As a self-proclaimed "new Athens," seventeenth-century Amsterdam was the city of the Athenaeum, founded in 1632, instructive konstkamer collections, and civic artworks such as Rembrandt's Nightwatch of 1642, but also a major site for the public display of artworks and artifacts related to education, entertainment, and technological advancement that have not until now received the academic attention they deserve. The Moving Statues of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam fills this gap in scholarship by carefully reconstructing the so-called Doolhoven, or public theme parks, (dedicated to the theme of metamorphosis) that, as Vanhaelen proposes, served civic education by advancing "various forms of community instruction" (14) through learned entertainment. In seven chapters she interprets the different artifacts these sites displayed - abundantly decorated sculpted fountains, complex mazes, advanced automata, and "lively" wax statues - as part of an urban environment that celebrated the importance of water in the canal-crossed harbor city and was aesthetically and acoustically informed by "public technology" through a number of widely visible and audible urban clocks.

Vanhaelen shows how art had the power to turn ancient pasts into lived experiences by transforming drinking holes into mythic realms - evoked by mechanized fantastical beasts, artificial sounds, and unusual waterworks - and pulling people out of everyday life into the ritual spaces of Amsterdam's maze-courts where they would be greeted by lifelike evocations of mythological (demi)gods like Bacchus, Theseus, and Ariadne, biblical figures such as Daniel and Esther, and recently deceased humans. Convincingly arguing for an experimental reconciliation of Protestantism with classical paganism at the heart of such public displays, Vanhaelen takes seriously the period conceptualization of the tavern as a refuge for the beleaguered arts in the age of iconoclasm put forward by art theorist Karel van Mander (1548-1606). Debunking one-sided readings of automata, labyrinths, fountains, and wax works in light of their medieval predecessors or as a revival of Burgundian court traditions, Vanhaelen instead stresses antique connections and transcultural elements in their making.

Acknowledging that European clocks and automata were sent around the world as diplomatic gifts to serve as "conversion machines" (157) spreading Christian beliefs, Vanhaelen stresses how, within their local European contexts, such artifacts were made to "teach" those who beheld and handled them in conversive ways. By adding the previously overlooked theme parks and taverns to our portfolio of canonized exhibition spaces, the book gracefully surmounts one of art history's biggest challenges, namely the "recovering [of] what can be known about nonextant works and their modes of display" (8). As a contribution to the larger ongoing project of a "speculative art history" [1], Vanhaelen's attempts to reconstruct visceral responses to art and material culture is particularly noteworthy. Bringing emotive and sensorial engagements to the fore, her interpretation of the ways in which beholders moved and were moved as part of a civilizing process of self-examination and self-improvement nuances previous scholarly engagements with the early modern experience of "wonder" and its democratization. Through the art historical attention paid to the pleasure of viewing as part of the engagement with mazes, fountains, wax works, and automata and the emphasis on how they affected sense before reason as part of "an exercise in cognitive and sensory dissonance" (55), Vanhaelen strikes a much appreciated blow for the importance of affection in the acquisition of early modern knowledge (and our interpretation of it).

In line with the relatively recent elevation of the grotto to the status of a display space worthy of focused art historical inquiry [2], the rehabilitation of the Doolhoven allows us to move beyond sheltered indoor exhibition spaces. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, it also enables us to leave elite circles of art appreciation behind and enter display spaces enjoyed by gentlemen amateurs, women, children, members of the lower classes, and "foreigners" including tourists, members of diplomatic delegations, travelling merchants and Amsterdammers of non-Dutch origin. Giving voice to these people is a major achievement of the book and one that will hopefully inspire more work in the same direction. Vanhaelen pays particular attention to the role of brewers at a time when power was beginning to shift from the established governing structures in Amsterdam to the hands of private individuals as the city emerged as a "nascent center of merchant capitalism" (106). The previously overlooked importance of these entrepreneurs as collectors, scientists, craftsmen, and scholars is brought to light through the example of Jan Theunisz (ca.1569-1637?), the owner of the tavern D'Os, who, versed in Hebrew and Arabic, briefly served as a professor at Leiden University. It is through her research into his life and much-frequented venue that Vanhaelen is able to define a new reading of the tavern as an experimental laboratory for "re-creating ancient forms of knowledge" (117) as, after all, taverns like D'Os contained artisanal workshops for activities such as brewing, assaying, and distilling.

Abundant in new archival finds, The Moving Statues of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam is in many ways as microhistorical as it can get - literally focusing on the reconstruction of a handful of key venues within the walls of a single city at a particular moment in time. Yet, it complements its local focus by zooming out into macrohistorical dimensions in exemplary ways, for instance via an epilogue that addresses the recent past, and does justice to what has lately been framed as "(dis)connectivity"[3] - the complex interplay of entanglements and detachment in early modern globalization. Especially noteworthy in this regard are Vanhaelen's careful examinations of automata and statues dressed in (pseudo-)foreign costumes and the impact that the application of Arabic knowledge on hydraulics may have had on the display at Theunisz's tavern where people of diverse origins mixed and mingled sparking conversations that created "mutable transcultural understandings" of the world (82). In addition, Vanhaelen's contextualization of biblical themes staged at one of Amsterdam's Doolhoven reveals contemporaneous elements in the display that link it to Ottoman as well as Habsburg threads. Taking a critical stance toward the Golden Age as a term and a concept, the book points to Dutch portrayals of the Spanish as "inhuman and sadistic" (135) as a means to shift attention from the brutal colonialist and military endeavors of the Dutch themselves, stressing how Amsterdammers actively engaged in and benefited from the latter at a time when foreign knowledge was embraced but "plural worldviews were actively devalued and eradicated," by, among other things, eliminating "non-Reformist religions and diverse cultures in order to achieve a perfected Protestant world," (163) - an agenda supported by Amsterdam's "moving statues" that Vanhaelen masterfully unravels.

Reading this admirably well-written, astute, and learned contribution to the field of Dutch art history and material culture studies, the only question the book left for me concerns its non-engagement with anthropology and anthropological theory (or recent art historical work drawing on both). Explicitly discussing androids as belonging to an "especially potent type of graven image" (79), referring to wax figures as "motionless bodies that appeared strangely animated" (122), mentioning "image magic" (136) as well as the "animated qualities" (125) and "spirit" (136) of artifacts while focusing on the "agential" characteristics of works that prompt public action (131) and the "fearsome potency" of portraits (139), the book states that "statues intoxicate" those who engage with them "altering their physical and emotive state" (50). It thereby develops an equation between the intoxication of the senses through liquor (enjoyed in inns and taverns) and the intoxication of the senses though the experience of art that these sites offered to their often-tipsy visitors. The simultaneous experience of inebriation and aesthetic, sensual and, on occasion, auditive stimulation can be beautifully understood through the framework of intoxication. Nevertheless, our art historical appreciation of Amsterdam's moving statues as well as our interdisciplinary understanding of notions of agency could have benefited further from addressing anthropological approaches (even if only to ultimately reject them as anachronistic and unhelpful). This in no way diminishes the major contribution to the field of art history that The Moving Statues of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam brings. It will undoubtedly attract myriad readers and be particularly valuable to those invested in sensory art histories, the reconstruction of sites of knowledge production in the early modern world, and aspects of (dis)connectivity in the art and culture of the seventeenth century.

Notes:

[1] Dana E. Katz / Dawn Odell (eds.): Nonextant Art. Studies in Speculative Art History, 1492-1800, forthcoming 2026.

[2] For example by art historical contributions cited by Vanhaelen that include Susan Maxwell: The Pursuit of Art and Pleasure in the Secret Grotto of Wilhelm V of Bavaria, in: Renaissance Quarterly 61:2 (2008), 414-462, and Luke Morgan: Nature as Model. Salomon de Caus and Early Seventeenth-Century Landscape Design, Philadelphia 2007.

[3] Zoltán Biedermann: (Dis)connected History and the Multiple Narratives of Global Early Modernity, in: Modern Philology 119,1 (2021), 13-32.

Anna K. Grasskamp