![]() The northern provinces had been part of the duchy of Burgundy in the past, which was still alive in the seventeenth century. What made such a prolific artistic production possible and, above all, what led the United Provinces to write a fundamental chapter in the history of European art? Among the many factors that could be cited, we should mention first of all the vitality of a pictorial tradition that went back to the beginning of the fifteenth century, the golden age of the duchy of Burgundy, and-thanks to the wealth of the cities of the Netherlands and the level of professional expertise demanded by the Burgundian court-that was already included by right among the great artistic schools of Europe. ![]() Inscriptions and coats of arms may sometimes grace the memorial tablets and sporadic images decorate the balustrades of the galleries, but everything else is strictly image less. Today, the large churches in Dutch towns still welcome the faithful with bare whitewashed plastered walls, with plain, stark spaces, where there is no indulgence in decoration. The wave of iconoclasm it set in motion was so powerful that it cut off the most classic destination of the most significant artistic production. It is estimated that between 16 no less than 5 million paintings were executed in small and large centers of painting, a figure that is even more surprising if you think of the distrust of holy images professed by Calvinism from the very beginning of its spread. There may be no other country in which in the brief span of a hundred years so many paintings were executed as during the seventeenth century in the United Provinces, in Holland, as this land is commonly called abroad, or the Netherlands, to use the name it gave itself.
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