Page 55 - For the Love of Porcelain

Porcelain,

the City Maiden of Amsterdam

and Amalia van Solms

During the seventeenth century, the allegorical depiction of Amsterdam developed from a city

virgin receiving all manner of merchants and their merchandise to a maiden being offered gifts

by the Four Continents.
Jan van Campen

10
Jacob van Campen
(1596 - 1657),
Triumphal Procession
with Gifts from East and
West, 1650-1651, oil on Elmer Kolfin published an interesting essay
canvas, 383.5 x 205 cm, on this topic. 1 An example of the early
Royal Collections, he depiction is the large engraving by Claes
Hague / Kingdom of the Jansz. Visscher (1587–1652), dated 1611,
Netherlands, Huis ten showing the city maiden in the centre and
Bosch, inv. no. SC/1295 a large group of merchants (fig. 1 and 2). 2
Of great significance in the turnaround of
the representation of Amsterdam was the
development of the decoration programme
for the Town Hall. The tympanum on the
back of the Town Hall embodies this theme,
and here we see the maiden in the centre
with America and Asia to her left, and 11
Europe and Africa to her right (fig. 6). They Detail of ig. 10
can be identified by their fixed attributes, as
described in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (first the turban and the camel. Because the city
ed. 1593), a book of examples and guidelines authorities were deeply involved in the
for the depiction of virtues, moods, but decoration programme of the Town Hall, we
also continents, of which a Dutch edition may assume that this new, Ripa-based way of
had been published in 1644. For Asia, the self-representation was a deliberate choice.
fixed image elements are the incense burner, In the 1660s three authors published a city

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