Pieter Saenredam: The Painter and His Time

Fascinated with Buildings -- with their spaces, the light that plays around them, their human uses -- the Dutch painter Pieter Saenredam became the first great architectural portraitist and one of the greatest artists of the seventeenth century. The dean of the Haarlem painters guild, Saenredam depicted existing structures, especially churches, with a clarity of vision that grew from precise observation and an unprecedented understanding of the perspective techniques he learned from architects and engineers -- skills that seemed abstruse to most artists and lay people of the day. His paintings, works of great poetic beauty, carry an apparent objectivity that has made them invaluable to architectural historians and a source of deep fascination for such modern writers as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes. Yet they are marked by a sensitivity of drawing and coloring that is unmistakably Saenredam's. This beautiful and important volume explores the art and life of Pieter Saenredam, placing both very much within the context of seventeenth-century Holland. With particular attention to the cultural, religious, and political life of the time, the elegantly written and authoritative text tells us the story of his family, his career, and his art. The authors have been able to paint for us an engaging and precise account of Saenredam's life and, by extension, that of Holland during the dazzling zenith of its economic and cultural power. Featuring splendid reproductions of the artist's complete oeuvre, including full-page color images of every painting, this book assembles all that is known about Saenredam, including important new material presented here for the first time. Accompanying the text is a complete catalog of his work, illustrated by plans of the churches he painted. These provide us with fascinating insights into Saenredam's working methods and the extent to which the apparent hyper-realism of his work was in fact a carefully manipulated appearance of reality.