each other before 1650. On 30 August 1648 van den Bos dedicated to Kretzer his Dutch adaptation of a play of 1607 by the Cambridge playwright Thomas Tomkis (ca. 1580-1634). In the preface, he writes: "It is some time now since you showed me some English comedies with the request to look them over in search of something worthy of translation. Accepting the request, and finding the Zinnens-spel of the Tongue [play of the senses] exceptionally delightful and instructive, I translated it ... into Dutch."25 The commission was unusual. While many of the offerings on the Amsterdam stage in the period were translations, few derived from English originals. Moreover, the play was full of sophisticated Elizabethan references that could not have been known to a Dutch audience. Nonetheless, van den Bos produced a creditable prose translation in which he substituted local references for some of the English ones.26 In an original elaboration on the English text, van den Bos built in readily recognizable allusions to the hallucinations of the recently deceased Caspar Barlaeus.27 The title of the original was Lingua: or the combat of the tongue, and the five senses for superiority. A pleasant comoedie, which van den Bos translated literally as Lingua, ofte strijd tusschen de tong, en de vyf zinnen, om de heerschappy. In the theatre account books the play is called Tong (Tongue) or De vijf sinnen (The five senses). The premiere took place on 14 September 1648, with the play itself enlivened between the acts with music and "The ballet of the five senses." None of the six performances, all of which took place during Kretzer's final tenure on the theatre board, was a hit at the box office. The average receipts were 115 guilders, well below the 155 guilders that the theatre took in on a normal night.28 Lingua, the tongue, is personified in the play by a woman who lays down a claim for rule over the microcosmos, the human being. Her rivals are the five senses, whom she plays out against each other by placing a golden crown and glittering gown on the street for them to fight over, which they obediently do. In a court case, Common Sense rules that the tongue is not a sense at all, at least not for the male half of mankind. Speech is belittlingly reduced to being the sixth sense of woman. In the denouement, the anti-female insult is compounded when garrulous womankind is shown to be incapable of mastering her tongue.29 The most important of the five senses, concludes Common Sense, is Sight. Even if the choice of Lingua for translation proceeded in the somewhat arbitrary way described by van den Bos, on the Amsterdam stage in 1648 the comedy was implicated in the ongoing debate concerning the relative merits and defects of the senses of sight and sound and the power of speech. This is a rich metaphor for discussions concerning such matters as the metaphysics of exteriority versus interiority, the truth value of visual as opposed to verbal evidence, the paragone

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 5 between painting and poetry, and the relative value of spectacle versus text in stage plays. As Jan Emmens has shown, this age-old theme had a meaning of its own in the Northern Netherlands. There it was deployed in polemics between Calvinists, who worshipped the Word, and Catholics, who gave precedence to the visual display of the host as the foremost manifestation of God's presence to his living believers.30 Emmens assumes that Catholic writers like Jan Vos would have been most inclined to assign superiority to the sense of sight. Lingua and, as we shall see, Kunst kabinet, do not follow this rule. Neither Kretzer nor van den Bos manifested himself emphatically as an adherent to a confession, but both were Reformed Christians. Kretzer was married in the (Calvinist) Walloon Church; van den Bos, who was rector of schools in Helmond and Dordrecht, will also have been a Calvinist. Whatever Kretzer's reason for sponsoring the translation and production of Lingua, religion is not an obvious factor. A more likely attraction of the play would be exactly the motif that Emmens thinks would have been more appropriate to Catholics: the triumph of sight – the sense of the visual arts – in a contest between the senses. For a serious collector of paintings on the theatre board who wished to use his position to further the visual arts, attaching his name to a Dutch version of Lingua would be a playfully appropriate gesture.

THE KONST KABINET OF MARTEN KRETZER: THE POEM The poem van den Bos wrote for

Kretzer early in the year 1650 is entitled KONST KABINET Van MARTEN KRETZER on the title page and

KONST-CABINET Van MARTEN CRETZER on fol. A2r. The copy consulted by J.H.W. Unger in 1884 and by the present author in the 1990s, belongs to the Koninklijk Oudheidkundig Genootschap, Royal Antiquarian Society, housed in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It seems to be the only surviving copy of the work. It was printed, no doubt at the collector's expense, by Nicolaes van Ravesteyn in Amsterdam. His logo is printed on the title page: a print of Elijah fed by the ravens, with the border caption: PERFER ET OBDURA, Have patience and endure, from Ovid, Ars amatoria, book 2, line 178. The firm was a good relation of van den Bos's: it was here that his book on Mas Aniello appeared as well as more than ten other publications.31 The format is a generous but not lavish quarto of three-and- a-half signatures (28 pages, with folio letters A-D). Far from entering the canon of Dutch literature, the poem has to my knowledge never been reprinted since 1650. The only article ever devoted to it, in the second volume of Oud Holland (1884), bears the unhelpful title "Vondeliana. II. Vondel's handschriften (Vervolg)," which has helped perpetuate the obscurity of the poem. The author was the 23-year-old Johan Hendrik Willem Unger (1861-1904), who the year before had been appointed adjunct archivist of Rotterdam. His work, despite some errors and shortcomings, is still an essential source for information on Kretzer.32 The volume is preserved in the library of the Rijksmuseum under number KOG O-246 [2] in a single vellum binding between two other Amsterdam imprints: Reyer Anslo's Martelkroon van Steven, de eerste martelaar (The martyr's crown of Steven, the first martyr; 1646) and St. Nicolaes milde gaven aen d'Amstelse ionckheyt (St. Nicholas's generous gifts to the youth of Amsterdam; 1640), attributed to Pieter van den Broeck and Jacob Valck.33 The former has been interpreted as an

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 6 "attestation of faith" of Anslo, who earlier that year was accepted as a full member of the Mennonite Church into which he was born.34 The latter is a lightly scurrilous gossip column in rhyme. Nothing more seems to unite the three editions than their format, decade and place of publication. Because this rare source has never been reprinted, and because it provides us with precious insights of several kinds into the mentality and fortunes of an important Amsterdam collector in the year 1650 as well as into the collection itself, it is here transcribed in its entirety, with a literal translation and a freer, more interpretive one (pp. xxx-xxx). The poem consists of 120 quatrains.35 It takes the form of a soliloquoy by the poet, visiting Kretzer's collection of paintings. The rhyme scheme is a strict a-b-b-a, in iambic tetrameters, with an extra unstressed syllable at the end of the second and third lines. The meter is quite coercive, forcing van den Bos to choose time and again between clarity and optimal versification. He always went for the latter. As a result, many of the quatrains are obscure to the point of incomprehensibility. This defect is aggravated by van den Bos’s weakness for plays on words. In a number of verses he links the literal meaning of an artist’s name – de Witte and Both in particular – to features of a painting, in others he picks up a word or trope in a concrete allusion and repeats it in a forced metaphorical sense. One quatrain with a style figure of this kind that still defies explanation is nr. 73: Is dit een Esel met verlof? Een gulden seght ghy, 'k moet bekennen, Indien 'er gulden Esels bennen, Ick maeck 'er oock een Esel of. (Is this an ass, by your leave? A golden one, you say. I must confess, If there are golden asses, I'll also make an ass of it.) The reader is also brought up short by van den Bos’s penchant for hyperbole. Rhetorical exaggeration belongs to the genre, but when the hired poet claims that Kretzer was greater than Prometheus or that his painting collection is better than that of any ruler who ever lived, the reader can only groan. We read the poem not for its contribution to the canon of Dutch literature but for what it tells us about Kretzer’s collection and responses to art in the mid-17th century. With some effort, the basic content can be extracted with confidence as follows. (The names of artists are modernized.)

Synopsis of Lambert van den Bos, Konst kabinet van Marten Kretzer, by quatrain

Lines Artist Subject

1-8 Expressions of amazement that painting can imitate life .

9-10 Mutual emulation of paintings in collection, their superiority to Greece.

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 7 11 Unnamed [1] Trompe l'oeil. “… a picture … to deceive people.”

12 Unnamed [2] History subject: “the best of wondrous histories.”

13 Unnamed [3] Seascape with storm clouds. "The big sky threatening storms."

14 Unnamed [4] Still life with food and table adornments. "A table heaped with adornment … delicious."

15 Unnamed [5 or continuation of 4] Unknown subject. "A pregnant mother cruel and strict.”

16-17 Transition to section on paintings by named masters, rhetorically asking what order to follow.

18 Painter who worked in a Dirck de Quade van Ravesteyn? Cf. [30]. However, he court on the Danube worked in the Prague court of Rudolf II in Prague, on the Moldau.

18 Two painters who Pieter Lastman [8, 17], Cornelis van Poelenburch [14], Jan worked in Rome Baptist Weenix [20], Pieter van Laer [41], and Jan Asselijn [44, 45] all worked in Rome. Why van den Bos speaks only of two is a mystery.

18 Two painters from Leiden Presumably Rembrandt [36] and Jan Lievens [46, 47].

19-25 Titian (ca. 1488-1576) [6] Beheading of John the Baptist: “Take it, … the head is yours. You wanted it, and it was through your dancing that it was cut off.” (Fig. XX – if example can be found.)

26-27 [Jacopo] Bassano (1510- [7] Christ mocked and crowned with thorns. “On the head 92) or a son full of divine rays, …, the crown of thorns…, mocked, … beaten and bound in chains.” An example of this combination of themes from the Bassano studio is a painting in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (fig. XX). The museum calls it an iconographical rarity.

28-31 [Pieter] Lastman (1583- [8] The suicide of Thisbe. "Another bloody blade,… stained 1633) by the lover's own hand, sharpened on virgin breasts." Listed in Freise 1911, p. 81, under nr. 106, with reference only to this poem. Perhaps identical to nr. 106a in Freise, a small painting of the subject in the estate of Willem

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 8 Spieringh, Delft, on 23 June 1689.

32-35 Unnamed [9] History painting sounding like a Christ appearing to Mary Magdalene: “…how your tongue, your hands, your eyes beg him who so recently moved…”

36-37 "Child of Leiden," [10] Adoration of the Magi. “… three kings offer their gifts to presumably Lucas van God and childish hands.” No painting by Lucas of the Leyden (1494-1533) Adoration of the Magi is known, only an engraving. However, his name was attached freely to paintings of his period.

38 Unnamed [11] Muscled figure.

39-41 [Peter Paul] Rubens Lovers. “What an abundance of art and wit comes here to (1577-1640) lavish treasure on the lovers!” Perhaps a garden of love or a double wedding portrait.

42-43 [Jacob] Jordaens (1593- Bacchanal. "Lustful joys acted out by satyrs and monsters." 1678) A characteristic example, depicting Bacchus and his revelling followers, was sold at Christie’s London on 5 July 2007, lot 66 (fig. XX). Like Kretzer’s painting, this Jordaens too was confused with work by Rubens. In a sale at Mak in Amsterdam on 26 May 1925, the painting was sold as a Rubens.

44 [Cornelis van] Feast of the gods. “… high feast celebrated by powers from Poelenburch (1594/95- heaven.” A famous painting by Poelenburch of a banquet of 1676) the gods on the ground was presented to Amalia van Solms by the States of Utrecht in 1627. Drossaers and Lunsingh Scheurleer 1974, vol. 1, p. 184, nr. 71. A “Banket der Goden in de Lucht” by the artist was sold in an anonymous auction in Amsterdam on 7 June 1708. Hoet 1752, vol. 1, p. 123, nr. 12.

45-46 [Hendrik] Terbrugghen Sleeping Mars. Identified with painting in Centraal Museum, (1588-1629) Utrecht, signed and dated 1629 (fig. XX; however, Benedict Nicolson lists six other versions of the same subject).36 A painting of this motif was the subject of a poem by Jan Vos when it was in the collection of Pieter Six (see below).

47-50 Frans Floris (1517-70) "Exalted threesome" of Godhead, presumably a Holy

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 9 Family with a nursing Madonna. The only presently known painting by Frans Floris that answers this description, down to the half-closed eyes of the nursing Christ child, is in the Musée de la Chartreuse in Douai, northern France (fig. XX).37

51 [Pieter] Lastman (1583- Elijah and the woman of Zarephath (1 Kings 17:8-24; 1633) catalogued on the basis of these lines, with no further information, as nr. 35 in Freise 1911, pp. 43-44).

52 [Jan (1581/82-1631) or Annunciation to the shepherds, with reference to the artist’s Jacob (1592/93-1650)] master. It is not apparent either from the sources or their Pynas work who the masters of Jan or Jacob Pynas were. No paintings or drawings of this subject by either Pynas brother is known. The annunciation to the shepherds was depicted a number of times by Abraham Bloemaert.

53-57 [Gerard van] Honthorst The death of Seneca. Several versions of this subject are (1592-1656) known, all of which are regarded as copies of a lost original. One is in Utrecht, Centraal Museum, another on permanent loan from a private Canadian collection to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (fig. XX).

58-60 [Jan Baptist] Weenix Storks fighting. No such subject yet identified. Not (1621-59) mentioned in Ginnings 1970.

61-67 [Jan Baptist] Weenix in Unspecified. The execution was graceful, the brushwork collaboration with [Pieter] enchanting, the concept witty, the space in accord with the van den Bosch (1604- laws of perspective, with convincing depiction of velvet and after 1649?) and an marble. unnamed artist whose work "adorns the king's chambers"

68-69 [Titian] (1485/90-1576). Mary Magdalene. Vondel’s description of the saint as Identified through the strikingly healthy and sensual, with “mouth and breasts one reference to another would like to kiss,” recovered from her life as a fallen poem on the painting “by woman, makes it sound like a version of Titian’s famous a better pen than mine,” Mary Magdalene in the Palazzo Pitti (fig. XX) rather than – that of Vondel, in his the more demure later version in the Hermitage. Since the verse of 1648 or earlier painting in the Pitti is documented in Italian princely

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 10 “Op M. Kretzers Ste. collections in the 16th and 17th centuries, Kretzer’s painting Marie Magdalene door is most likely to have been a copy. Titiaen geschildert.”38

70 Andrea del Sarto (1486- Madonna. The earliest reference to a Madonna by Andrea 1530) del Sarto in the Netherlands that I have found is in the sale in The Hague on 25 August 1760 of paintings from the estate of Gerard Hoet (1698-1760), listed in Hoet and Terwesten 1770, vol. 3, p. 222: “2. Maria met ‘t Kindje, door A. del Sarto, hoog 31, breet 25 ½ duimen. 100-0” (Madonna and child, by A. del Sarto, 31 inches high, 25 ½ inches wide. 100 guilders). An Andrea del Sarto Madonna of approximately those dimensions from the collection of Mrs. Alfred Taubman was on loan in 2011 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. XX).

71 Miss van der Werf. No "Painting without line or paint." Presumably embroidery or artist of that name is another needle art. recorded in the 17th century.

72 [Anthonis] Mor (1519- Father of sixty children. No portrait of this impressive 1576/77) individual is known in the literature.

73 Gulden Esel. One of the Unspecified, unless it is a painting of a donkey. members of the club of northern European artists in Rome, the Bent, was nicknamed Den Gulden Ezel, the Golden Ass. An 18th-century auction catalogue assigns this name to Jan Hals (ca. 1620-1674), a son of Frans Hals, but there is no further evidence to back this up.

74-76 Unnamed Allegory of sensual love.

77 [Joachim von] Sandrart Fish. Fish still lifes were one of Sandrart’s specialties. In

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 11 (1606-88) 1654 or 1655 he painted a vast fish market probably for Archbishop Guidobald Graf Thun, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (fig. XX).

78 [Jan (1615-52) or Brothel. An idea of what a painting of this description could Andries (1612/13-1642)] have looked like is the brothel scene by Andries Both in the Both Bredius Museum., The Hague (fig. XX).39

79-80 [Dirck de Quade van] Portrait of Rudolph II. “During the reign of Rudolf II the Ravesteyn (active in painting workshops on Prague Castle Hill produced dozens Prague 1589-1612) if not hundreds of portraits of the emperor.” (Fusenig 2010, p. 186.) A portrait of Rudolf II by the artist, presumably a different one, was owned by a later member of the van Ravesteyn family in 1662.40] One of those by his older contemporary Hans von Aachen (1552-1615) is a characteristic example (fig. XX).

81-82 [Albrecht] Dürer Unspecified.

83 Emanuel [de Witte] Joseph with Mary and Jesus at night. Most likely the Holy (1617-92) family by de Witte from the Goudstikker collection, which is dated 1650 (fig. XX). Recuperated by the Dutch state after the Second World War, in state custody (during which time it was on loan to the Prinsenhof Museum in Delft) until 2006, when it was returned to Goudstikker’s heirs.41 The author of the standard monograph on the artist, Ilse Manke, writes that this is de Witte’s last known history painting. She suggests that Kretzer may have encouraged and facilitated de Witte’s change of specialty to architectural painting.

84-85 Emanuel [de Witte] "Distant white walls." A vague allusion, but in the context it offers support to Manke’s suggestion that Kretzer played a role in de Witte’s change of specialty. The verse dates indeed from the period to which the earliest existing church interiors by the artist are assigned. Ilse Manke and Almut Pollmer feel that Bosch’s verse refers to the artist’s play with light and dark.42 This is true, but for Lambert van den Bos the contrast was more a play on words than a visual discovery. The earliest dated church interior by de Witte, in the Wallace Collection, London, shows a sermon in the

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 12 Oude Kerk in Delft and is dated 1651 (fig. XX).

86-87 De Sotte [Cornelis van] Madonna and "other works of your hand." A characteristic Cleef (1520-ca. 1567; example is in the Minneapolis Museum of Art (fig. XX). son of Joos van Cleve, on account of mental breakdown nicknamed de Sotte Cleef – Mad Cleve)43

88 [Jan (1583/85-1632) or Ships off a stormy shore. Not many Porcellis seascapes Julius (1610/9-1645)] include a shore. One that does is in the Boijmans Van Porcellis Beuningen Museum (fig. XX).

89 Rembrandt (1606/07- Unspecified. 1669)

90 Mirabel Poetic allusion to a still life. The last two lines of the

[Mirabello di Antonio quatrain contain the words “stom” (dumb – which is also a Cavalori (1535-72)?] The synonym for “stil” (still) – and “leven” (life), which I interpret Italian master’s name as a hint that the painting by Mirabel was a still life. That it comes closest to is linked to the names of the still- life painters Floris van “Mirabel,” but no still lifes Dyck and Georg Flegel supports this hypothesis. by him are known.

90 [Floris] van Dyck (ca. Poetic allusion to a still life. 1575-1651)

90 [Georg] Flegel (1566- "Lamp- and candlelight." A number of paintings by Flegel 1638) with burning candles are known, but none with a candle and a lamp. See the painting of that description in the Wallraff-Richartz Museum in Cologne.44

91 Willem Key (1544-89) "The rays of the Lord's word given to the blessed choir." This is the only quatrain that I have been completely unable to interpret.

92 [Pieter] van Laer (1599- Unspecified. 1642)

93 [Jan Davidsz. (1606-83) Still life with food. More than 100 still lifes by Jan Davidsz. or, less likely, his son de Heem include edibles. A fine example of around the

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 13 Cornelis (1631-95)] de time of the Konst kabinet is in the Boijmans Van Beuningen Heem Museum (fig. XX).

94 [Pieter] van den Bosch Unspecified. (1612/13-between 1663 and 1683, the artist who worked in Kretzer’s service in 1647)

95-96 [Jan] Asselijn (1610/15- "Multitude of slaves digging a harbor." No such subject 1651) could be found in the monograph on Jan Asselijn by Charlotte Steland-Stief.45 Since that book was published without an index – which should have been a punishable offense – I cannot be sure whether or not the reference in the Konst-kabinet is cited.

97-98 [Jan] Asselijn Sunset. A modest example is a painting sold at Christie’s in 1998 (fig. XX).46

99-101 [Jan] Lievens Angry self-portrait. Neither of the two paintings currently regarded as a self-portrait by Lievens looks particularly angry. That in the National Gallery of London is closest to the period of the Konst kabinet (fig. XX).

102 [Jan] Lievens "How many landscapes have you rubbed out of your palette?"

103-105 Unnamed Mary Magdalene

106 Unnamed Homer

107-109 Apology for breaking off without "depicting everything"

110 Courtiers prefer beauty to art

111 This collection assembled over twenty years, with artistic knowledge

112-113 Masters competed with each other to please the patron

114-117 Due to sad circumstances, "art and love" are to part (The collection is to be sold)

118-119 Who will love and honor the collection more? (Who will buy

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 14 it?)

120 "Let me no longer distress my eyes or your hearing, well- wishing listener..."

Only one of the verses, in combination with known extant works, produces a match that allows us to be reasonably certain that we can admire a painting that was once in the collection of Marten Kretzer: Emanuel de Witte’s Holy family (verse 83). Nevertheless, the comparative examples allow us in 18 cases to form a visual impression of part of his collection.

KONST KABINET: BREAKDOWN OF THE PAINTINGS The information contained in the poem is not sufficient to provide a figure for the number of paintings in the collection. The introductory verses about a history, a seascape and still lifes (11-14), seem to allude to paintings that are covered below in verses of their own. Quatrain 102 may or may not refer to individual paintings; we have no idea how many unsung paintings are being left out in 87 and 107-109. The irreducible number of discrete references, which specify either a master or a subject, is 42. By subject matter, the hard-core entries break down thus: 7 Biblical history (1 Old Testament, 5 Life of Christ, 1 Beheading of the Baptist) 6 Pious Christian images (2 Madonnas, 2 Mary Magdalenes, 1 Trinity, 1 Saints) 6 Mythology (3), allegory (2), ancient history (1) 4 Genre (3), animals (1) 4 Portraits (3), tronies (1) 3 Landscape (1), marine (1), architecture (1) 3 Still life 9 Unspecified For purposes of a comparison of the breakdown by subject matter with that in Amsterdam inventories tallied by Michael Montias, I have attributed subjects to three paintings whose authors are identified but not the subject: I place a Weenix collaboration and a van Laer under Genre and animals, and a “van de Heem” under still life. This yields the following percentual results:

TABLE 1: Percentual share of subject categories in Amsterdam collections, 1620-1649, by decade, compared with works in Konst kabinet47

Subject category Amsterdam Amsterdam Amsterdam Konst kabinet collections 1620- collections 1630- collections 1640- 1650 29 39 49

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 15 History, allegory 46.9 32.4 23.8 45.2

Landscape 20.2 25.3 27.1 7.1

Portraits, tronies 15.1 15.4 16.9 9.6

Still life 5.0 7.5 8.6 7.1

Genre, etc. 7.8 9.5 11.5 9.6

Unspecified 5.0 9.9 12.1 21.4

With all subject categories but one in the same order of magnitude, the juxtaposition of the figures tells us that we are dealing with a characteristic if old-fashioned collection of the second quarter of the seventeenth century, with a noticeable personality of its own. In his penchant for history painting Kretzer was a man of the 1620s, and in the share of still life and genre of the 1630s. A genuine personal touch is his lack of interest in landscape. (Unless quatrain 102 covers a wall of Lievens landscapes. The shortfall in portraits I ascribed to the fact that no family portraits are included in the collection. These were presumably left out for a reason to become clear below.) Of the 37 painters with known nationalities (assuming that Miss van der Werf and the Golden Ass were Dutch and Mirabel Italian), the distribution compares thus with the masters in Montias's sample:

TABLE 2: Origin or main place of work of painters represented in Amsterdam collections, 1620-1649, by decade, in percent, compared with painters in Konst kabinet48

Amsterdam Amsterdam Amsterdam Konst kabinet collections 1620- collections 1630- collections 1640- 1650 29 39 49

34 artists

Amsterdam 43.6 43.8 36.5 35.3 (12)

Elsewhere in 30.9 32.9 48.3 32.4 (11) Northern Netherlands

Southern 16.4 15.5 12.2 14.7 (5) Netherlands

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 16 Italy 9.1 5.5 1.1 8.8 (3)

Germany 0 2.3 1.9 8.8 (3)

Once more we find that Kretzer's habits as a collector resemble those of his peers, with the single notable difference that with his three Italian and three German paintings he struck a more cosmopolitan figure than most.49

TERMS OF PRAISE IN THE KONST KABINET: LIFELIKENESS The numerical analysis above is intended mainly as a reassurance that the collection described in the Konst kabinet is not impossibly idiosyncratic. At the least, we can say that this contemporaneous delineation of a representative collection from 1650 bears a recognizable resemblance to the picture that emerges from archival statistics. Secure in that knowledge, we can proceed to an analysis of the ideas on art in the poem. In this regard as well, we find that the content of the Konst kabinet is typical of its time. Read together with other Dutch writings on art from the seventeenth century – specifically Karel van Mander’s Schilder-boeck (1604), Franciscus Junius’s De schilder-konst der oude (1641; quoted here from the English edition of 1638, The painting of the ancients) and Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst; anders de zichtbaere werelt (Introduction to the Academy of Painting; or the Visible World; 1678) – the Konst kabinet (1650) is recognizably of its time. Nonetheless, the particular nature of the poem gives it a value all its own. The treatises on art referred to are devoted to the art of painting in general; they deal with values and systems first and examples second. The Konst kabinet is a down-to-earth application of those principles to a given collection of paintings. No other text like it is known to me in the Netherlands. The closest approximations I have found are two contemporaneous publications in France: Georges de Scudéry (1601-67), Le cabinet de Mr. de Scudery, Paris (Augustin Courbé) 1646, and Pierre Le Moyne (1602-72), “Cabinet de peintures,” in Les Poësies du P. Pierre Le Moine, Paris (Augustin Courbé) 1650. Comparison of these texts to that of Lambert van den Bos awaits the attention of a following researcher.50

The main conceit of the Konst kabinet is taken fairly literally from a passage in Junius’s Painting of the ancients concerning the emotions undergone by the art lover in the presence of “some rare piece of workmanship.” It chanceth therefore very often that the truest Lovers of art, meeting with some rare piece of workmanship, stand for a while speechlesse: see Callistratus in his second description of Praxiteles his Cupid: yet afterwards, having now by little and little recovered their straying senses, they breake violently forth in exclaiming praises, and speake with the most abundant expressions an eye-ravished spectator can possibly devise.51 The art lover in van den Bos’s poem is the poet himself, speaking in the first person. In the opening line, he undergoes exactly the sequence of conditions described by Junius. “Here I stand mute and speechless! And - either through amazement or delight - hardly one of my lips releases a single word.”

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 17 After which the poet overcomes his speechlessness and breaks out in hyperbolic praise. One quality above all others is held responsible for this ravishing of the eye, overwhelming of the ability to speak, nullification of the mental faculties, and paralysis of the body: lifelikeness. To van den Bos, the power of the image goes beyond lifelikeness to become life itself, created by the artist through witchcraft: “… is it life, which deceives my eyes by silent witchcraft and has robbed them of the power to reason?” The highest approbation is hyperbolic indeed: a painter/painting is said to bring the dead to life. This quality, which in quatrains 4-6 is grounded in Promethean mythology, is attributed to Titian's Beheading of St. John the Baptist (19-25) and Honthorst's Death of Seneca (53-57). These are also the paintings to which most space is devoted, seven and five quatrains respectively. Jan Porcellis, an Antwerp immigrant in Holland (or less likely his son Julius, who was only 20 years old in 1650), is credited with the somewhat less miraculous ability to "transform art into life" (88), and Jan Lievens, a Dutchman who worked in Antwerp, with creating landscapes "even more lifelike than life itself at its most beautiful" (102). Making “life itself from canvas and wood and precious sludge" (8) is said to be a latter-day attainment of the art of painting in general, after a period when life was not created by painters but merely traced. Although van den Bos does not employ an explicit hierarchy of praise, we may assume that "creating life itself" is superior to evoking the illusion of life or "living appearance." This is credited to a trompe l'oeil (11), and something like it to a "lamp- and candlelight" picture by Flegel (90), of which van den Bos says that nothing in it is unlike life.

The following remarks by Thijs Weststeijn, in his outstanding book on Samuel van Hoogstraten’s art theory, are important for understanding the figures of speech employed by Lambert van den Bos in Konst kabinet. The central importance of the issue of “lifelikeness” in seventeenth-century texts about painting, as well as the deliberate play with illusion and the puncturing of illusion that characterizes many paintings of the period, are difficult to evaluate properly for modern viewers, who are used to interpreting paintings as art objects with an inherently problematic relationship to reality. Today’s viewer takes it for granted that a work of art has a reality of its own. Seventeenth-century spectators, in contrast, were more than willing to forget that they were looking at a fictional work…. Not that painted figures were believed to be literally equivalent to living human beings, but the initial conditioned response to a painting was always to play the game…. In 1635, the theorist Pieter le Brun described this attitude as the most important “manner of speaking” about art: “To discuss splendid paintings, one must speak of them as if the things [depicted] were real, not painted.52 This is indeed the way Lambert van den Bos speaks about paintings. Where he learned to do so is an interesting question. None of his other writings, as far as I know, betrays an insider’s knowledge of painting or the art world. However, he did travel in circles where this knowledge was up to date and intense. Lambert van den Bos was a friend of none other than Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-78).

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 18 True, the first documented connection between the two men does not date before 1657, when they contributed poems of tribute and extra matter to each other’s publications.53 At that point, van den Bos had been rector of the Dordrecht Latin school for three years and a prominent figure on the literary scene there. That would allow us to predate his acquaintance with van Hoogstraten to 1654. However, van den Bos had earlier contact with Dordrecht: a book of his was published there as early as 1641.54 When in 1662 he acclaimed the cultural elite of Dordrecht in his Dordrechtsche Arcadia, “Lambert van den Bos … observed that Dordrecht’s literary circle had ‘a kind of Republic among them’, by which he meant a miniature republic of letters in which information was exchanged and people commented on each other’s writings.”55 Although there do not seem to be literal duplications of wording between van den Bos’s Konst kabinet of 1650 and van Hoogstraten’s Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst of 1678, the underlying values of the Konst kabinet recur, in far more discursive form, in the Inleyding. Van Hoogstraten does not depart from the ideas about art we have examined in Franciscus Junius and van den Bos. Weststeijn writes of van Hoogstraten’s attitude in this regard: The “confusion” or “inner struggle” aroused by the experience of a work of art is assumed to be closely related to the experience of deceptive verisimilitude and physical immersion in a virtual reality. So it is understandable that the words “astonishment” and “lifelikeness” often occur in the same breath. Van Hoogstraten’s term “inexpressible joy” is apparently a fitting response to this transportation to a virtual reality, in which the medium, and therefore the possibility of speaking in the customary vocabulary of art criticism, fades away. Compare to this the strofe in the Kunst kabinet on a Beheading of John the Baptist by Titian: “What do I see there? For pity, what a tragedy meets our eyes. Oh, it is only art, I am deceived. O heaven how that rejoices me.” The author escapes to his relief from physical immersion in the unbearably tragic execution scene. Writing as he does of personal, vehement emotions, van den Bos has no recourse to “the customary vocabulary of art criticism” and indeed does not employ it. Yet, it pays to look at the vocabulary van den Bos does employ and the opinions about art explicitly or implicitly conveyed in his poem. In the following sections we will examine the role played in the Konst kabinet by subject matter, emotions, reputation and emulation, and technique.

NOBLE SUBJECT MATTER Van den Bos attributed great significance to the subjects of the paintings in the Kretzer collection. Returning to the two paintings that receive the most and most emphatic praise – Titian’s Beheading of St. John the Baptist and Honthorst's Death of Seneca – we note that they are not only said to bring the dead back to life, but that they deal with the subject of death. The horror and tragedy of the deaths of the two heroes form an ultimate challenge to the abilities of the artists, a challenge met adequately, to their great credit, by the Italian and Dutch masters. The two paintings that occupy the second rank in terms of space, with four quatrains each, also take aspects of death as their subject: Lastman's Death of Thisbe and an unattributed Christ appearing to the Magdalene (103-05). The gravity of the material conveys itself to the paintings. As in classical art theory, the successful evocation of a highly dignified subject is considered a greater achievement than

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 19 an equally accomplished treatment of less elevated matter. This conglomerate of values corresponds well once more with Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Inleyding, of which Weststeijn writes: “In the Inleyding there is an express reference to emotional scenes with a sad ending: ‘Seneca also says that a tremendous Painting of a tragic outcome touches our mind. Indeed, picturing a tragic event can be very functional; ‘Painters and Tragic Poets best adorn their Pictures and Plays by depicting divers sorrows and lamentations.’”56 The ideal relation between subject and depiction, life and art, fear and relief, is evoked by van den Bos in his first quatrain on the Titian, quoted above: "What see I here? For pity, what a tragedy meets our eyes. Oh, 't is only art, I am deceived. O heaven how that rejoices me." The painter's skill is sufficient to deceive the visitor momentarily into believing that he is witnessing a beheadal. The relief of the poet/beholder in discovering his error is great, but the illusion remains powerful enough to enable him to negotiate, with more control, the border between direct experience and artistic depiction.

AFFECT Chapter 6 of van Mander’s poetic instruction in the art of painting, the Grondt, is devoted to “Wtbeeldinghe der Affecten, passien, begeerlijckheden, en lijdens der Menschen” (The depiction of the emotions, passions, desires and sufferings of people).

De Natuer-condighe laten ons hooren, Onderscheydelijck de namen der dinghen, Affecten gheheeten, eerst en al vooren Liefde, begeerlijckheyt, vreucht, smert en tooren, Commer en droefheyt, die t'herte bespringhen, Cleynmoedicheyt, vreese quaet om bedwinghen, Oock opgheblasentheyt, en nijdich veeten, Dees en derghelijck, al Affecten heeten. (22v-23r) … Dan mijn hop' is wel, dat dit noch ontvoncken Sal menighen gheest, en den lust doen wassen, Voortaen beter op d'Affecten te passen. (28v)

Students of nature inform us about the various names of the phenomena called affects: first and foremost are love, desire, joy, sorrow and anger, anxiety and sadness that seize the heart, cowardice, fear that is hard to suppress, as well as self-importance, irate feuding, these and others are all called affects…. My hope is that this [presentation] will inspire many people and stimulate them to pay more attention from now on to the affects.

Van den Bos did not need extra encouragement in this regard. He seldom let an opportunity pass to evoke the emotions felt by figures in Kretzer’s paintings, even when they are invisible, like the panic of the seamen in a Porcellis storm. All of the emotions mentioned by van Mander are referred to in one

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 20 verse of the Konst kabinet or another. In fact, in the 120 quatrains of the poem nearly 40 different states of mind can be distinguished.57 Not all of them are treated equally. The most prevalent emotion is fright. Fright is inspired not only by history paintings such as the Titian Beheading of St. John the Baptist and Honthorst’s Death of Seneca. It can also be called forth by a storm at sea (13) or even by the over-vigorous power with which Jordaens paints a bacchanal (42-43). In all instances but the latter, van den Bos considers fright to be a positive recommendation for artistic superiority, evidence of enhanced lifelikeness. But when he feels that an artist overdoes things, as Jordaens did in his Bacchanal, he reprimands the painter for frightening his audience. "Desist! ... People are frightened by such art-panels." From this we learn that inducing fright is not a virtue in itself. It is only so in the service of noble subject matter. The Titian Beheading is the richest and most complex repository of emotions. The painter captures the gamut of strong feelings moving the executioner and the servant-maid as well as Salome. The Beheading, joined by Bassano's Crowning with thorns and Honthorst's Death of Seneca, is credited moreover with evoking a range of other feelings beside fear: scorn, bitterness, mourning, sadness, oppression. Van den Bos attributed great significance to the latter. Three kinds of emotional phenomena cross each other in the poem. One is the depiction of affect in painted persons, as discussed by van Mander. More striking are the emotions engendered in the viewer, which van den Bos deploys freely, especially in the form of fear and being struck dumb. Emotion on the part of the artist hardly comes into play. Van den Bos does not consider it necessary for the artist to undergo the emotions he encounters in the source and evokes in the spectator. The only passion attributed to a painter is the anger of Jan Lievens, which however is expressed in a self- portrait and is said to be directed against the poet for leaving his painting for one of the last. In this regard, van den Bos departs from the practice of rhetoricians who urge orators to share with their subjects and their audiences the emotions they are conveying. This is related to van den Bos’s respect for decorum. Not only Jordaens is taken to task by him for sensuality above and beyond demands of the subject. The charge of excess is also laid at the feet of one of the Both brothers: his "too great art" in depicting a brothel "makes ... of every heart a whorehouse" (78). A more fitting image of lust, "which neither moves nor touches" the poet, is an allegory of sensual love (74-76). In these verses Bos feels out the boundary between the proper and improper stimulation of the passions, always a delicate matter in the arts.

ARTISTIC EMULATION A certain truism governing the financial value of art plays out in the Konst kabinet as much as in a present-day auction: the foremost property in determining worth is the name of the artist. Dürer is said to stand above praise ("He who speaks most of your ability would receive the least praise; your highest praise consists in silence..."; 81-82) and Rembrandt not to need it ("I shall not attempt to depict your fame with my pen, O Rembrandt. Everyone knows what honor you merit if I merely name your name"; 89). The latter testimonial is weaker than the former in that it occurs in a section of the poem (87-98) structured as one long apology for insufficient tribute. The nickname of Cornelis van Cleve ("de sotte Cleef"; Mad Cleve; 86) is deplored for its unwarranted

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 21 denigration. Van Cleve's work is said to be "well-loved." Other painters mentioned in general terms are treated to more qualified expressions of esteem, such as Pieter van Laer: "Why should I ... put van Laer upon a higher throne and more illustrious stage? The connoisseurs will have to judge and present your abilities." When it came to Pieter van den Bosch no appeal to fame or fashion could be made; the speaker resorts to lauding the painter's qualities: "Will your name, O van den Bossche, urge me to praise your hand? O no, your honor is greater than that and your cleverness [greater than] both of them together." One verse appeals to the fame not of the artist but of the subject. Van den Bos employs this device in order to close his catalogue of paintings without having to name an artist to bring up the rear: "Is this Homer...? His fame makes me turn from the pen...." (106). As usual in writings of the period, the comparison of one artist with the other takes the form of emulation. "Each exerts himself here to compete for fame, here they try to rob Rome of her wreath of honor and each desires to rise above the able hand which he envies" (9). Whether this refers to ancient Rome or to present-day Italian painters is unclear. In the following verse the conceit is explicit: the moderns in Kretzer's collection are said to outnumber by a hundred to one the single Apelles or Zeuxis of which Greece boasted. A somewhat aggressive mode of emulation is a recurring leitmotiv. Titian is played out against Rubens (39), Rubens against Jordaens (42), the ancients against Honthorst (57), the modern Italians against Weenix (60) and Jan Davidsz. de Heem against Pieter van den Bosch (93). In these pairings the poet links similar works or masters, not polar opposites. Emulation is a matter of bettering one's heroes at their own game. The arena in which the competing painters are pitted against each other, it is well to note, is universal and timeless. Nowhere does van den Bos link particular characteristics to nationalities, schools or periods. The Dutch painters who are in the majority are praised in the same terms as artists from Italy or Antwerp.

TECHNIQUE Are we leaving anything out? In vol. 5 of A corpus of Rembrandt paintings, Ernst van de Wetering toted up a handy comparative chart of sixteen main critical criteria in van Mander’s Grondt der edel vry schilder-const and Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Inleyding.58 In general, they correspond to the listing extracted by Anna Tummers from her study of a broader range of sources throughout Europe and throughout the seventeenth century.59 Reading the Konst kabinet against these criteria reveals which issues were put into play by van den Bos, which he ignored, and which he added. For technical issues and niceties of touch he had little interest. Excellence in drawing or composition, perspective or pictorial balance, proportion or light are not adduced in praise of Kretzer’s paintings. When color enters the discussion, it is less in aesthetic than in symbolic terms, as when van den Bos notices the juxtaposition of green grass and the red of blood in Lastman’s Suicide of Thisbe. Brushwork is praised, though only in general terms: skillful (Lastman), powerful, vigorous (Jordaens, Lievens), graceful (unnamed court painter), beautiful, enchanting (van den Bosch). Superior evocation of texture is observed once, in the folds of velvet drapery in a collaborative effort by Jan Weenix and Pieter van den Bosch. Artful play with light and dark is noticed in two paintings by Emanuel de Witte (83-85), a

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 22 nocturnal Holy family and a painting of "distant white walls." The poet picks up on the conceit and spins out a punning metaphor on the artist's name, which can be read to mean "the white one."60 The light of twilight is said to distinguish the work (and career – in which the sunset is to be followed by a glorious sunrise) of Asselijn (97-98), while coloristic effects are singled out in a blood-filled history by Lastman (28-31). Otherwise, as we noted above. artistic qualities are evoked in more abstract language.

THE SENSES Above we spoke of the illusion of lifelikeness as a means to negotiate the border between direct experience and artistic depiction. An essential instrument for achieving this balance is provided by the senses, especially sight. Sight is called upon sixteen times and touch three, but hearing, taste and smell only once each. The tone for this subtheme is set in quatrains 3 ("Are [artist's] fingers able ... to stroke the eye, the senses...?) and 11-15, where four exemplary paintings precede the actual catalogue. The senses of sight (eyes; 12), hearing (lips; 12), touch (hand; 14) and taste (appetite; 15) are alluded to in these lines, while later on the smell of a fish still life rounds out the list (77).61 Touch additionally plays something of a role in the metaphoric use of the word "hand" for artist, and taste is alluded to in a painting of a nursing Madonna (49), in drooling over a still life (66) and in the image of the collection being weaned from Kretzer's nursing like so many suckling babies (114- 16). The latter betrays van den Bos’s penchant for bodily as well as emotional metaphor. His poem is full of body parts, from head to foot, skin to entrails. By far the most frequently employed, fittingly for a poem on paintings, are the eye and the hand. To put into numbers the poet’s deployment of “the eye, the senses and the mind” in his poem, van den Bos refers in his 120 verses 83 times to parts of the body and corporeal functions, 22 times to the five senses and the senses in general; and 62 times to states of mind. There is another count that reveals where his attention is going. The number of senses is limited to five, but van den Bos is able to expand ad libitum his references to parts of the body and states of mind. He distinguishes between 24 parts of the body and no fewer than 40 states of mind. If there is a leitmotiv linking these modes of expression, it would be a paragone between the senses of sight and hearing, which extends from the beginning of the poem ("Here I stand mute and speechless"; 1) to its end: "But let me no longer distress my eyes or your hearing..."; 120). The superiority of sight is not argued in so many words; it is integrated into the very presentation of Kretzer's collection. As if the Konst kabinet were written under the jurisdiction of Common Sense from Lingua, van den Bos consistently and invariably degrades speech and glorifies sight. Far from regretting the silence of painting, he treats it as an added distinction. The description of Titian's Beheading of St. John is nearly programmatic in this regard. Following five quatrains full of images referring to sight, seeing, gazing, the eyes, the face, and the reading of appearances, the sixth quatrain begins: "Here stands one in plain appearance representing with mute lips..." (25). That is, fullness of representation is achieved without speech. Speechlessness is prescribed in the opening and closing strophes and in the interim as well. We are told to hush before the Rubens (39) and are assured that the best judges of art are dumb (90). Jan Lievens is able to upbraid the poet by his gaze alone, "without speaking" (99). Here too van den Bos is toeing the conventional line. “Junius writes of

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 23 the effect of great works of art as transcending speech: ‘Incredible things finde no voice;… some things are greater, then that any mans discourse should be able to compasse them.’”62 The eye, on the other hand, is eloquent as well as receptive. The eyes of Mary (70) and the Magdalene (103) burn and Poelenburgh's banquet of the gods should properly be called a banquet of the eyes (44). Konst kabinet takes a step beyond Lingua in a direction not envisioned by Thomas Tomkis. It not only propagates the superiority of vision above the other senses and the tongue but also posits the supremacy of painting over all other sights. Van den Bos phrases it quite straightforwardly, as if he were letting the reader in on his brief from the patron: "It is my duty to praise art far above everything that reaches the human eye, if that be honor enough" (76). The high status of painting redounds to the credit of the patron as well – and to Kretzer above all other patrons. Van den Bos nods in the direction of the court only to deny that any "mighty ruler, however proudly he shows off his glory and gathered treasures, could also own so much art that cannot be bought at any price." The eye of the courtier is so accustomed to outward appearance and pretence that it chooses "beauty" above "art." Kretzer's collection, on the other hand, built up over a period of twenty years, was formed on the basis of "artistic knowledge" (111).63 Since the artists he commissioned were aware of this, they exerted themselves to the utmost for this "mecenas of illustrious spirits" and did their best work for him. The superiority of the patron is responsible for the excellence of his paintings, which are called "babies in suck" and he a "nursing master." Although this claim means less with regard to work by Titian and Dürer, it is true that the majority of Kretzer's paintings were made by masters alive during the twenty years of Kretzer's period of collecting and therefore may in principle have been commissions. In one last table, let us look at the relevant ratios in Montias's sample of Amsterdam inventories compared to those in the Konst kabinet:

TABLE 3: Percentual share of living artists and old masters in Amsterdam collections, 1620-49, by decade, compared to Konst kabinet64

Amsterdam Amsterdam Amsterdam Konst kabinet collections 1620- collections 1630- collections 1640- 1650 29 39 49

Contemporary 55.0 65.7 58.8 75.0

Old masters 45.0 34.3 41.2 25.0

Even if the paintings by older living masters such as Rubens and Lastman are unlikely to have been commissions, many of the others may well have been. But even if most were purchases, Kretzer

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 24 merits, in this comparison, the credit he takes for supporting living artists.

KRETZER IN DISTRESS If not a tragedy, the Konst kabinet van Marten Kretzer owes its existence, by its own statement, to a misfortune. The suckling babes were about to be weaned against their will from their nurse and owner. Kretzer was about to "tear away his breast and wean [the paintings] from the loving reception of knowledge and common sense" that elevated their status. The reason for this unhappy change is not specified, but the poet calls it a shame, a cause for unhappiness and sad pain. The fact of the dispersal is attested by an advertisement in the Amsterdamsche Courant of 19 March 1650. News from diverse quarters. Publisher Broer Jansz. Marten Kretser of Amsterdam plans to sell by public auction [op-veylinghe] to the highest bidder, on the coming 3 May and the following days, in the Heerenlogement, a remarkable group of excellent paintings and drawings by various Italian masters and others, the catalogue of which can be obtained in the shops of various booksellers three weeks in advance.65 The paintings in the Konst kabinet must have been the main items in the sale. (This accounts, I believe, for the absence of family portraits, which would not have been put on the block in a voluntary sale.) No record of the auction results has been preserved. One reason Kretzer needed cash that spring was the impending marriage of his daughter Sara, whose engagement to Jan Haller from the island of Sint Maarten was announced on 28 April 1650.66 That could not have been the only or main reason. The poem hints at dire circumstances attended by calumny and libel. If Kretzer were under a financial cloud, this could explain why he never afterwards served even in a semi-public office such as the theatre board. When it came to dispensing offices, Dutch society was far less sensitive to heterodoxy or corruption than to suspicion of monetary wrongdoing. This casts a new light on his role in the founding of a new Brotherhood. Had the attempt succeeded, he would have been able to exercise more than personal influence on the art world without being dependent for his position on the civic authorities, as he was on the theatre board.67 A single glimpse into Kretzer’s later activities is provided by a charge brought against him in 1665. The plaintiff was Gerard van Groendijk (1614-1691), the steward of the Kloveniersdoelen, the headquarters and practice range of the civic guard companies for musket and pike. The Great Hall of the building housed a famous suite of civic guard group portraits, including Rembrandt’s Night watch. The hall attracted art lovers who came just to see the paintings. Van Groendijk took advantage of this traffic in order to sell paintings to the self-selecting group of visitors. In 1659, the year he acquired the post, van Groendijk rented out an attic room to Marten Kretzer for the storage of paintings. The assumption is that this formed a supply on which van Groendijk could draw for his sales efforts. As Groendijk told it, Kretzer failed to pay his drink bill in 1659 and was in arrears for rent on the attic space, amounting to the considerable sum of 450 guilders. In order to exert pressure on Kretzer, he seized the paintings that Kretzer had left behind. When Kretzer demanded their return, van Groendijk took retaliatory action. On 7 May 1665 he submitted a charge threatening to have the paintings, which

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 25 he kept in his house, officially confiscated to pay Kretzer’s overdue bills. Kretzer protested vociferously.68 This drawn-out altercation with a semi-public Amsterdamer will not have contributed to the repair of Kretzer’s reputation.

Konst kabinet van Marten Kretzer provides us with an inter-personal interpretation of a not insignificant collection of paintings in the year 1650. In the case of legendary masters like Dürer and Rembrandt, the collector's satisfaction comes from contemplation of the sheer fame of the artists whose work he owns. For the most part, however, the primary value of his paintings lies in the significance of their subjects and the success of the painters in bringing them to life. The poem expects beholders to be touched less in their intellectual capacities and religious beliefs than in their emotional and sensuous faculties. History paintings are the largest and most highly valued group of works, engaging collector and poet more than any others. They bring into play the same passions in the depicted figures that the collector seeks to experience and share with his visitors. Still-life paintings and landscapes are appreciated for their ability to deceive the eye, the hand, the appetite. Kretzer and van den Bos go out on a limb in their far-going claims for the status of painting as an art. They reverse the prevailing judgment that the Word – Scripture, poetry and philosophy – is mankind's surest sources for apprehending the truth. Unapologetically and without argumentation, they place showing above speaking, looking above listening. Painting is compared with Promethean creation, to the point that the poet asks whether painters, who give life itself to their pictures, do not deserve the same punishment as Prometheus. The role of the patron as mecenas stands in a sense even above that of the painter. Kretzer prides himself in his connoisseurship or "artistic knowledge," crediting himself with drawing forth from artists their best achievements. The impending dispersal of his collection is seen as a disaster for the paintings in it. Wealthy Amsterdam is called upon to take up Kretzer's task and make good the damage. Kretzer's collection answers in its measurable features to a typical Amsterdam collection of mid-century, with the kind of individual deviations that add authenticity to the image as a whole. The fact that Kretzer was called in by the Guild of St. Luke as an appraiser means that his judgment of quality and worth was shared and respected. Presumably this applied to his attributions of artistic significance as well. His views were not the only ones current, but they add up to something like a coherent philosophy of art for a Dutch patron-collector (the distinction between the two functions is weak) in 1650. We find in it echoes of ideas expressed by the authors of the foremost art treatises in Kretzer’s time, from Karel van Mander to Samuel van Hoogstraten. The pressures that forced Kretzer to sell his cherished collection at this juncture were no more peculiar to him alone than the motives behind its formation and make-up. The dispersion of cultural capital by a man who lived from the spiritual and social interest on that capital was a drama in his life and a harbinger of the hard times now ahead for him, his peers and their painter-protégés.

Appendix I

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 26

Op M. Kretzers Ste. Marie Magdalene door Titiaen geschildert.

De Kunst, die dus zich zelve pryst, Verdient alleen geen goude lyst, Maer eenen zoom van diamant, Ter eere van des Meesters hant. Zagh 't gryze Griecken op, voorwaer Het kranste noch dien Tekenaer. Hier heeft de Tekenkunst haer' eisch. Ghy ziet geen verf, maer levend vleisch: Doch niet gelyck Natuur het geeft, Nu haer de Slang bedorven heeft; Neen zeker, 't is van hooger prys, En zulcks als in het Paradys Ons Moeder eerst ter weerelt quam, Toen Grootvaêr heur in d'armen nam Eer zy de lippen had gezet Aen 't zoet vergift, ons vuile smet. Wat krachtigh een penseel is dit, In zulck een' dagh, daer zwart noch wit Gevonden wort! o kloecke vont! Hoe levendigh, hoe maghtigh ront Verheft zich SINTE MAGDALEEN, Gezalft, genezen van haer ween! Het lichaem, dat zoo deerlijck viel, Is nu gezont, gelijck de ziel, Die straelt u toe door 't nieuwe bloet. De rust van haer verzoent gemoedt Verschijnt u in 't aendachtigh licht Der oogen, in 't vernoeght gezicht. Dat voorhooft zet geen rimpels meer Van rouw, maer slacht het helder weêr, Wanneer de hemel open staet. 't Godtvruchtigh wezen, en gelaet, Die mont en borsten, waert gekust, Bekooren niemant dan met lust Tot Godt, en IESUS, nu verhooght. Dit hair, dat flus de voeten drooght Van dien genaderycken Heer, Verstrickt geen wulpsche harten meer; Hoe blont het dien albasten neck En parlemoeren rugh bedeck', En krulle om haeren blancken arm. MARIE MAGDALEEN, bescherm Den Dichter, daer ghy boven zit, En aen 's Verbidders voeten bidt.

I.V. Vondel.

OP M. KRETZERS STE. MARIE MAGDALENE, blz. 454:

Handschrift in de Universiteitsbibliotheek te Gent, in facsimile bij Van Lennep V, tegenover blz. 772; zie Oud-Holland II, 1884, blz. 119.

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 27 Met opschrift: Aen M. Karel Couvrechef, en aentekening: Haec D.I. Vondelius propria manu scripsit Ao 1650 22 Juli; getekend J.V. Vondel. Vs. 5 en 6 ontbreken.

Notes

1 For a summary of van den Bos’s life and writings, see Thissen 1994, pp. 132-36. 2. Thissen 1994, p. 134.

3 The banns for his marriage to Sara van Loon of La Rochelle were posted in the church registers on 24 October 1626, when he declared to be living on the Keizersgracht and to be 28 years old. The marriage ceremony was carried out in the Walloon Church. Unger 1884, p. 112.

4 Buried in the Oude Kerk, 1 December 1670: “marten kretser uijt de O. brugh steegh – f 15.” Amsterdam city archives, www.stadsarchief.amsterdam.nl, Begraafregisters voor 1811: NL-SAA- 9250348.

5 Goldgar 2007, pp. 62-63. Montias 2002, pp. 72-73.

6. Unger 1884, pp. 111-112. For a summary of documents related to Kretzer and his family, see the note on him in the Montias Database at the Frick Collection: http://research.frick.org/montiasart/browserecord.php?-action=browse&-recid=24601.

7. Dudok van Heel 1980, p. 42.

8. Postma and Blok 1991.

9. 16 September 1653: Hendrick Uylenburgh, Martin Kretzer and Lodewijk van Ludick confirm the authorship by Paul Bril of a “landscape with hills, trees and a valley with figures and animals” whose attribution to Bril had been contested by “several Antwerp painters and art dealers.” Lammertse and van der Veen 2006, p. 201, note 291, citing GAA, not. J. van der Hoeven, NA 1649, pp. 1239-1240 and older literature. A distinguished roster of Amsterdam artists and connoisseurs were called in to back up this controversial case. 29 March 1656: Johannes de Renialme, Martin Kretzer and Lodewijk van Ludick appraise the paintings inherited by the widow of Maerten Papenbroeck. Bredius 1915-1921, vol. 2, p. 641. 27 June 1657: the paintings in the estate of Johannes de Renialme appraised by “Adam Camerarius, Constschilder, und Marten Kretzer, den bekannten Gentleman-dealer, mit dem auch Rembrandt zu tun hatte.” Bredius 1915-1921, vol. 1, p. 230. Strauss and van der Meulen 1979, p. 397, citing Amsterdam city archive, notary Frans Uyttenbogaert, NA 1915, fols. 670-79. There is no evidence in the Rembrandt documents of direct contact between Kretzer and Rembrandt. 22 March 1657: sale of paintings from the bankrupt estate of Roelof Codde, appraised by Hendrick Uylenburgh and Marten Kretzer. Dozy 1884, p. 43.

10. For de Renialme see Montias 1996.

11 Hell and van Gent 2013, pp. 304, 324. The document concerned is in the Stadsarchief Amsterdam, notarial files, “not. W. Lossij, 3419, fol. 870, insinuatie 7-5-1665.” The statement concerns long overdue payment of rent. See below, toward the end of the article.

12. There may have been two artists with this name. Fred Meijer of the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie distinguishes a Pieter van den Bosch who was a painter of still lifes in a style Meijer associates with French work of the period, from a genre painter of the same name whose work resembles that of Gerard Dou. See his entry in the Allgemeines Künstler-Lexikon, vol. 13, 1996, p. 164. The existence of two painters with that name is however not supported by documentary evidence and is doubted on stylistic grounds as well by Tom van de Molen.

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 28

13 “Pieter van den Bosch sal gehouden wesen gelyck hy hem selver verbonden (ende Sr. Kretzer aengenomen heeft) daegelicx van primo Februari eerstkoomende tot primo Februari 1646, de lange daegen van s' ochtens ten seven (uytgesondert de Sondaegen, twee kars, twee pinxter, twee paes, een hemelvaerts, als mede soodaenige binnen dien tydt voor- vallende bij de Ho: Mo: Heeren Staten ingestelde Boetdagen) te komen ten huijse van de voorn. Sr. Kretzer ende aldaer te continueren tot ts avonts ten seven uyren toe ende de corte daegen van sochtens met den dach ende tsavondts tot den duysteren, sullende gehouden wesen ten huijse als voren de voorn. tydt geduerende naerstich, vlijtich (ende nae zyn kunst vermach) te schilderen al sulcke stucken als de voorn. Sr. Kretzer hem van den Bosch proponeren ende gelieven sal.” Bredius 1934, p. 189. “In a specification of the dowry a woman had brought with her when she married a silversmith in 1662, a number of paintings are listed including ‘the pickled herring with an armozeen curtain in front, bought from Cretser, done by Van de Bos.” Lammertse and van der Veen 2006, p. 170. The inclusion of the identity of the seller from whom the painting was acquired is highly unusual in any historical inventory. The fact that the painting was bought from Kretzer was apparently thought to contribute to its worth or at least to confirm the attribution to van den Bosch.

14. Van Deursen 1992, p. 15, cites the daily earnings of an Amsterdam ship's carpenter at 30-40 stuivers, depending on the hours of sunlight, as against the 76 earned by van den Bosch, even in the winter.

15. Bredius 1915-1921, pp. 1837-1838. Manke 1963, p. 2, links this document to the mention of de Witte in Konst kabinet and in Vos's Zeege der Schilderkunst to support the hypothesis that Kretzer was responsible for de Witte's move from Delft to Amsterdam. This seems to me insufficiently grounded.

16 Bredius 1935B. With kind thanks to Tom van der Molen for pointing out this and seven other publications on such contracts, including that in the following note. 17 Bredius 1935B. 18. “Want bij aldien het selve volgens de voorschreven articulen wert gepractiseert soo sullen voor eerst verscheijde liefhebbers die (om de aencomende konstenaren in haere konst te animeren) nu meest alle hare stucken afkoopen genootsaekt syn haere handen thuijs te houden also sij anders geene weeg souden weeten haere gekofte stucken te vertieren.” Miedema 1980, vol. 1, p. 251.

19. Seidel 1890, p. 123.

20. There is a painting of a scullery maid in the Berlin museum signed Pieter van den Bosch, which has been present in the museum at least as early as the eighteenth century and may have been acquired by Friedrich Wilhelm as well. Although there is some difference of opinion concerning the identity of this master, I agree with Tom van der Molen that we are dealing with the same artist who was contracted by Kretzer.

21. Hoet 1752-1770, vol. 1, p. 2.

22 “En om niet verde te gaen, blyvende in ons Vaderlandt, jae selfs binnen onse Wallen, alwaer wy konnen vinden die nette uyt-muntende Gerrit Dou, die jaerlicx om dat hy de Ed. Heer Spierings de eerste aenbiedinghe van sijn stucken doet, 500 Carolus guldens tot vergeldinghe krijcht.” Angel 1642, p. 23. 23. Martin 1901, p. 42.

24. “Quade schulden, daervan niets te verwachten is:… Maerten Cretzer …. 19:0:0 | Deselfde met Gaesbergen in compie …. 170:0:0. ” Bredius 1915-1921, pp. 86-87.

25 “Aen MARTEN KRETZER, Regend van de SCHOUBURG. Gunstige Vriend, ‘t IS een geruymen tijd geleeden dat ghy my eenige Engelse Commedien vertoonende, met eenen verzocht dat ikze eens zoude willen overzien, of ‘er yets onder was waerdig vertaelt te zijn, ’t welk by my aengenomen zijnde,

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 29 ende het Zinnen-Spel vande Tonge uytnemende heerlijk en leerlijk bevonden, heb ik ‘t, geparst door u beleeft verzoek, in Nederduyts vertaelt.” LINGUA, Ofte strijd tusschen de TONG En de VYF ZINNEN Over de Heerschappy, Amsterdam (Gerrit van Goederberg) 1648, fol. A1. 26. Meeus 1992.

27. Oey-deVita 1984, p. 329.

28. The dates were 14, 15 and 17 September and 12 October 1648 and 18 January and 25 May 1649. The term of office for the theatre board began and ended in July each year. Oey-de Vita and Geesink 1983, pp. 111-113, 196-197, 210. For the calculation of the receipts I used the totals added up by Worp 1920, p. 124, coming to about 17,000 guilders a year, in seasons that ran to some 110 performances.

29. Synopsis from Oey-de Vita 1984. See also Meeus 1992.

30. Emmens 1956 (1981), pp. 71-74. Emmens does not adduce the display of the host.

31. On 23 January 2012 (as on 17 July 1996) the Short Title Catalogue Netherlands (STCN, available through the website of the Royal Library: www.kb.nl/stcn) reported 12 hits, dated between 1649 and 1652, for the combination Author=Bos? and Publisher=Ravest?, all of which were books translated or written by Lambert van den Bos and printed or published by van Ravesteyn. The Konst kabinet is not included, since the library of the KOG has not yet been described by the STCN.

32. Unger 1884.

33. Oversteegen 1969, pp. 139-204. Although no publisher or place of publication is given, I call it an Amsterdam imprint on account of its subject matter and the likelihood that it was printed there.

34. Knippenberg 1958, p. 8.

35. Not 98, as in Unger 1884, p. 114, Floerke 1905, p. 167, van Gelder 1978, p. 231, Dudok van Heel 1977, p. 107 and Weber 1991, p. 29, the latter three despite the emphatic correction of Unger in Hofstede de Groot 1906, p. 154.

36 Helmus 1999, pp. 207-12. 37 Friedländer 1967-1976, vol. 3, nr. 136. Van de Velde 1975, vol. 1, pp. 198-99; vol. 2, fig. 18.

38 De werken van Vondel, vol. 5: 1645-1656. Amsterdam (De Maatschappij voor goede en goedkoope lectuur) 1931, pp. 454-55. Also on the Digitale Bibliotheek van Nederlandse Letterkunde at http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/vond001dewe05_01/vond001dewe05_01_0069.php. 39 See also Frimmel 1904, for another brothel scene attributed to Andries Both, in the Karpf collection, Vienna. 40 A. Bredius and E.W. Moes, “De schildersfamilie Ravesteyn,” Oud-Holland (1891), pp. 207-19, pp. 212-13. 41 Manke 1963, p. 77, cat. nr. 1. Sutton 2008, pp. 184-88, cat. nr. 24. 42 Manke 1963, p. 22, n. 1: “Aus den Versen geht weiter hervor, dass den Zeitgenossen das Nebeneinander von einem ganz dunkel gehaltenen Bilde und solchem mit viel Helligkeit aufgefallen war.” Pollmer 2011, p. 435. 43 Van Mander-Miedema, vol. 3, 1996, pp. 158-60. 44 Kurt Wettengl, exhib. cat. Georg Flegel 1566-1638: Stilleben, Frankfurt am Main (Historisches Museum Frankfurt) 1993], p. XX, cat. nr. XX. 45 Steland-Stieff 1971. 46 Another version, which Cornelis Hofstede de Groot considered “onbetekenend” (insignificant), is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes. Steland-Stieff 1971, p. 151, nr. 165. 47. Source for Amsterdam collections, Montias 1991, pp. 352-353, table 3: "Subject categories of paintings in private inventories with attributions."

Schwartz: 1650: Kretzer (1 February jjjj) 30

48. Source for Amsterdam collections, Montias 1991, pp. 360-361, table 7: "Paintings in private inventories attributed to seventeenth-century artists active in various localities (1620-1679). There is a slight difference in the data, in that Montias tallies some painters in more than one location, while I give each artist only one location. This is somewhat inconsistent, in that I place Pieter van Laer in the section Northern Netherlands outside Amsterdam but Rembrandt in Amsterdam. However, this should not affect the general picture.

49 This point was observed by Weber 1991, p. 41, comparing the names in Kretzer's collection with those in Jan Vos's Zeege der schilderkunst.

50 For a start, see Christian Biet, "Rendre le visible lisible pour la plus grande gloire de Dieu. La pédagogie jésuite face à la peinture et à la poésie: Le Cabinet de peintures (1650-1671) du P. Pierre Le Moyne," Licorne, nr. 23, Poitiers (Université de Poitiers, Faculté des Lettres et des Langues) 1992, pp. 31-54. (Published online 24 March 2006 at http://licorne.edel.univ- poitiers.fr/document.php?id=261. Accessed 15 February 2012.)

51 Junius 1638, pp. 329-30. A more elaborate evocation of such a moment is found in De schilder- konst der oude, 1641, pp. 323-24. For a discussion of the emotions in Dutch painting, with a section on van den Bosch’s Konst-kabinet, see Schwartz 2014. 52 Weststeijn 2008, p. 160. Ernst van de Wetering displays unusual animadversion to Weststeijn’s book, which goes so far that he disdains to quote from it. In a chapter of vol. 5 of A corpus of Rembrandt paintings entitled “Towards a reconstruction of Rembrandt’s art-theory: confusion,” he writes on p. 25 that “little use is to be made of Thijs Weststeijn’s exegesis of Van Hoogstraten’s book.” To my mind, van de Wetering thereby does himself as well as the reader a disservice, not to mention his younger colleague. 53 See Roscam Abbing 1993, pp. 84-85, bibliography items 10-12. 54 “Mogelijk had hij [van den Bos] daar [in Dordrecht] al eerder [dan 1654] contacten gehad, want al in 16412 was bij de Dordtse uitgever Jasper Gorissz onder de titel Wonderbaerlycken strydt tusschen de kickvorschen ende de muysen zijn vertaling van het Griekse parodistische epos Batrachomyomachia verschenen.” Thissen 1994, p. 132. 55 Weststeijn 2008, p. 30, referring to Thissen 1994. The passage comes from van den Bosch, Dordrechtsche arcadia (1662), which Thissen (p. 122) quotes from a secondary source. 56 Weststeijn 2008, p.188. 57 This claim requires a footnote. The affects and states of ,mind to which I refer, in order of occurrence in the poem, are: fear and trembling (8), thoughtfulness (7), lust, anger, sadness or tears (6), dumbfoundedness, deception, envy (5), anger (4), delight, hate and despising, regret (3), amazement, consternation, anger (2) and mentioned once each insensibleness, hate, ambition, cruelty, strictness, frustration, sympathy, being moved, scorn, evil, feeling oppressed, being passive, feeling satisfied, hunger, misfortune, happiness, filled with intent, in love, hurt, zealousness, showing off, pretence, being accustomed, infected. 58 Van de Wetering 2010, p. 24. 59 Tummers 2011, p. 230. 60 Pollmer 2011, p. 435, proffers a heavier-going reading of this line. “Das genaue Verständnis von Van den Boschs Versen birgt freilich Schwierigkeiten, deutlich aber wird, daß De Wittes Bestimmung von Schwarz und Weiß den Charakter seiner Kunst ausmacht. Man darf nun spekulieren und annehmen, daß Lambert van den Bosch oder die Amsterdamer Rhetorikerkreise den weißen Farbaufrtag bereits mit den Namen De Wittes in Verbindung gebracht hatte, bevor sich De Witte für seine Spezialisierung als Maler von Kircheninerieurs … entschied.” There seems to me to be no need for this series of assumptions. As we have seen, van den Bosch had a weakness for this kind of play on names. He applied it as well to Andries or Jan Both and Anthonis Mor as well, without implying any further comment on their art. 61. This key observation was made by my student Sharon Assaf in a seminar meeting on 12 December 1995 at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

62 Weststeijn 2008, p. 158.

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63. In March 1637 Kretzer was a (minor) buyer at Jan Bassé sale in Amsterdam. Bredius 1915-1921, supplementary volume, p. 8n. Wurzbach 1906-1911, vol. 2, p. 64, reports without source that the painter Jacob van Loo (1605-1670) was in contact with Kretzer in 1635.

64. Source for Amsterdam collections, Montias 1991, p. 363, table 9: "Contemporary artists and 'old masters' in Amsterdam inventories 1620-1714."

65. “19.3.1650. Tijdingen uyt verscheyden quartieren. Uitg. Broer Jansz: ‘Marten Kretser, tot Amsterdam, is van meeninge den 3 May eerst-komende en de volgende dagen, op ’t Heerenlogement aen de meest biedende by openbare op-veylinghe te verkoopen een merckelijcke party uytmuntende Schilderyen en Teeckeningen, van verscheyde Italiaensche Meesters en andere, waer van men de Catalogus 3 weecken te vore in verscheyde Boeckverkoopers Winckels konnen bekomen.’” Dudok van Heel 1977, p. 107. Dudok van Heel's opinion that the Konst kabinet is the catalogue referred to and therefore "the oldest preserved auction catalogue," cannot be correct. The Konst kabinet van Marten Kretzer does not answer to any of the major specifications of an auction catalogue. Moreover, the number of items sold in a multi-day auction of paintings and drawings must have exceeded by far the less than fifty objects in the Konst kabinet.

66. Unger 1884, p. 112, note 2.

67. The members of the theatre board were appointed directly by the burgomasters. See Worp 1920, p. 91. Kretzer's patron among the burgomasters would seem to have been Wouter Valkenier (1589- 1650), the only one who was in office during all three of Kretzer's appointments. If so, his death in 1650 would have robbed Kretzer of his political backing. It may also have influenced his financial difficulties. Although Valckenier did not die until 23 July, he was incapacitated for some time between his election on 2 February and his death, after falling victim to a stroke in the burgomasters' chamber during an altercation with Anthonie Oetgens van Waveren. Elias 1903-1905, vol. 1, pp. 409-414. Bontemantel 1897, vol. 2, p. 492.

68 Hell and van Gent 2013, pp. 304, 324 and gracious e-mail of Maarten Hell, 27 November 2014: “1665 7 mei NA 3419-870 not. W. Lossij”: “Insinuatie van Gerard van Groendijk kastelein in de Kleveniersdoelen aan Martijn Kretser fijnschilder. Groendijk heeft verscheiden malen (en nu nog) aan U gepresenteerd zijn schilderijen die ten huize van Groendijk zijn (uitgezonderd die al bij u van de kamer of de zoldering afgehaald zijn) aan u terstond te laten volgen. Mits al te voren aan hem Groendijk te voldoen zo over verteerde gelagen in 1659 als zolderhuur van de gemelde schilderijen daarvan hij U lang voor dezen extract uit zijn register geleverd heeft. Te voldoen per resto f450.- en bij gebreke van dien schade enz enz. Antwoord: hij protesteert van kracht en geweld.”

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