Pieter Saenredam

Haarlem revisited

Talking about the New Church in Haarlem may give a wrong impression. In fact that New Church was built in the 17^th century. It was painted by Pieter Saenredam, a church crawler avant la lettre. Nowadays members of the Church Crawlers Anonymous, based in England which has a wealth of historic churches, take photos of the churches they visit, and share them on Facebook. Pieter Saenredam painted churches. I personally love his paintings, because they give a very good impression of the architecture of the buildings and the dimensions. It was customary for the parishioners to stand during a sermon, and on weekdays the church was used to meet people and just wander around. There were no chairs or pews, and the few people usually represented in his paintings emphasize the scale of the buildings.

 

Bavo Church as paintedv by Saenredam

Saenredam lived in Haarlem and was buried in the St. Bavo Church, the big church in the Market Square which was built as a Roman Catholic Church (1370-1520) and only became a protestant church after the Reformation. Usually the churches were whitewashed so that any frescoes or murals would be covered. Often during iconoclasm beautiful windows were smashed. The Bavo has a choir, the New Church hasn’t, nor does it have an altar but the pulpit takes a central position as it was built as a protestant church. For the Protestants the Word, the Bible, was the most important thing. Any liturgy was minimal.

Saenredam was buried in the Bavo, and when we had our Choral Festival I walked over his gravestone, a very simple one, while processing in and out of the nave.

Saenredam also painted the BAVO, this church in which he was interred. The famous Müller organ now hanging on the West wall hadn’t been built yet and is absent in this painting. It was built between 1735 and 1738, Saenredam died in 1665. There is only a smaller organ, which hangs on one of the other walls. Pieter Saenredams painting of the New Church is exhibited in the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem. Frans Hals, the famous portrait painter, was also buried in the BAVO.

Saenredams painting of the New Chrurch

This is another link to the painting of Saenredam

Wikipedia has an interesting anecdote about the Müller organ:

The organ of the Saint-Bavo church (the Christiaan Müller organ) is one of the world's most historically important organs. It was built by the Amsterdam organ builder Christian Müller, with stucco decorations by the Amsterdam artist Jan van Logteren, between 1735 and 1738. Upon completion it was the largest organ in the world with 60 voices and 32-feet pedal-towers. In Moby-Dick (1851), Herman Melville describes the inside of a whale's mouth:

"Seeing all these colonnades of bone so methodically ranged about, would you not think you were inside of the great Haarlem organ, and gazing upon its thousand pipes?"

Many famous musicians played this organ, including Mendelssohn, Händel and the 10-year-old Mozart, who played it in 1766.

I’ll have to re-read Moby-Dick. It was compulsory reading when I was enrolled at Leyden University and I remember reading it during a Christmas holiday in a village near Manchester when the rest of the family went for a trip to London. It did not endear this great white whale to me.