Todd shares archives and scans from his library
- Title: Plates from Architectura Moderna
- Author: Salomon de Bray (1597 - 1664)
- Subject: Architecture of Hendrick de Keyser
- Year: 1847
- Source: Personal collection
For our current project for the Amsterdam Light Festival we are recreating —after a fashion—one of the vanished renaissance clock-towers of Hendrick de Keyser: the Haringpakkerstoren. One of the foundation principles of the project is the knowledge that De Keyser is under-appreciated and deserves to be brought into the limelight, as it were. Never the less there is a decent amount of archival material available, either in the image-bank at the Amsterdam city archives (Beeldbank Stadsarchief) or in other archives around Europe. We’ve found detailed construction plans, paintings from various eras and biographical information on De Keyser himself. Here is a number of images from that collection.
But the subject of this post is the collection of images from Solomon de Bray’s Architectura Moderna, illustrating De Keysers designs in Amsterdam as an example of fine “modern” building. It’s interesting to note that only 20 years after De Keyser, the architectural winds were blowing in a completely new direction as we move from Northern Renaissance to Holland Classicism in the hands of Jacob, Campen, Pieter Post and Daniël Stalpaert.
