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De Zeventiende Eeuw. Jaargang 21 (2005)

De Zeventiende Eeuw. Jaargang 21

(2005)– [tijdschrift] Zeventiende Eeuw, De–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

Utrecht's Transformations: Claiming the Dom through Representation, Iconoclasm and Ritual*
Angela Vanhaelen

Utopian hopes

In the autumn of 1636, the Haarlem artist Pieter Saenredam spent several days documenting the interior of the Domkerk, the main church of the Dutch city of Utrecht.1 One of the resultant drawings gives a sweeping view down the nave toward the choir (Fig. 1). At first glance, this image conveys the impression of a vast and largely empty space, bereft of human activities. Yet it also draws the viewer in. The central perspective channels the gaze down the nave, encouraging an examination of the painstakingly rendered details of this gothic interior en route. In this way the meticulous depiction of the church's furnishings works against the initial impression of barrenness. As is so often the case in Saenredam's architectural paintings, a seemingly empty space reveals itself to be replete with meanings, and a close consideration of visual details offers up a wealth of information about the history of the church.

In fact, art historians have approached this drawing as important documentary evidence, which provides reliable facts about the seventeenth-century Calvinist arrangement of this space as well as its former Roman Catholic layout.2 Here we see the church as it was arranged for Reformed worship. The choir - the former site of the high altar - is blocked by a choir screen, and the pulpit is centred in front of it. Marking off this liturgical heart of the Calvinist worship service is the rail of the baptismal enclosure, and this area is surrounded by benches designated for the church council and other prominent members of the congregation.3 These furnishings reveal that this is



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Fig. 1. Pieter Saenredam, The Nave and Choir of the Dom in Utrecht, seen to the east. 3 September 1636 (Het Utrechts Archief).


clearly a Calvinist space of worship, focused on the preaching of the Word of God.

Saenredam has dated this drawing precisely to the 3rd of September, 1636. At this time, the church had been Calvinist for a relatively short period of fifty-six years. Although the interior had been converted for Reformed worship, details of the drawing also point to the former Roman Catholic functions of this space. These include the gold tapestry paintings and some of the escutcheons on the columns, as well as the choir stalls and stained glass windows in the far background. Such fragmentary visual vestiges of the religious past have potentially nostalgic functions, working to call up the previous splendour of the rather austere interior that Saenredam records.4 For prior to the Reformation, the Domkerk had been the cathedral of the powerful bishopric, and later the archbishopric, of Utrecht. This site had stood - literally and symbolically - at the very centre of Roman Catholic dominance in this region, for its vast territories had once included most of the Northern Netherlands.5

The loss of the cathedral to the Calvinists in 1580 was thus a devastating event. Following iconoclast riots of that year, the cathedral chapter was forced to oversee the cleansing of the church, and they hired twenty labourers who worked steadily for several days and nights, removing statues, altars, and religious imagery.6 In spite of these efforts, however, the complete eradication of the building's past was never entirely successful. As Henri Lefebvre reminds us, ‘In space, what came earlier continues to underpin what follows’.7 Saenredam's drawing attests to this, indicating how remnants of the church's history remained visible in the architecture. Moreover, as will become evident throughout this paper, the history of Dom also continued to linger in collective memory, surfacing as a point of conflict in times of crisis.

It has been suggested that Saenredam was commissioned to come to Utrecht in 1636 specifically to create visual records of some of the city's important medieval churches for a small group of Roman Catholic patrons.8 The inclusion of fragments of the Catholic past of the Dom consequently might have been part of a larger antiquarian effort - an attempt to restore memories of the place by salvaging the remains of the building's history for clients who had something at stake in it. If this was the case, then Saenredam's drawing can be seen as a multi-temporal image of space, which points to the historically changing functions of the church. Although this is a highly realistic and probably quite accurate rendering, it must be understood as a representation, which not only documents the interior of the Dom, but also draws attention to specific aspects of it. Most notably, the drawing does not offer up one static meaning for the building; rather, it indicates past struggles over the definition and control of the church, and the various appropriations of the space by different groups with conflicting ideals. Moreover, if the drawing was done with a Roman Catholic patron in mind, it might have resonated with widespread utopian hopes for the restoration of this place to its former power.9 By drawing upon memories of the past, this image therefore had the potential to open up a consideration of possible futures that were radically different from the situation on Wednesday September 3, 1636.

Such utopian hopes seem to evade the actual relations of power that pervaded within the Dom, the city of Utrecht, and indeed the entire Dutch Republic in 1636. This was a time when the history of Roman Catholicism must have appeared increasingly remote in the face of the dominance of Calvinism - not just in the churches - but also in social and political life. Although they were compelled to worship in secret and officially banned from holding public offices, however, the Republic's Roman Catholics managed to persist in the everyday practices of their faith, and found ways to create a

specific religious identity for themselves.10 These efforts were aided by the involvement of the international Roman Catholic Church. Under the impetus of the Counter-Reformation, the Holland Mission was established in order to nurture the faithful, and win back those who had left the Catholic Church. The wider goal of this movement was to re-convert the entire Dutch Republic - a hope that implied nothing less than a revolutionary overthrow of the dominant religious, political, and social ordering of the social fabric.11 Such hopes also were cultivated by practices such as the interpretation of miracles, prophecies, and religious visions. For instance, there were reports that in 1670, a nun from Brussels predicted that in two years' time, the Mass would be celebrated openly in Utrecht again.12 As it turned out, this was not a false prophecy, for this is exactly what did happen during the occupation of the city by the French army of Louis XIV in the years 1672 and 1673.

There is a range of visual imagery that represents the dramatic historical changes and shifting relations of power that were played out in Utrecht during the occupation. These representations reveal that religious tensions came to the fore throughout the crisis, and this paper will analyze images that situate the Domkerk as a key site where this divisiveness was made manifest. As the church was taken over by various groups, different possible histories of its place within Utrecht and the Dutch Republic came into conflict. Representations of the ritual practices that occurred in and around the Dom at this time expose much about what was at stake these battles, for they indicate how remembering and forgetting, and conflict and contradiction were all active processes within various attempts to envision a socially cohesive city during this time of crisis.

In order to begin to explore these issues, it is useful to contrast Saenredam's drawing of the interior of the Domkerk with the only surviving architectural painting of this space, Interior of the Dom in 1672, painted by Hendrik van Vliet in 1674 (Fig. 2). In its mingling of Reformed and Roman Catholic imagery, Saenredam's drawing points to a potential lack of reconciliation between the church's past and its present. Van Vliet, by contrast, creates a more homogenous image, and the Dom that he paints resonates with the vision of the nun from Brussels. For here we see the cathedral restored to its former glory and power. As in Saenredam's drawing, Van Vliet chose a view up the nave toward the choir. While both images are centred on the same site, however, Saenredam's orthogonals lead the eye to the pulpit, while Van Vliet's point to the conspicuous absence of pulpit, choir screen, and church benches, allowing instead a view into the depth of the choir where a high altar and large crucifix are visible. The emphasis of this image is clearly on



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Fig. 2. Hendrik van Vliet, Interior of the Dom in 1672, 1674 (Collectie Centraal Museum, Utrecht).


the restored rituals of Roman Catholic worship. Several figures kneel before the two altars at the front of the choir, and these can be identified as nuns, Capuchin monks, and laypeople.13 In the north aisle, a priest holding a chalice and an altar boy with an incense censor walk from the sacristy in the direction of the left altar, ostensibly in preparation for mass. Another priest presides over the altar at right.14 Three more altars are visible in the ambulatory and nave of the church, and, like Saenredam, Van Vliet also has included the gold brocade tapestry paintings and some of the escutcheons.15

At the base of the column in the left foreground the artist signed the painting together with the inscription: ‘In the year 1672 the Dom was transformed in this manner’.16 The inscription indicates that, in a move somewhat reminiscent of Saenredam's

trip to Utrecht in 1636, Van Vliet may have travelled to the city in 1672 in order to create a lasting image of the Domkerk as it appeared at that time. Like Saenredam, Van Vliet also may have been working for a Roman Catholic patron, for this painting contains almost no trace of the recent Calvinist past. Instead, utopian hopes for the restoration of this church to Roman Catholicism have seemingly been fulfilled: a space that had only been conceived in the imagination has suddenly become a perceptible reality.

While the interior depicted looks realistic, however, the style in which it is painted must have appeared somewhat anachronistic to contemporary viewers. As Walter Liedtke has pointed out, this work is definitely ‘old-fashioned’ in its stylistic approach.17 Van Vliet, after all, was from Delft, and like many Delft painters of his day, he experimented with innovative ways of creating strikingly realistic visual and spatial effects on canvas.18 The compositional inventions of Delft architectural painters such as Van Vliet, Gerard Houckgeest, and Emanuel De Witte included a move away from central projections down a tunnel-like nave in favour of oblique views from aisles into spaces dappled with sunlight, which seem to respond more to the actual experience of viewing the church.19 In this painting, by contrast, Van Vliet appears to exaggerate the height, length, and narrowness of the church, especially in the choir area.20 The result is a painting that looks outdated. It has more in common with the work of the Antwerp architectural painters of the late sixteenth century, such as the van Steenwijks and Neefs, than it does with the innovations of Van Vliet and his contemporaries in Delft.

This is the last known painting in Van Vliet's oeuvre, and the question of why he reverted to a somewhat obsolete style remains unresolved. The painting certainly confounds notions of stylistic progression, both within the painter's body of work and within the genre of architectural painting, indicating that concerns other than innovation may have informed its execution. Given the specific historical context, the approach of the Antwerp painters actually is quite effective, as it successfully conveys the painting's content. This style was associated predominantly with Roman Catholic church interiors, while the innovations of the Delft painters responded mainly to the specifics of Reformed churches. Although Van Vliet specifies that the date is 1672, at first glance this looks like a representation of a sixteenth-century Roman Catholic church. Seen in this way, the painting's outdated style actually works to call up the historical past of the Dom. Indeed, this may have been one of the primary attractions of the image: what the church has become in the present allows the viewer to look back with nostalgia at what it once was, and possibly also to look forward to the continuation of this particular vision of past and present into the future.

A certain homogeneity of time is thus imposed upon this space. There is very little in

this representation to remind viewers of the nearly one hundred years of Calvinist worship that had taken place within the building prior to the sudden reversal of 1672. Van Vliet's painting is therefore intriguing, for even though it represents what look to be actual events within the church, it also appears as a utopian image, removed from the conflictual social relations of this place and time. Calvinist claims upon the church seem to be wilfully forgotten, excluded from this vision of the untroubled and continuous Roman Catholic history of the Dom.

The long history of antagonism between Catholics and Protestants cannot really be separated from the ideal of social and religious coherence represented here, however, and the painting does contain some allusions to this history. The caption, for instance, reminds the viewer that this is what the Dom became in 1672, which implies that it had been something quite different prior to that date. Moreover, in his detailed analysis of this painting, A.J. van de Ven has argued that, based on the particulars of the liturgical vestments of the priests, the painting can possibly be dated more precisely to the 24th of August, 1672 - which is the feast day of St. Bartholomew.21 While the evidence for this is somewhat scant, it is nevertheless an interesting suggestion, for a reference to the infamous massacre of French Protestants in 1572 would have been particularly resonant in light of the victories of French Roman Catholicism in 1672. Moreover, some of the staffage figures within the church resemble French officers22 - which could call up the recent military conquest of the city, while potentially also suggesting the Catholic-Protestant violence of the distant past.

At the same time, these French soldiers disrupt the utopic nature of the space somewhat, for they indicate that this is not a vision of the Dom restored as the autonomous centre of Dutch Roman Catholicism. Rather, like the city of Utrecht, the church too is occupied by a foreign power. Betraying its own attempt to picture temporal and spatial homogeneity, Van Vliet's image implies that the return of the Dom to Roman Catholicism did not signify a seamless continuity of the church's past functions. Indeed, in a consideration of the various groups who had conflicting interests at stake in the church, the claims of the French Catholics should not be overlooked. As Willem Frijhoff has pointed out, the utopian hopes of the Dutch Roman Catholic faithful were compromised during the French invasion, for the restoration of church buildings and traditional religious practices certainly came at a cost.23

The World Turned Upside Down

While these costs are not emphasized in Van Vliet's painting, they come across more urgently in the many printed images representing the French occupation of Utrecht in 1672 and 1673. In effect, the topical nature of these events was perhaps better suited to



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Fig. 3. J. van den Aveele, Den Dom gegesselt en gewijdt in: Utrechts Veranderingen, Amsterdam: Hieronymus Sweerts, 1674 (Het Utrechts Archief).


the medium of print than to the genre of architectural painting. The occupation of Utrecht and the restoration of the Roman Catholic religion in the city were causes for concern throughout the United Provinces, for these events possibly portended the fate of the entire Republic if the French achieved their military goals. Circulated to a broad audience, this printed material represents several key moments of the crisis, providing opportunities for widespread debate about the situation in Utrecht. As we shall see, the images often employ satirical humour, allowing anxiety about the occupation to be diffused with laughter. Both the medium and the conventions of printed imagery prompt consideration of the notions of time and change, and of power and its reversal, as the city was transformed and transformed again during these crisis years.

A print series entitled Utrechts Veranderingen, or The Transformations of Utrecht, etched by J. van den Aveele and published by Hieronymus Sweerts of Amsterdam, focuses on the remarkable events that followed the arrival of the French in Utrecht. At first glance, the opening print of the series, The Dom scourged and sanctified (Fig. 3) is reminiscent of

representations of the Protestant iconoclast riots of the sixteenth century. Upon closer inspection, however, the rioting figures emerge as monks, priests, laypeople, and klopjes, or Roman Catholic lay sisters.24 This satirical image seems to take up the question of how to purify a Calvinist church, which - almost by definition - already has been cleansed. In the Netherlands after all, iconoclasm was an action historically taken against the religious imagery of the Roman Catholics as the Reformed laid claim to their churches and altered them for Calvinist worship. This image of Roman Catholics carrying out acts of iconoclasm in a Reformed church consequently turns the iconoclastic history of the Netherlands on its head.

The historical accounts indicate that in this reverse iconoclasm, the Catholics mainly targeted the furnishings that had been installed after 1580 and were central to the Calvinist worship service. The pulpit was attacked first: it was removed and then publicly beaten. The church benches and chairs were taken out the next day and burned in the church yard, accompanied by the ringing of bells.25 In the foreground of the print is an overturned baptismal font. The etched lines indicating the spill of water flow into another series of strokes, which represent the destructive forces of fire and smoke. Although the pile of burning rubble is not rendered with great clarity, within it we can make out a few chairs, the collection bag used to gather the weekly tithe, some dishes, possibly those used in the sacrament of Lord's Supper, and a number of books, which are probably Protestant Bibles and Psalters.

The print also suggests that the public monuments of the church came under attack. At the far right, a man climbs a ladder, seemingly to remove an epitaph that hangs upon the column. These types of memory boards were common features in Calvinist churches; usually they were erected to commemorate the lives of prominent citizens. At the left of the group in the foreground a man adds a plumed helmet to a pile, which also contains a military gauntlet and heraldic crest. These evoke the monuments to military heroes that were prominent in many of the Republic's Reformed churches. Celebrating the deaths of commanders who had fought for the freedom of the Republic from foreign - and often Roman Catholic - oppressors, these sorts of monuments worked to link the past conquest of religious spaces with the victories of war, especially the Dutch Revolt against Spain. They were a fitting target for the Roman Catholic iconoclasts - for it is precisely this history of the space that they were attempting to eradicate.

Such active washing away of the violent conquests of the past also is emphasized in the historical texts. Tobias van Domselaer's Het Ontroerde Nederlandt focuses on the actions of a group of Roman Catholic women:

The klopjes, nuns and Bagijns now openly revealed themselves in public, and with angry hearts they scorned this blameless Dom, where the preaching and worship services of the Heretics had so long taken place [...]. But now it had become their domain, they swept, brushed, scrubbed and washed the church so clean, so that no scent of Beggary or Heresy could be smelled anymore.26

 

Armed with their brooms and scrub brushes, this battalion of women is visible in the left background of the print. The idea that they are washing away the stink of ‘Beggary’ calls up the distant past, when the armies of Orange, or Sea Beggars, fought against the Roman Catholic Spaniards in the Revolt. This certainly resonates with the print, indicating how iconoclasm functioned as a means of actively and intentionally forgetting recent as well as more distant memories of the building's Calvinist history.

The paradox that the image reveals, however, is that the Roman Catholics of Utrecht actually re-enacted this past in their attempt to eradicate it. It is as though the violence of the Reformed iconoclasm had etched itself so deeply into the collective memory that, in this moment of opportunity, the trauma was acted out and hence exposed. In this way, the aim of forgetting the past was accomplished through a powerful act of remembering. Remembering and forgetting intertwine, revealing the difficulty of imposing or controlling either process.

The text of the print puts it more bluntly: ‘Everyone mops and sweeps and scrubs and whitewashes, but the heart remains full of filth’.27 From this point of view, these iconoclast attempts to wash away the past could never succeed - they are represented as a misguided attempt to replace Calvinist purity with Roman Catholic pollution. Iconoclasm, after all, was directed against religious imagery and objects, with the aim of replacing them with material objects that could not be venerated for their sacred powers. The incongruity of the actions of Roman Catholic iconoclasts certainly was not lost on Utrecht's Calvinists, who coined the term ‘stoelgeselaars’ in order to mock those who had lashed out at chairs. This became a widely-used insult in Utrecht, preserving the memory of a topsy-turvy iconoclasm that was directed at mere furniture.28 From the Calvinist perspective, therefore, the actions of the Catholics were laughable, for their appropriation of Calvinist behaviour was not true iconoclasm.

From the Roman Catholic point of view, on the other hand, the active eradication of Reformed church furnishings was necessary in order to restore the Dom. The printed image juxtaposes the actions of iconoclasts with those of iconophiles, who install a number of religious statues within the interior. The active destruction of the visual culture of Calvinism thus was interconnected with the forceful reassertion of Roman Catholic religious imagery.

Indeed, after taking back the Dom, the Catholics used it as a base to assert their dominance in the city. Of all of the Catholic rituals that were re-established at this time, the one that received the most publicity was the Sacrament's Day Procession of 1673. This procession is described in some detail in a book entitled Journal or Daily Story of the Business of the French in the Cities of Utrecht and Woerden by Abraham de Wicquefort.29 According to this account, on Sunday the 18th of May, Bishop Neercassel, the leader of the Holland Mission, announced from the pulpit of the Domkerk that the procession would take place in the city on Sacrament's Day, the following Thursday.30 While the risks of this public performance of their allegiances must have been obvious to the Roman Catholic population of Utrecht, clearly they also understood the important message that this procession could convey. By acting out a banned practice, the Sacrament's Day procession could reawaken the memory of the traditional celebration of the church calendar through a vivid enactment of the Roman Catholic past in the here and now. Not only would this return to the cyclical time of the church calendar commemorate past practices, but it also reinstituted them in a process that bestowed legitimacy upon current Roman Catholic claims to the city.31

This vision of cyclical time was reinforced by the itinerary of the procession. The beginning and end point was the Domkerk, and the route formed a circuit around the cathedral.32 On the way, it passed near the Buurkerk, the Pieterskerk, and the site of the former church of Oud Munster, all noteworthy medieval churches with strong connections to the Roman Catholic past. By focusing on these sites, the procession endowed the pre-existing space that it traversed with specific meanings.33 As Louis Marin has noted, processions that are structured as a closed circuit work to establish a symbolic frontier, marking off a site in order to legitimize the significance that the procession bestows upon it.34 In the case of the procession around the Dom, the round trip served to sever the church from the recent past. The procession seemingly departed from the Domkerk in order to move forward in time and space. This forward movement really prompted a consideration of the city's medieval past, however, and the event closed with a return to its starting point. As it arrived back at the same place, a circuit of time also was closed: the present looped back to the past in order to secure the site for the future.

As we have already seen with Van Vliet's painting of the reconsecrated Dom, however, such a vision of homogeneous time and space depends upon the denial and repression of the claims of conflicting groups. This comes across vividly in historical descriptions of the preparation of the parade route. These state that members of the Reformed

community were warned to stay indoors and shut up their homes and shops, which were in danger of being plundered. In fact, in spite of the warnings, ‘here and there some acts of mischief were committed’.35 These accounts point to the supplementary meaning of the procession, for it made a statement, not just about the resurgence of the Roman Catholic faith, but also about its victory over Calvinism. In this regard, the procession was an antagonistic act whose message was aimed at Reformed and Roman Catholics alike. The frontier created by the circular procession certainly delimited the Roman Catholic history of the site. At the same time, it marked a boundary that excluded the counter-claims of the Reformed. Utrecht's Roman Catholics, who for so long had to practice their religion in private, now could publicly lay claim to the cathedral; it was the Calvinists' turn to stay inside with the windows closed.

The warning to the Reformed community also served to delimit the procession's participants and spectators. By excluding the Calvinists, the event brought Utrecht's Roman Catholic community together, providing a powerful opportunity for the constitution of their new collective identity. This was reinforced by the ordering of the participants.36 On the morning of May 22nd, after the celebration of Mass in the cathedral, the north doors were opened and a group of children, many of them dressed as popes or angels, led the procession into the streets.37 They were followed by many women, including the klopjes. After the women and children came men of the laity. Then monks of different orders, followed by priests dressed in white. Behind them marched the lackeys of the French military commander Condé. They prepared the way for the symbolic centre of the event - the sacrament carried in a monstrance by Bishop Neercassel, who walked under a red pavilion held up by four French officers. At the end of the procession came Louis XIV's representative, Governor Stoupa, the commander of the occupied city.38 Each participant thus was situated within the order of the whole according to hierarchies of age, gender, religious status, and political power. The overall vision was of a totality that was socially, religiously, and politically legitimated. The procession accordingly allowed the Roman Catholic community to convey a powerful message about the revalidation of their collective values.

Of course, it did not escape the notice of their opponents that the restoration of this particular vision of social, political, and religious order was brought about only through a transgression of the former order. A print of the event entitled The Procession in Utrecht in the series The Transformations of Utrecht by Aveele and Sweerts provides a satirical view of the procession and its aims (Fig. 4). The caption in the upper left corner proclaims: ‘Now the French rooster is crowing from the heights, and everyone must appear in the procession’.39 Directly underneath this caption, participants march beneath the words



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Fig. 4. J. van den Aveele, De Processie t' Uytrecht in: Utrechts Veranderingen, Amsterdam: Hieronymus Sweerts, 1674 (Het Utrechts Archief).


‘Ludovicus Triump’, which decorate the top of a temporary triumphal arch. A series of ephemeral monuments such as this were erected along the route; others bore captions such as ‘A la gloire de Dieu, et a l'honneur du Roy’.40 This temporarily redefined the city, and clearly linked the resurgence of Roman Catholic practices with the French conquest. A contemporary description notes that the entire procession route was lined with French soldiers ‘apparently to prevent all disorder’.41 From this point of view, the harmony imposed by the procession clearly was forged out of antagonism and war, and had the capability to spur further discord. While the procession aimed to reveal the unity and coherence of a Roman Catholic city, for some of the onlookers, it also brought into plain view the treasonous allegiance between Dutch Roman Catholics and the French occupying forces.

The visual transformation of the city during this time also brought key religious differences to the fore. Even as the houses of the Reformed were closed up, Roman Catholic homes came to prominence through exterior decorations such as religious paintings, crosses, poetry, and greenery. Clearly this was a forceful reassertion of the sa-

cred visual traditions that had been banned by the Calvinists.42 Moreover, the power of the procession itself revolved around the visible display of the holy sacrament. As the print indicates, the appearance of the sacrament in the streets was met with devotion, and onlookers and participants in the procession alike all knelt before it. This served as a very effective means to draw spectators into the theatricality of the event, transforming them from passive viewers into active participants. The very sight of the host had the potential to eliminate distinctions between the procession's actors and its audience, and hence to further reinforce the unity of the Roman Catholic community.43

Calvinist accounts, by contrast, pointedly attacked the powers of sacred images and objects. The Journal, for instance, baldly states that the elevation of the host by Neercassel was truly apish behaviour, and that the holy sacrament itself was ‘nothing but a white wafer shut up in a golden case’.44 In the print, swags, draperies, and flags hang above the altar, setting this space apart, and emphasizing the theatrical, and possibly the transient, nature of these events. The caption of the print makes similar connections by asserting: ‘But the show is not over yet’.45This could imply that efforts to turn the city into a theatre set were nothing but fleeting and illusory attempts to impose false meanings. As in the theatre, comic inversions are usually resolved by the reassertion of social norms.

A similar response comes across in Domselaer's description of these events. With the benefit of hindsight, this author situates the cyclical procession within a very different time frame, and ends his account by stating:

Thus did these fine and devout Roman Catholics for once honestly reveal their hearts in public; this is something that has not occurred in about a whole century of one hundred years, and also will not occur in the following years and possibly (from a human perspective) will never happen again.46

 

In opposition to the procession's aim of establishing the continuity of the cyclical time of the ancient church calendar, Domselaer claims that in the final analysis, this was nothing more than a one-time event - an anomaly that would not soon be repeated. He hesitates to say that this would never happen again, however. It seems that the events of 1672 and 1673 taught him to allow for the potentially unpredictable possibilities of the future.

For as the comic symbolism of the World Turned Upside Down reveals, while the world can turn on its head, it can also spin upright again, seemingly in an instant. Powers rise, are deposed, and replaced by other powers.47 Thus, early on the morning of



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Fig. 5. J. van den Aveele, 'T Verloste Uytrecht in: Utrechts Veranderingen, Amsterdam: Hieronymus Sweerts, 1674 (Het Utrechts Archief).


Thursday the 13th of November 1673, drums were beat, the bells of the Dom tower were rung, and the last mass was celebrated in the Dom.48 Governor Stoupa then gave back the keys of the city with the legendary last words, ‘By the will of the [...] King, I return these keys to you. Go into your church, and thank God for your freedom, and pray to Him that we will never come back’.49 After seventeen months of occupation, the French had relinquished their hold on the city and the church.

No sooner had the French departed than violence broke out in the city. As if in retaliation for the damage done to Calvinist homes during the Sacrament's Day procession, the houses of several Roman Catholics - especially those who had openly supported the French King - were attacked, and many windows were broken.50 A group of Calvinists also rushed to the Dom, and, finding it unlocked, they began to plunder it, removing images, altars, and other Roman Catholic objects.51 Once again, the residents of Utrecht witnessed the Dom undergo a sudden transformation. We can sense

Wicquefort's astonishment as he notes: ‘Surely an enormous change in one day, for only that morning the Mass had been celebrated in the same place’.52

A print of The Liberated Utrecht appears in The Transformations of Utrecht by Sweerts and Aveele (Fig. 5). In a reversal of the Roman Catholic iconoclasm represented by the previous image in this series (see Fig. 3), it is now the turn of the Reformed to purge the church. A fire has been lit in the church yard and a statue of Mary and the Christ child is being thrown into the flames, which also engulf a confessional booth, a bell, a brush reminiscent of the type used by the Catholic iconoclasts, a book, an incense burner, and a cross.

The gestures of two officers on horseback at the centre of the image link this scene to the events depicted at the left - one officer points his baton at the men with the statue, the other points his rifle at a woman, possibly a nun, who stands with arms outstretched in front of the church portal. Behind them jut the rifles and spears of a group of soldiers, linking violence against imagery to the military and political aggression of the time. Centred in the foreground of the image, a group of men carry a large chest inscribed with the name Condé toward the fire. The belongings of this French military commander appear to be as offensive as the idolatrous objects of the Roman Catholics. Clearly there was more at stake here than just the destruction of the sacred image; these attempts to eradicate material traces of the French indicate that this iconoclasm was as political as it was religious.

In this manner did the constitution of one kind of social order depend upon the active obliteration of another. As in the print of the Roman Catholic iconoclasm, this image indicates how destruction often is accompanied by the creation of new images. In the background of the scene a group is occupied with the erection of a large triumphal arch. The redecoration of the church clearly interconnects with the larger redefinition of the urban fabric. The ephemeral arch is of course reminiscent of those built to decorate the city for the procession on Sacrament's Day (see Fig. 4). What has changed is the slogan: ‘Ludovico Triump’ has notably been replaced with ‘viva d orang’. Abandoned by the French king, the citizens of Utrecht prepare to meet their new ruler, the Prince of Orange.

While the makers of this print series had mocked the Roman Catholic iconoclasm, it is significant to note that they do not condone the actions of Calvinist image breakers either. This can be seen especially in the caricatured faces of the iconoclasts, who grimace with open mouths. This satirical representation resonates with written descriptions of the event, which claim that it was ‘het graeuw’ or the rabble that plundered the church, while the godly expressed themselves in more appropriate ways by holding a service of thanksgiving that evening in the newly cleansed Dom.53 As numerous stud-

ies of iconoclasm recount, iconoclastic crisis often is followed by uncertainty or even atonement, and the subsequent denigration of the iconoclast as a member of a brutal and ignorant mob is a common strategy used to create distance from the violence.54 The notion of ‘het graeuw’ functions as a convenient stereotype: it circulated in a number of pictorial and textual representations of these events, which enabled the Calvinists whose interests were served by the iconoclasts to simultaneously condemn their actions.

In fact, the repression of religious discord figured largely in the city's preparations to welcome the Prince of Orange. A pamphlet printed in Utrecht provides detailed descriptions of the how the city was decorated for William's royal entry. Significantly, this event was contrasted with the Sacrament's Day procession. During the religious procession, for instance, a Roman Catholic and pro-French poem had been posted underneath a painting of the crucified Christ, which hung above the door of an inn along the route.55 The pamphlet transcribes this poem in full:

 
Oh holy Host,
 
In which France puts her trust,
 
The only hope of the faithful,
 
Give strength,
 
And protect the Lily.56

For the entry of William, this offensive display was replaced with a ‘response to these verses’, which stated that the God of the Roman Catholic heretics was made of nothing but flour, and that although on Sacrament's Day the papists had allowed the French to become their masters, they should now thankfully turn to the Prince of Orange, who had delivered them all from much misery.57 The religious and political conflicts that were manifested during the Sacrament's day procession were thus addressed and resolved: under the leadership of Orange, a new harmony would pervade.

This is expressed vividly in a poem displayed in the church yard:

 
Reformed and Catholics
 
Alike await your Highness [...]
 
Both desire to live together
 
As good Patriots of the Land [...],
 
And to live here in Peace together
 
As befits good Burghers.58

At the site where so much religious conflict had occurred appears a new message of social concord. Just as the dead wait for the second coming of Christ, the Reformed and Catholic burghers of the city await the Prince of Orange. Religious divisiveness, it seems, has been subsumed by the fervour of patriotism.

The adornment of the city for William's entry promulgated the somewhat utopian vision of a unified, disciplined society, with one leader and one main religion. In point of fact, these ideals had always been central to the definition of the Dutch Republic.59 As Joke Spaans has argued, Calvinism was a religion that had been introduced from above by the House of Orange, based on the principle that the monarch had the divine right to determine the religion of his people.60 This was tempered with an awareness of the need to accommodate religious differences, however. Therefore, potentially divisive religious differences often were downplayed by secular authorities in efforts to create and maintain social order.61

Perhaps as a result of such policies, distinctions between the Reformed and the Roman Catholics were not all that sharply drawn in the everyday life of the Dutch cities; the evidence points to many shared practices and beliefs between the two groups.62 This ecumenicity of the everyday could, of course, be disrupted in moments of crisis and tension, when fear, panic, and violence broke out, and certainly the sources reveal that this was the case during the French occupation. At the same time, possibly because the lives of both groups were so intertwined, there really was relatively little Calvinist-Catholic violence during the crisis, and the French retreat was followed by widespread attempts to deny the religious differences that had divided the city.63

While this may seem like nothing more than the re-imposition of the Calvinist status quo, Frijhoff speculates that the return to peaceful coexistence probably also was in the best interests of the Roman Catholic population.64 Although the Catholic clergy had looked to Louis XIV as a potential saviour who could bring to fruition their utopian hopes, the actual invasion did not fulfill these expectations. Instead of restoring the old order with Utrecht and the Domkerk at the centre of Dutch religious and political power, it resulted in the imposition of French Roman Catholic rule.65 In light of the French defeat, it probably did benefit both religious groups to pledge their allegiance to Orange, and to build a collective vision for the future of the city based on patriotic, rather than religious interests. In this way, the instability and fragmentation that were revealed during the invasion could be denied by asserting a narrative about the unity and constancy of the city as a homogenous space of political consensus. According to this narrative, the conflicts of the recent past could be forgotten as the city's diverse religious groups reverted peacefully back to their formerly harmonious coexistence.

Unpredictable Possibilities

This image of a city restored to harmony certainly was favoured in the historical accounts, and it clearly provides a fitting and neat conclusion to the tumultuous events of the invasion and its aftermath. History, however, rarely accommodates itself to such narrative structures. For about nine months after the French retreat, the Domkerk underwent another sudden transformation - this one brought about by an act of God so dramatic that no one could possibly have predicted it. On the first of August, 1674, a tremendous hurricane tore through Utrecht. The Dom lay in the path of the storm, and in less than half an hour, the nave of the mighty cathedral was reduced to a pile of rubble.66

Utrecht artist Herman Saftleven created a series of aquarelle drawings of the ruins of the Dom.67 The drawing dated September 3, 1674 (Fig. 6) presents a view into two of the chapels of the choir seen from the north aisle. The roofless, ruined, rubble-filled Domkerk pictured here certainly resonates with some of the observations of contemporary



illustratie
Fig. 6. Herman Saftleven, De kapellen Taets van Amerongen en Van der Vecht, het Noorderportaal en de Mariakapel vanuit het oosten. 3 September 1674 (Het Utrechts Archief).


commentators, who noted with wonder how God had destroyed this mighty church - the pride of Utrecht, with its heaven-high roof - which had been built to endure until the end of the world.68 Saftleven's image stands in stark contrast to Hendrik Van Vliet's visual celebration of the restored Dom, a painting that - ironically enough - was completed in 1674 (see Fig. 2).

For the people of Utrecht, the devastation of the Dom in 1674 must have seemed like the ultimate memento mori - a reminder that nothing in the world endures forever; nothing is spared from death and destruction. Prominent in the right foreground of the drawing is a fallen epitaph. In the middle ground of the image, another of these memory boards hangs precariously from its column. The purpose of such monuments was to keep the memory of the dead alive. Only the back of the foreground epitaph is depicted, however. Its text, naming the important citizen it commemorates, is no longer important, for worldly powers have been overturned. The image indicates the ephemeral nature of any attempt to preserve memory, which seemingly cannot be fixed

in words, carved in stone or wood, or even preserved in architecture.

Above the fallen epitaph is one of the gold brocade paintings reminiscent of the church s Roman Catholic past. In the left foreground, the remains of a Calvinist church bench can be seen. The contradictory historical meanings of the church are thus evoked, as if to indicate how the Dom had escaped the demands of the diverse powers that so recently had vied to claim it. The insights of Saftleven's drawing consequently provide a fitting conclusion for this examination of the antagonistic uses of representations and rituals to define the church's history. For the possibility of imposing a single fixed meaning on the Domkerk is annulled by this image, which calls up instead a chain of incompatible and unpredictable possibilities and disruptions. It is almost as though God has acted as the ultimate iconoclast, destroying, not only the structure of the building itself, but also - for the moment at least - the conflicting images, rituals, and beliefs that had always filled it.

Abstract - After Louis XIV's army invaded Utrecht in 1672, the Domkerk regained its status as a Roman Catholic cathedral. During and immediately after the occupation, different histories of the Dom came into conflict, and were played out in a series of ritual actions such as the iconoclastic cleansing of the church by both the Roman Catholics and the Protestants. Focusing on visual representations of the rituals that took place in and around the Dom, this paper examines the role of remembering and forgetting within these conflicts and within broader attempts to envision a socially cohesive city during this time of crisis.

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