The Amsterdam Town Hall in Words and Images

This book investigates the splendour and architectural scale of the Amsterdam Town Hall, inaugurated in 1655 and portrayed by contemporaries as the ultimate representation of the power, position, and wonder. To fully understand these mechanisms of power, this book relates the Town Hall to the most impressing buildings of the same period?the palace of the Louvre, Saint Peter's Basilica, and Banqueting House?and their visual and textual representations. It provides new international insights in the agency of magnificent buildings, clarifying how artists and writers all over Europe presented buildings as wonders of the world.