Ascanius Survives

Abstract

ABSTRACTAllegory of Amsterdam may be the last painting by Domenicus van Wijnen (1661-ca. 1700), called Ascanius, who was active in the Schildersbent in Rome before returning to the Netherlands around 1690. Its recent reappearance is opportunity for reexamining the artist, best known from works in Dublin and Budapest, and late seventeenth-century Dutch painting.The central figure in Van Wijnen's classical Allegory is an artist, poised to draw, who receives inspiration from the Maid of Amsterdam. Other figures on the ground, water, and in the sky, hold attributes and objects that attest to Amsterdam's supremacy in commerce, culture and politics. Van Wijnen's personal circumstances offered reasons for self-identifying with the artist whose ideal of his home city was an enlightened civic patronage that is the equal, indeed the rival, of European princely magnificence.Ascendant, too, are the arts, which classicism enabled to represent this apotheosis. Van Wijnen openly refers to the architecture of Jacob van Campen and the sculpture of Artus Quellinus, and to the gesamtkunstwerk of the Amsterdam Town Hall. His most conspicuous allusions, however, are to Gerard de Lairesse; Allegory revises two of De Lairesse's late paintings, making the revisions part of the meaning. The poetry of Vondel is also evoked for comparison of the painting with a tableau vivant in the Amsterdam Schouwburg. In the poetic allusion, Van Wijnen represents himself as the Dutch Ascanius, spiritual descendant of Vondel's Dutch Aeneas, Gijsbrecht van Amstel, returned to a glorious city that has replaced classical Rome.