Pieter Saenredam, 'The Interior of the Grote Kerk at Haarlem', 1636-7

There are few greater challenges in art than making the inside of a complicated building seem realistic. The way that our eyes perceive a three-dimensional line of arches receding into the distance, for example, is extremely hard to reproduce in two dimensions. But Pieter Jansz. Saenredam was brilliant at creating such illusions, and his depictions of church interiors were extremely popular in Holland in the mid-seventeenth century.

Between 1634 and 1637, Saenredam made a series of views of the interior of the Grote Kerk (or the Cathedral of Saint Bavo) in Haarlem, the city where he lived and worked – this is one of them. Even though this is a small picture, it required an enormous amount of work. Saenredam made sketches on site, followed by preparatory drawings based on precise measurements. He would then trace a final version directly onto the panel he was going to paint on.

Despite his care when measuring, he would make significant adjustments to the final painting, usually to emphasise the building’s grandeur or to get around difficulties with creating the illusion of perspective. Two original drawings for this painting have survived (they are now in the Haarlem Municipal Archives). By examining these and comparing them with the painting, we can see that he struggled to depict some of the distortions caused by his chosen viewpoint – one which allows glimpses into a series of complex spaces set at different angles, and seen through arches of different heights at different distances.

In the earlier drawing, he actually gave up his attempts to make one of the arches look right and he didn’t quite solve the problem in the painting. The arch visible through the piers in the top right-hand corner of the painting is left hanging behind the column in the middle of the foreground. He also significantly exaggerated the size of these foreground columns, and deepened the spaces we can see through the arches. As a result the church appears far more monumental, with massive columns and distant vistas. It is an effect exaggerated further by Saenredam’s use of figures – people are scattered around the church, mostly in the distant background. They are out of scale, significantly smaller than they would have been in real life.

Light floods the building, showing off its grandeur. Despite the fact that there was almost no colour in the church, Saenredam used different shades of grey and white to capture the filtered glow of a bright sunny day to brilliant effect. This also highlights the dark, angular shapes of the boards hanging on the columns. These are coats of arms, marking the location of the gravestones of noble families who were buried under the floor. It was one of the few decorative features surviving in a church which had been stripped of its colourful Catholic paraphernalia only a few decades before.