Last year, I visited the Hague in the Netherlands and stopped by the Mauritshuis art museum where the products of some of history’s worst crimes are exhibited. The collection at the Mauritshuis mostly comprises paintings from the Dutch ‘Golden Age’, including works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Steen and Holbein the Younger. As in any era where wealth and power are intensely concentrated, these cultural products were grand and refined. Here was Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson, with its doctor cutting into the arm of a corpse before a crowd of interested onlookers, each rendered in unique detail. There was Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring, with its figure coyly turning her head, bathed in a glowing light.
It is all very pretty until you ask how this Dutch ‘Golden Age’ came about. How were these painters supported and how were they able to access the rare and expensive pigments that were characteristic of their work? The answer is ugly: war, slavery, colonialism. Dutch wealth in this period was built on trade monopolies established through massacre, and a colonial regime that eventually brutalised the lives and freedoms of over a million slaves. Of course, the painters themselves were not directly involved in this sordid affair, but we can easily trace how it facilitated their work. Rembrandt was commissioned to paint a portrait of Marten Soolmans, whose large sugar refinery relied on raw sugar extracted from the slave plantations in Brazil. That is a more direct lineage. Many of the connections are more nebulous but nevertheless real. Vermeer’s The Milkmaid, like many of his other works, was bought by one of his main patrons Pieter van Ruijven. Van Ruijven’s wealth – his ability to patronise Vermeer – was based on successful investments including those in the slave trading Dutch East Indies Company.[1] Only with the lucre plundered from all over the world could this vast network of painters and patrons be sustained.
Increasingly there has been a cultural reckoning about this history. My tour guide in Amsterdam took us outside the headquarters of the Dutch East Indies Company and explained how its vast profits were extracted from brutalised colonial territories. The former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has publicly apologised for Netherland’s outsized role in the history of slavery. And the Amsterdam Museum has stopped using the term ‘Golden Age’, replacing it with the more neutral ‘17th century’. At the same time, there has also been a defensive reaction from those who want to be proud of Dutch history. One forceful response to the replacement of the term ‘Golden Age’ by the Amsterdam Museum came from Dutch MP Zohair El Yassini. He suggested that replacing the term is to ‘judge the things which happened in the past with the moral view of today’ and that Dutch people should be ‘proud of what [they] have accomplished as a country’ rather than feel shame for ‘something that happened 300 years ago’.
These two points are common responses against reconfiguring our perspective toward the ‘great’ products of serious historical crimes. They are completely mistaken. The first point – that we should not hold people of the past to the moral standards of today – imagines peoples of the past as unable to recognise evil cruelty. It is obviously ahistorical. Even when Aristotle launched into his infamous defence of slavery, he acknowledged that ‘[o]thers affirm that the rule of a master over slaves is contrary to nature, and … is therefore unjust’.[2] People from all times and places have despised the brutal treatment of their fellow humans. Others who turn a blind eye or refuse to extend their sympathies justly ought to be condemned. We should not pretend that the past was some alien moral wasteland.
The second point is incoherent on its face. It says that there should be pride but not shame for things that happened 300 years ago. If we cannot say the actions of people of the past represent us when it is shameful, why can we say it when it is to allow ourselves to be prideful? We cannot selectively own from the past only what we see as good. Perhaps the justification for keeping our pride but not our shame is because the people who were harmed are long dead. If that is the justification, it is a dangerous one. If we allow the cries of victims past to be silenced by the passage of time, but allow the glory to persist, we foment the conditions for the creation of new victims. We tell the hungry soul that it is right for them to be the author or beneficiary of crimes today so long as they conjure up a greatness for a future audience who will revere them and ignore the dead victims. We perpetuate a terrible cycle.
What should we do instead then? At the very least, the crimes must never be forgotten. We should never look at these works without remembering the cruel and inhuman treatment that brought them to life. In this light, little pride will be wrought from these ‘Golden Age’ paintings. Some are pretty, and many show technical sophistication. But even the best of them ought to be conceived of as baroque artifacts that commemorate an evil that cannot be repeated.
Of course, while I have told the story of the paintings of the Dutch Golden Age, it is not a unique one. When we pay attention, the products of virtually all Golden Ages and other works from ‘great’ empires have relied on domination and oppression. The splendour of the Roman Empire was built on mass killings, mass enslavements and genocide. And the scientific and technical advances of the Islamic Golden Age also followed violent conquests involving brutal massacres and enslavements.[3] Our language thereby reveals how debased our notion value really is. We forgive inhumane crimes so long as they result in some grand monuments, nice looking paintings or clever techniques. Only if we recognise the evil of this perspective and refuse to accord prestige to the products of crimes can we liberate ourselves from the cycle of subjugation and violence.[4]
[1] John Michael Montias, Vermeer and His Milieu: A Web of Social History (Princeton University Press, 1989) 247 fn 8.
[2] Aristotle, Politics (tr Benjamin Jowett) Book I Part III.
[3] Hugh Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In (Da Capo Press, 2007) 89, 184, 306.
[4] An obvious question is whether any of us can separate ourselves from the products of historical and modern crimes. Our modern global economy relies on child labour, slavery (there are more slaves than ever today), and brutal work conditions to produce the goods and services many of us are accustomed to. I will address this point in part 2 (to come).
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