Vermeer's Delft: Stadts Doele en Anatomie

The Stads Doele (Municipal Shooting Range) and Anatomiekamer (Anatomy Theater) in Delft are historical aspects of the city's rich cultural and scientific heritage (fig. 1). These institutions played significant roles in the civic and scientific life of Delft during the early modern period, reflecting broader trends in the Netherlands and Europe regarding civic defense and the study of medicine and anatomy.

Anatomiekamer (Anatomy Theater)

Encouraged by the city government, which desired to promote a healthy living environment in the city in the second half of the seventeenth century, physicians and surgeons, united in the medical-surgical guild, began to conduct research and experiments, and became the main practitioners of the natural sciences in Delft.

An important location for scientists and artists interested in scientific discovery in Delft was the Anatomiekamer, which opened in 1614. In that year, the city government granted the surgeons' guild permission to set up the baptismal chapel of the Oude Kerk (Old Church) for this purpose. At that time, the guild comprised thirteen surgeons who had acquired their skills through practical experience. This guild fell under the oversight of a select few university-trained physicians, numbering no more than three or four, who were appointed by the city or hospital.

Following the devastation caused by the infamous De Delftse Donderslag (Delft Thunderclap) on the morning of October 12, 1654, which heavily damaged the existing building on Verwersdijk, the entire northeastern part of the city was subsequently reorganized. The Pesthuis (Pest House)^{On December 29, 1657, the regents of the Oude and Nieuwe Gasthuis (Old and New Hospitals) received a brand new Pesthuis (Pest House) from the city government. It was built on the eastern side of the city, at the location of the current Vondelstraat. The city mayors decided to turn necessity into a virtue and immediately relocated the Pesthuis outside the city. According to the latest medical insights, those suffering from such a highly contagious disease are better isolated.} on Verwersdijk was located outside the city. The vacated building of the former chapel of the Maria Magdalena convent, on the east side of the Verwersdijk across from the Oude Vercke Marckt and Diertien Huijsen, was renovated and partly made available to the surgeons' guild. ^{Before the Reformation, Mary Magdalen was one of a dozen convents and monasteries in Delft. During the plague years of 1557-58, it was put into service to supplement the nearby Old Gasthuis, or hospital, and became known as a plague house (pesthuis).}

The new premises of the Anatomiekamer was more expansive than its former location. Two separate sculptures by Pieter Rijckx on the themes of civic guards and anatomy were installed above gates of the two institutions, which were set next to each other (fig. 2). The city magistrate spared no expense in creating one of the finest monumental outdoor spaces of Delft.^{Kaldenbach, Kees. "Nieuwe Schutterij Doelen (New Shooting Range)." Vermeer. Accessed February 22, 2023. https://kalden.home.xs4all.nl/dart/d-b-schutterij.htm.} Attached to the Anatomiekamer was a library and a museum, which, like the one in Leiden, was essentially a Kunst und Wunderkammer (Cabinet of Curiosities)^{A Kunst und Wunderkammer, or Cabinet of Curiosities, was a collection or room in Renaissance and Baroque Europe filled with a wide array of objects showcasing the wonders of the natural world, art, and science. These precursors to modern museums contained natural wonders (Naturalia), man-made artworks (Artificialia), scientific instruments (Scientifica), exotic items from abroad (Exotica), and marvels of nature (Mirabilia). They served educational and entertainment purposes, displayed the collector's wealth and sophistication, and facilitated scientific research. Kunst und Wunderkammern played a crucial role in the development of science and museums, influencing the systematic study and classification of natural and man-made objects, and laying the groundwork for the establishment of modern museums for public education and enjoyment.} containing rarities, often with moral-philosophical implications.

Lectures were held in the Anatomiekamer on a weekly basis. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723), often a guest at the guild, and the physician Reinier de Graaf (1641–1673), ^{de Graaf sent Leeuwenhoek's insect observations to the Royal Society.} Delft physician and anatomical researcher, were the most prominent. "Historically, many physicians, scientists, mathematicians, and lawyers living in Delft had studied at the University of Leiden. A prime example is Jacob Spoors (1595-1677), who would become a particularly important individual in Vermeer's network of friends and colleagues interested in exploring the natural world through art, science, mathematics, and optical devices. Spoors began his professional career as a surgeon in his native Delft in 1614, the very year that the Anatomy Theater was founded."^{Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., "Exploring the physical and spiritual world," in Vermeer's Delft, edited by David de Haan, Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., Babs van Eijk, and Ingrid van der Vlis (Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers, Museum Prinsenhof Delft, 2023), 23.}

The Physicians, surgeons, and artists who attending these gatherings, such as Spoors, Vermeer, and Van Leeuwenhoek were also interested in scientific instruments that required lenses, like microscopes. Van Leeuwenhoek. can be recognized in a portrait of an anatomy lesson by Cornelis 's-Gravesande (1631-1691), who is the only person in the painting who was not a doctor or a surgeon, but was nevertheless included owing to his status as a man of science. For thirty years from 1661, 's-Gravesande was Delft's city anatomist.

The Nieuwe Doelen

The Delft Doelen (City Shooting Range),^{The term "doelen," from Middle Dutch "doelen" (to target-practice), equivalent to "doel" + "en."} refers to the practice of archery, located north the Anatomiekamer, was part of a network of the Doelen (shooting ranges) found in many Dutch cities during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These facilities served as headquarters for the schutterij (civic guard), a militia composed of citizen soldiers responsible for the defense of the city and maintaining public order. The Doelen provided space for military drills, shooting practice, and social gatherings of the city's militia members.^{In 1829-1831, it was remodeled into a theater, a concert, a dance hall, and a room for lectures with a coffee room, a landlord's house, and a director's office, by an unknown architect.} Demolished by De Delftse Donderslag (Delft Thunderclap), as well as the nearby quarantine hospital where plague victims were confined, the shooting range was established in two new buildings: The Oude Doelen, used for practicing with the crossbow, and the Nieuwe Doelen, used to practice with firearms. As a member of Delft's schutterij, ^{The schutterij was a militia that for centuries had been tasked with defending Delft against external threats and maintaining order within the city. In the seventeenth century, the Delft civic guard was divided into four standards (orange, blue, green and white), each of which represented part of the city.} Vermeer must have frequented the Doelen on a regular basis.

The Doelen, however, was not merely a shooting range, but major social network for artists such as Vermeer. Members were drawn from the richest and most influential families. Vermeer's membership is testimony to the social status he had achieved by this point. In 1660, Leonaert Bramer (1596–1674), of the most respected painters of Delft and close friend of the Vermeer family, decorated a room in this new Nieuwe Doelen with frescos for a sum of one thousand guilders, a sum roughly the equivalent to the cost of a small house. Bramer was was not the only artist member of the civic guard. In the records for 1674, Vermeer is also listed as a member of the first company of the orange standard; it is possible he had been a member for some time. The inventory of his estate refers to "iron armour with helmet; a pike."

Pesthuys

In seventeenth-century, the Delft Pesthuis formed part of the city's institutional response to recurrent outbreaks of plague. It should not be understood as a hospital in the modern medical sense, but principally as a place in which plague sufferers could be separated from the wider population, housed, cared for, and, when necessary, buried. Delft's authorities had long recognized the practical value of isolating those believed to carry the disease, even though contemporary explanations of plague continued to combine ideas about contagion, corrupted air, environmental conditions, and divine punishment.

Delft had suffered repeatedly from plague since the sixteenth century. During the severe epidemic of 1557–1558, the former Maria Magdalena convent on the Verwersdijk was brought into use for plague victims. The city's physician Pieter van Foreest (1521–1597) advocated measures intended to limit infection, including the isolation of sufferers and improvements to the circulation and cleanliness of canal water. The former convent continued to serve as Delft's principal Pesthuis for roughly a century.

The most devastating seventeenth-century outbreak in Delft occurred in 1624. Contemporary demographic evidence indicates approximately 4,554 deaths among a population of about 22,769, corresponding to a mortality rate of roughly 20 percent. Not all of these deaths can necessarily be assigned individually to plague, but the exceptional mortality clearly reflects the severity of the epidemic. Plague returned, less violently, in 1635–1636 and again in 1655. Delft's final significant outbreak came in 1664, when approximately 400 plague deaths were recorded.

The institutional history of the Pesthuis changed dramatically after the Donderslaag of October 12, 1654 (Delft Thunderclap) when the provincial gunpowder magazine exploded and devastated a large part of the northeastern quarter of the city. The former Maria Magdalena convent was badly damaged. Rather than simply reconstruct the old plague hospital within the densely inhabited city, the authorities decided to establish a new facility outside the city walls, east of Delft near the Oostpoort, approximately in the area of the modern Vondelstraat. The new complex was surrounded by a ditch and possessed its own burial ground, physically separating infectious patients and their dead from the urban population. On December 29, 1657, the new Pesthuis was formally transferred to the regents of the Oude and Nieuwe Gasthuis.

Meanwhile, part of the damaged former convent complex on the Verwersdijk acquired a very different medical function. In 1656, the Delft surgeons' guild moved into renovated premises there. The building contained a meeting room, facilities for instruction, and an anatomical theater, or theatrum anatomicum, where surgeons and their apprentices could attend anatomical demonstrations. Thus, within only a few years, a site long associated with epidemic disease became associated instead with the increasingly organized teaching of anatomy and surgery.

The new Pesthuis, engraved in volume 1 of Dirck van Bleyswijck's Beschryvinge der stadt Delft (fig. 3), remained a conspicuous municipal institution even after plague disappeared from Delft. Its only major use during a subsequent plague epidemic appears to have been during the outbreak of 1664. By Vermeer's later years, therefore, the building represented both a practical precaution against epidemic disease and a reminder of a danger that had shaped the experience of several generations of Delft citizens. The institution survived long after the final plague epidemic and was eventually demolished in the nineteenth century.

Its civic significance is also demonstrated by its inclusion in the monumental Caert Figuratyf of Delft, supervised by Dirck van Bleyswijck (1639–1681). Here one chronological distinction is important: although Van Bleyswijck's first volume of the Beschryvinge der stadt Delft appeared in 1667, the engraved Caert Figuratyf and its series of views of Delft buildings were first issued in 1678, not 1667. One of these prints, titled Pest-huys, presents the plague hospital from a bird's-eye perspective (fig. 3). The border prints were subsequently incorporated into copies of Van Bleyswijck's city history in connection with the appearance of its second volume in 1680. The Pesthuis thus took its place visually among the churches, civic buildings, military installations, charitable institutions, and monuments through which Delft chose to represent itself.