The Manner of the Country: Dutch Cityscape Paintings and Urban Citizenship in the Seventeenth Century

This dissertation argues that compositional shifts that appear in Dutch cityscape paintingsdepicting Haarlem and Amsterdam between 1650 and 1672 indicate cultural fluctuations thatimpacted expressions of urban citizenship. In the decades following the Protestant Reformationand the eighty-year revolt against Spain, Dutch academics and political reformers proposed arelationship between city and inhabitant structured around rationality, voluntary collectivism,and a desire for environmental and existential certainty. Chapter 1 evaluates texts that addressthe destabilizing effects of the war with S... Mehr ...