Brand in de lijnbanen van de Admiraliteit, 1673 before 1690

Curator: Whoa, this print really grabs you. It feels like chaos condensed into monochrome. Editor: Indeed. This is "Brand in de lijnbanen van de Admiraliteit, 1673" – or, "Fire in the Ropery of the Admiralty" – created before 1690 by Romeyn de Hooghe. The medium is engraving. Curator: Ropery… rope-making? So all that drama is happening in what, a 17th-century factory? I’m picturing the workers scrambling, tools cast aside, everyone desperate to save what they can. Editor: Precisely. The image meticulously captures the catastrophic fire at the naval ropery, offering insights into the physical spaces of labor and their vulnerability. Consider the implications for naval power, reliant on these very lines. The engraving makes the event legible and thus repeatable. Curator: Repeatable as in reproducible, or doomed to repeat? There’s this looming sky and these little ant-like figures wrestling with flames. I keep thinking about how temporary everything feels. Was it meant as a cautionary tale, maybe? Editor: Perhaps. De Hooghe presents this scene as an event deeply embedded in its material and social circumstances. It calls into question what it meant to depend on this type of industrial production, which we now would consider rather unsafe. It’s amazing to me that such fragile, combustible items – rope – could mean so much. And yet here, so quickly, they come undone. Curator: You know, when I first looked, I saw flames and panic, but you’ve shown me the actual strands, both physical and symbolic, being pulled apart. I find I'm sitting here feeling a bit of the smoke. Editor: The work offers an explicit vision of a turning point that allows for an important shift to occur. Romeyn de Hooghe here is asking a very important question, and using industrial calamity to drive at larger political problems.