Dutch Baroque Architecture

Dutch Baroque architecture is the variety of Baroque architecture that flourished in the Dutch Republic and its colonies during the Dutch Golden Age of the seventeenth century, distinguished from more ornate Baroque building elsewhere in Europe by its restraint and its close reference to classical antiquity, a sobriety often described as Dutch Palladianism and read as a deliberate architectural expression of the young republic's democratic values. The architects Jacob van Campen and Pieter Post, working together, are credited with establishing the style, incorporating Venetian influences absorbed in part through the earlier work of Hendrick de Keyser, whose Amsterdam churches, the Noorderkerk of 1620 to 1623 and the Westerkerk of 1620 to 1631, helped shape the tradition's early development. Van Campen and Post's mid-century buildings are marked by giant order pilasters, gabled roofs, central pediments and prominent steeples, seen in civic commissions such as Amsterdam's 1646 seat of self government as well as in residences built for the House of Orange, including Huis ten Bosch and the Mauritshuis, whose symmetrical, large windowed blocks were stripped of the ostentatious flourishes typical of Baroque architecture elsewhere. The style's restrained classicism is considered to have anticipated the later Classicism of the English architect Christopher Wren.