Tulipomania - Mike Dash [81]
CHAPTER 14
Goddess of Whores
No one in the United Provinces loved tulips more than Claes Pietersz. of Amsterdam, who was probably the most fashionable physician in the whole of the republic. Other men might grow the flower, trade it, and even make their fortunes from it. Pietersz. changed his name because of it. He became, quite literally, Dr. Tulip.
Claes Pietersz. began styling himself Nicolaes Tulp (the Dutch word for the flower) in 1621, when tulips were just coming into vogue among the wealthiest and most discerning members of the regent class. He used the flower as a personal emblem too. When he was elected an alderman of Amsterdam in 1622 and had to choose a coat of arms, Tulp had his shield adorned with a delicate, scarlet-flamed Rosen tulip. His alderman’s seal stamped a red wax flower on the hundreds of official documents to which he gave his approval. And when he returned home after a long day in the service of the city, it was to a painting of the tulip—one of the finest of the fabulous Admiraels, it was said—that adorned a signboard swinging to and fro over the front door of his fashionable house on the Prinsengracht.
In time, young Dr. Tulp (he was in his late twenties when he changed his name) rose to a position of great eminence. He became a friend of Rembrandt’s and was the subject of one of the painter’s most celebrated canvases, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp, which shows him as a distinguished surgeon busily dissecting the body of a recently executed criminal. Contemporaries knew Tulp as a botanist, a vigorous promoter of the medicinal benefits of tea—which he prescribed as an antidote to lassitude and cramps—and a successful politician who was four times burgomaster of Amsterdam. He was also a notoriously stern Calvinist, whose principled disdain for the intoxicated revels that were traditional at even the loftiest of Dutch weddings led him to sponsor a piece of legislation for which he is still occasionally remembered today: Amsterdam’s “sumptuary law” of 1655, which made it an offense for wedding feasts to involve more than fifty guests or last longer than two days.
It is hardly surprising, then, that Dr. Tulp instinctively hated the drunken excesses of the tavern colleges. In private he remained a connoisseur until the end of his long life; indeed in 1652, on the occasion of his retirement from the surgeons’ guild, he presented a silver beaker in the shape of a tulip, with a lizard climbing its stem, to his old colleagues and asked that in the future it be used to propose the final toast at the guild’s numberless banquets. But in public, after 1637, Nicolaes Tulp preferred not to be associated with the famous flower with which he shared his name. The sign outside the house in the Prinsengracht came down, the coat of arms was less prominently displayed. Dr. Tulip felt ashamed of the excesses of the tulip mania.
There were many who shared Tulp’s sentiments. Adolphus Vorstius, the professor who occupied Clusius’s old chair of botany at the University of Leiden and lectured twice each week in the hortus there on the properties of its plants and herbs, came to despise the vulgarity of the traders and their hysteria for bulbs and took to destroying every tulip he came across, hacking away at the flowers with a staff. Even outsiders who had taken no part in the mania themselves often shared the connoisseurs’ low opinions of the florists. During the final stages of the bulb craze, many ordinary people began to refer derisively to the members of the tavern colleges as “kappists.” This was a considerable affront; for the Dutchmen of the Golden Age, the name summoned up the image of a fool clad in a jester’s cap.
Not all the critics of the tulip mania confined themselves to jokes and insults. Some, particularly the more religious members of Dutch society, took an altogether sterner view, accusing bulb dealers of casting aside the Christian principles of charity and moderation. Even before the final collapse of the market for tulips, a number of