Riesgo de tumbado por la proa y por la popa (“girting”) y riesgo de abarloado

work given the following title in a catalogue from 1801: ‘The execution of the surgeon on the ship of J. van Nes, who had given poison to the Admiral, on the river Meuse near Rotterdam’.150 _{This Jan Jansse van Nes (1631–1680) was} the brother of lieutenant-admiral Aert Jansse van Nes (1626–1693), who had been more or less the stand in for Michiel de Ruyter and, as such, acquired the nickname of the ‘Dutch Ajax’. Jan van Nes had been a vice admiral of the United Provinces from 1673 onward, and his flagship had been the Virgin of 147 Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings. The text can be found online: http://www. constitution.org/eng/patriarcha.htm

148 See also chapter 1; and see Gordon J. Schochet, Patriarchalism and Political Thought. 149 Grevius, Tribunal, pp. 492–98.

150 In the original: ‘De executie van den chirurgijn op ’t schip van J.van Nes, over ’t ingeeven van vergif aan zijn Admiraal op de Maas voor Rotterdam’. The title was discovered by maritime historian R.B. Prud’homme van Reine, see ‘’t Paerlen op de kroon der Gallerij’.

Dordrecht (see figure 6). The catalogue’s title of the painting was explained in the nineteenth century with the story that the surgeon was not really put to death but simply punished by keelhauling, because admiral Van Nes had forgiven him. Maritime historian Prud’homme van Reine drily remarks that this seems highly unlikely, since there are no records of this event, and insubordination as extreme as poisoning would have been a major offense in the maritime world.151 _{This was a world, moreover, in which one documented} almost everything when it came to crime and punishment. There are several other aspects of the painting, moreover, that do not fit its title. Prud’homme van Reine analyzed this, and I will follow his reading here.

First of all, the ship at the center of the spectacle, with the man hanging and waiting to be thrown into the water, is too small to be an admiral’s ship. It carries only 20 cannons instead of the average 60. Then, its backside or spiegel (poop) carries a fictional coat of arms with two orange lions. This would be odd if it were the admiral’s ship of Van Nes. The ship to the left is a type of ship that was used by the States-General or one of the Provinces, a so-called Statenjacht (literally a ‘ship of state’). This merits emphasis; the surprisingly small but central vessel of the painting floats next to a warship that could metaphorically indicate the ship of state, a metaphor introduced by Plato in Republic VI. With this in mind, it is telling that the painting is abundant in the color orange. This brings Prud’homme van Reine to the question of who might have ordered this piece. It would certainly have to have been a supporter of the House of Orange; perhaps someone responsible for administering justice; someone who acquired some wealth, since this was a large and expensive painting; and it could have been someone involved in issues of the ‘ship of state’.

In the Republic, the ‘ship of state’ had been ruled in previous years, from 1651 to 1672, by the regents of the states. The leaders of the states-oriented party had been the two brothers De Witt: Johan and Cornelis. What was later defined as the ‘First stadholderless era’ was at the time called the period of ‘true freedom’ (Ware vrijheid) by the dominant political figure Johan de Witt, Grand Pensionary of the States of Holland. The era was defined as such not because people were free in the modern sense of the word but because the regents were free from any other dominating power, such as the stadholder’s. This, of course, did not mean that the stadholder had simply disappeared. When, early on, in 1654, Johan de Witt and his companions abolished the hereditary nature of the stadholder position and De Witt had to defend this position in the States-General, he was much aided by the fact 151 R.B. Prud’homme van Reine, ‘’t Paerlen op de kroon der Gallerij’, p. 108.

that William III, son of the deceased stadholder William II, was only four years old.152 _{Yet, by 1666 the young William III had become a political player} of importance, in part because of considerable popular and elite support, while Johan de Witt had lost much popularity.

Adding everything up, Prud’homme van Reine suggests that the man commissioning the Verschuier painting could only have been Johan Kievit. The latter had fled to England in 1666 because of the so-called Buat complot against Johan de Witt, in which he had taken part. In England, he had become a favorite of Charles II, who made him baronet. In 1672 he returned to the Republic on a Statenjacht, welcomed by a large Rotterdam crowd. In The Hague, a little later, he and his brother-in-law, admiral Cornelis Tromp, witnessed the fruition of their prior plotting: the lynching of the brothers De Witt. After the De Witt’s removal and William III’s return to power, Kievit was appointed as advocaat-fiscaal, an officer of justice, in 1673. A little later he became burgomaster of Rotterdam. Kievit used his new administrative positions to amass wealth. The painting could have been ordered to decorate the opulent mansion he had built in 1678.

As I read it, the painting is a matter of condensation, then, in which the glorious return of Kievit on a Statenjacht, the administration of maritime law, and the lynching of the brothers De Witt as improper captains of the ship of state coincide. The painting is formally theatrical, in the sense that it re-stages something, namely a glorious return. It is also so in content, showing a hanging or a lynching with an audience surrounding what is staged. Yet, a spectacular model superimposes the format of the theater, here. The man hanging is not an actor, and the audience has not gathered to be implicated in a theatrical division between an inside and an outside. They have come for a thrill, invited by a ruler who wants to show his power spectacularly.

In general, representations of maritime forms of punishment in the Dutch Republic are extremely hard to find. In a society in which the maritime world was part of everyday life this is surely strange, especially considering that print and visual media were abundantly present and the audience at large was fascinated by bodies in pain. Still, a fairly obvious domain of social life in which bodies were being hurt was not ‘in the picture’. There are plentiful reproductions that depict, for instance, how people were punished in the so-called rasp houses. By contrast, Prud’homme van Reine noted, 152 On the brothers, see Luc Panhuysen, Deware vrijheid, and on the key text in which the function of the stadholder was propagated to be abolished, see S. ter Braake, Manifest van de ware vrijheid.

‘From the seventeenth century itself we have only a very small number of representations of the execution of maritime punishment.’153 _{Why was it} not represented? Why was it not on theatrical display? One obvious reason for the relative absence of representations of maritime punishment could be that companies such as the voc and wic, the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (United East Indian Company) and the Westindische Compagnie (West Indian Company), were not eager to make it even more unattractive to work on ships. Another reason could be that the punishment on ships was not aimed at subjection for political or societal reasons, but aimed at survival.

I suggest that the pain inflicted on ships in the seventeenth century was not shown to a large, public audience in a theatrical sense because its point was more that it was done, dramatically, in the enclosed space of a ship community. Although this case may seem particular, it has more general implications for a distinction between different modes of societal subjection that follow a different generic logic, namely the logic of the spectacle, the theater, or of drama. In this context, the painting’s theme is also an application of punishment on ships, something that should in general be understood dramatically. On the ships there was a sort of podium that marked off a specific space distinct from its everyday usage; a normal mast became a place of punishment. Instead of the scene being defined by a frame, one might better speak of a different level or a different intensity, here. All the actors involved would be subjected not so much on the level of representation but in practice.

In this light, on the level of diegesis, the painting would work differently, bringing us back to a dramatic moment, which in this case would either be the dramatic moment of someone being hung on a ship or the dramatic moment of the brothers De Witt being lynched. To bring us back to this dramatic moment, however, the theatrical frame of the painting, the frame of representation, has to be ruptured. And indeed, such a rupturing element is present, although it is easy to miss. Yet, once noted, it is unavoidable.

There are nineteen flags depicted, predominantly the national tricolor, and there is one pennant, also the national tricolor, flying center stage. Straight underneath it the convicted man is hanging. The peculiar thing is that all eleven flags to the left are pointing toward the left, as if the wind is coming from the right, whereas all eight flags to the right of the pennant and the hanging man are pointing to the right, as if the wind is coming from the left. For any painter only tangentially familiar with circumstances on Dutch waters, this is impossible in reality. To be sure, winds can be turbulent, but 153 Prud’homme van Reine, ‘’t Paerlen op de kroon der Gallerij’, p. 109.

then the flags should have been pointing in various directions. As it is now, it is as if the wind is blowing from the center of the painting, a center that consists of the white sky behind, the flying pennant above, and the lonely

figure of the convicted, hanging man.

The artificiality of this ‘wind’ from the center is distinct. Yet it is not theatrical. It concerns something that is in effect unrepresentable, since the thing to be represented does not exist. Representing it nevertheless, the painting both stages a theatrical event, and produces a dramatic moment leading to something new, capturing the true nature of a dramatic moment. Something unpredictable is being actualized, and at the same time a certain world is being foreclosed, cruelly.

3.3. The ship of state and the cruel political choice between