THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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Wishful architecture in painting
So much for fictional houses, but there is now the important new addition of painted ones. They did not serve merely to fill in the background, more frequently and
authentically they also sought to be wishful building in their turn. There is a distinct series in which the architectural picture gains a nevertheless strange life of its own,
with a special concentrated expression. This goes back a long way, much further than landscape painting; the Pompeian murals belong here again, and painted
townscapes already seem late Gothic. Afterwards the architectural distant views in the pre­Baroque of the fifteenth century begin, the halls and streets in Raphael's
‘School of Athens’ open out, Dürer and Altdorfer set the tone for architecture depicted for its own sake. Altdorfer's detached Renaissance villa in the ‘Bath of
Susanna’ gazes into the countryside as an individual subject, with highly exaggerated loggias. Architectural pictures became particularly numerous in the north from the
middle of the fifteenth century; from Memling on, they all contain prophetic anticipations of the architectural style to come. Altdorfer, already living in the breakthrough
of the Renaissance, a painter and architect as well, gives in his pictures, overdoing the architectural style that had arisen, a permanently strange portrayal of the Italian­
German Renaissance as it had never been built so far north. Afterwards there follows the half naturalistic, half fantastic painting of buildings in Dutch mannerism of the
seventeenth century, with Vredeman de Vries and others. Their portrayals, now simply called ‘architectural pictures’, with the building as sole subject and people at
best as accessories, turn Altdorfer's Renaissance villa almost into a peepshow veduta, but also into a particularly closed Baroque gloria; it is as if there were nothing in
the world but this painted palace courtyard, this castle­yard, this late Gothic imaginary church (cf. Jantzen, The Dutch Architectural Picture, 1910). Particularly
interesting here, because of its space­making character also well­suited to a philosophical study, is a successful architectural picture by Hendrik Arts, repeated by Peter
Neefs and then frequently after that. This hall church,* painted in treble perspective and correspondingly coordinated spatial style, admittedly anticipates no future
architecture, but has a Romantic attitude to the late Gothic style, in the middle of the seventeenth century, in such a way however that the space seems to
* A church with nave and aisles of the same height.