The "Sugar House" of Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen in The Hague – Early Modern Metropolis and Colonial Representation in a European Context

Albert Maximilian Fischer, M.A.

This dissertation project pursues a European study with the Mauritshuis in The Hague as its point of departure. The residence of Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen, Governor-General of Dutch Brazil, is considered one of the earliest classicist buildings in the Dutch Republic. Italian architectural theory here served not only the representatio of the patron but also the staging of the subjugation of overseas territories. Architecture, interior decoration, and imagery materially and visually inscribed colonial claims into the political center of The Hague.
The project proceeds from the thesis that these two aspects were not independent phenomena but mutually constitutive. In this way, the conception of a “New World” was juxtaposed with, and simultaneously interwoven with, an “Old World” articulated through Italianizing classical forms. The aim of the dissertation is not only to examine the reception of antique architectural forms and Italian treatise literature in the Dutch context, but also to demonstrate how the construction of the “own” in architecture became intertwined with colonial notions of the “foreign.” The turn to classical forms thus served not merely to anchor a universal antique legacy, but became part of a colonial order in which the “Old World” was asserted as the center of civilization and history—set against, and indeed in opposition to, a “New World” imagined as devoid of history.