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By Root 516 0

are Wisdom and Strength, and the reliefs to either side of the central group represent good governance; on the left is the god Amphion, who plays his lyre to persuade the stones to pile themselves up into a wall, and to the right Mercury attempts to lull Argos to sleep – stressing the need to be vigilant. All this is part of a good-natured and witty symbolism that pervades almost all of the building: cocks fight above the entrance to the Commissioner of Petty Affairs; Ferdinand Bol’s painting in the Burgomasters’ Council room depicts an unsuccessful attempt to bribe and then frighten (with the elephant trumpeting behind the curtain) a Roman consul; and a medallion above the door of the Bankruptcy Chamber shows the fall of Icarus, surrounded by marble carvings depicting hungry rats scurrying around an empty money chest and nibbling at unpaid bills. In the Magistrates’ Court is a second Bol painting, Moses the Lawgiver, depicting Moses descending from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, but most of the paintings displayed in the palace are of little distinction.

The Koninklijk Paleis (Royal Palace)

The decorative whimsy fizzles out in the High Court of Justice at the front of the building, close to the entrance. Inside the consciously intimidating chamber, the judges sat on the marble benches flanked by heavyweight representations of Righteousness, Wisdom, Mercy and so forth as they passed judgement on the hapless criminal in front of them; even worse, the crowd on Dam Square could view the proceedings through the barred windows, almost always baying for blood. They usually went home contented; as soon as the judges had passed the death sentence, the condemned were whisked up to the wooden scaffold attached to the front of the building and promptly dispatched.

The Old Centre | Dam Square | The Koninklijk Paleis |

From Town Hall to Royal Palace

At the time of the building’s construction in the mid-seventeenth century, Amsterdam was at the height of its powers. The city was pre-eminent among Dutch towns, and had just resisted William of Orange’s attempts to bring it to heel. Predictably, the council craved a residence that was a declaration of the city’s municipal power and opted for a startlingly progressive design by Jacob van Campen, who proposed a Dutch rendering of the classical principles revived in Renaissance Italy. Initially, there was opposition to the plan from the council’s Calvinist minority, who pointed out that the proposed Stadhuis would dwarf the neighbouring Nieuwe Kerk, an entirely inappropriate ordering, so they suggested, of earthly and spiritual values. However, when the Calvinists were promised a new church spire (which was never built) they promptly fell into line, and in 1648 work started on what was then the largest town hall in Europe, supported by no fewer than 13,659 wooden piles driven into Dam Square’s sandy soil – a number every Dutch schoolchild remembers by adding a “1” and a “9” to the number of days in the year. The poet Constantijn Huygens called the new building “The world’s Eighth Wonder / With so much stone raised high and so much timber under”.

The Stadhuis received its royal designation in 1808, when Napoleon’s brother Louis, recently installed as king, commandeered it as his residence. Lonely and isolated, Louis abdicated in 1810 and hightailed it out of the country. Afterwards, possession of the palace became something of a sore point between the Royal family and the city; the initial compromise kept the building as royal property on condition that the royals stayed here for part of the year, but the Oranges almost universally failed to make much of an appearance. This irritated many Amsterdammers, and in the 1930s the Oranges offered the city fifteen million guilders to build a new city hall in return for a new agreement, which allowed them to use the Palace whenever they wanted, with ownership passing to the state (as distinct from the city); the new town hall, on Waterlooplein, was finally completed in the 1980s. Nowadays the Dutch royals live down in the Huis ten Bosch,