Spotlight

On 9 October, exactly two hundred years ago, Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte spent the night in the Royal Palace in Dam Square in the course of a visit to Amsterdam. His brother Louis Napoleon had been the king of Holland until his abdication in 1810, at which point the country was annexed to France.

The only image of Napoleon Bonaparte in the Palace is in the form of a sculpture on a French mantel clock, where he appears as Caesar. Wearing a toga, he stands beside the dial on the base, which depicts a seated military commander and weapons as symbols of the Roman Empire. The clock glorifies the emperor who restores peace after war, enabling the nation to develop commerce and the arts and sciences. Louis Napoleon bought the piece from the clockmaker P. Reeder in The Hague for 4 200 guilders. It was the largest and most expensive clock he acquired for the Palace.

The piano in the former Magistrates’ Chamber, now the Throne Room, of the Royal Palace formed part of the furnishings and accessories that were installed in the Palace in 1808-1810, when King Louis Napoleon took up residence in what had previously been Amsterdam’s Town Hall. Music was important at the court of Holland’s French king—musicians were actually members of the  Royal Household. Chamber music was played at intimate gatherings and light dance music at balls in the Grande Salle, the Citizens’ Hall.  In fact, there were several pianos in the Palace in the early nineteenth century, all of them manufactured either in France or the Netherlands.  This rectangular table piano was made at the leading Amsterdam workshop of Meincke and Pieter Meyer. The Meyer brothers produced three pianos in all for Louis Napoleon, two of which were for the Palace in Dam Square. After completing the commission they were honoured with a Royal Warrant to call themselves Pianoforte Manufacturers by Appointment to Their Majesties.

The relief above one of the doors to the Secretary’s Office in the south gallery of the Royal Palace was made by Rombout Verhulst, an assistant of the famous sculptor Artus Quellinus. The relief  represents Discretion, one of the most important virtues for a secretary. The word secretary derives from the Latin word secretus which translates roughly to ‘writer of secrets’.

Discretion is personified by a woman holding a finger to her lips as a sign of silence while she is leaning into a dolphin. In the 17^th century a dolphin was considered as species of fish. An appropriate symbol of taciturnity, since it was considered a silent animal. In the background one can see a goose with a stone in its beak. The goose flies with a stone in its mouth to keep it from cackling and attracting the attention of predators.

During Royal events the floor of the Citizen’s Hall is covered with a carpet to protect the valuable marble maps. With the years the old carpet needed to be replaced. In the ‘90s the Dutch artist Ria van Eyk was commissioned to design a new carpet which suited the designated hall, the floor and the history of the Royal Palace.

Never before had a carpet of such proportions been woven in the Netherlands: it was to measure almost six hundred square metres (31.84 metres by 17.75 metres). The more than thousand colours Van Eyk used in her countless sketches and designs were reduced to eight basic colours and added with black, white and grey. The design itself, a view on the heavens, was based on a photograph of the Milky Way chosen by Van Eyk. In the centre of the carpet we find the Hale-Bopp comet, which was visible during eighteen months in 1997. Due to all the 21st-century technologies the knowledge and the image of the universe changed considerably in comparison to the 17th-century marble starry sky.