‘Die Neue Sachlichkeit ’. ´s Claudius Civilis

Yannis Hadjinicolaou

Figure 1 Karl Schuberth, Copy of The Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis, 1926, oil on canvas, , (Photograph Yannis Hadjinicolaou)

I. A Claudius Civilis Picture

Positioned on a landing between two floors, a large painting unfolds its power – a picture almost every historian knows: ’s Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis, now at the National Museum in Stockholm (fig. 1). Meant to embellish the interior of the Amsterdam town hall, built in 1648, the painting was completed in 1661-2. Nevertheless, it was eventually rejected by the regents, removed from Jacob van Campen’s famous edifice, and stowed away out of public view.1 The questions to be addressed here are: where was the photograph taken, and what is the painting that it shows. If it were in a museum, the wall label would carry information concerning the painting, yet it only contains the lapidary

1 For the town hall in Amsterdam see the publications: Eymert-Jan Goossens, The Palace of Amsterdam. Treasure wrought by chisel and brush, Zwolle: Waanders, 2010; Exh. Cat. Opstand als Opdracht/The Batavian Commission. Flinck Ovens Lievens Jordaens De Groot Bol Rembrandt, ed. by Marianna van der Zwaag, Amsterdam: Stichting Koninklijk Paleis Amsterdam, 2011. I would like to thank Mark-Oliver Casper, Nicos Hadjinicolaou, Robin Greeley and Herman Roodenburg for their valuable and critical reading.

Journal of Art Historiography Number 19 December 2018 Yannis Hadjinicolaou ‘Die Neue Sachlichkeit Rembrandts’. Aby Warburg´s Claudius Civilis statement ‘Stairs up.’ A small arrow also indicates the upward direction. The Rembrandt picture is clearly not hanging in Stockholm. As the wall label is written only in English, the painting must be in an English-speaking country but not in a museum, because the hanging of the image neither seems to be dictated by security nor by the wish to offer the best point of view for the beholder. The photograph was taken between the third and the fourth floors of the Warburg Institute in London. The name of Aby Warburg already delivers a second hint in identifying the painting. In fact, in 1926, the famous art historian – or rather image-historian (Bildhistoriker), as he called himself – commissioned the Swedish artist Carl Schuberth (1860-1929, a painter mostly of landscapes and history pieces) to make a copy of Rembrandt’s Claudius Civilis.2 The copy was meant to decorate the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (KBW) in .3 Soon after 1926, it was moved next door to Heilwigstrasse 115, Warburg’s private residence. There it hung in the staircase, as recalls in his memoirs on Aby Warburg and as it is documented on a note by from the diary of the KBW.4 With the library’s later move to London in 1933 and its foundation as The Warburg Institute, the work arrived in the British capital via Amsterdam. It hung in various parts of the Institute until it reached its current placement, following Warburg’s thematic ordering, between the third floor (‘Orientation’) and the fourth (‘Action’). Action, as I discuss below, comprised a substantial part of Warburg’s lecture Italienische Antike im Zeitalter Rembrandt´s (Italian Antiquity in Rembrandt´s Age), which he gave in May 1926 at the KBW lecture hall.5

2 This occurred after the director of the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, Alex Gauffin, recommended Schuberth to his friend Warburg. Warburg and Graf Kalckreuth (who actually wanted to make himself a copy of Claudius Civilis) in Hambur