How do museums exhibit the colonial past? Kelly Horan © Mauritshuis, The Hague Jan Mijtens (Dutch, c. 1614–1670), Portrait of Maria of Orange with Hendrik van Nassau-Zuylestein and a Black Child (detail), c. 1655. Oil on canvas.
When the Amsterdam Museum announced, in September 2019, that it would no longer refer to the Dutch Republic’s most robust period of cultural and economic ascendancy as its “golden age” a term that glosses over the gross inequities of the period Sarah Mallory, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art and Architectural History at Harvard and a scholar of the period, took notice.
“That term, ‘golden age,’ is so integrated into the way that people think about the Netherlands in the 17th century and its incredible flowering of arts and culture,” she says. Think Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Van Dyck. “It’s also a signal to remember some incredibly important reasons why that [flowering] was able to happen.” Namely:
Merchant republics amsterdam antwerp and hamburg 16481790 | European history after 1450
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Joseph ii volume 2 | European history after 1450 | Cambridge University Press
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