Beleg van Oostende, 1601-1604 1601 - 1603

Made between 1601 and 1604, this print depicts the siege of Ostend and comes to us anonymously. It’s a bird’s eye view, which flattens the landscape, turning fields, fortifications, and ships into a complex but legible design. What strikes me is the distance from which we view the scene. It allows us to map the siege, to understand the layout, and thus to grasp, in its totality, the scope of the conflict. But who is this "we"? What does it mean to comprehend the violence from such a height? What is absent is any sense of the lived experiences of those under siege, the claustrophobia, the relentless anticipation, the sheer terror of war. The image offers an elegant, strategic overview but little sense of the personal cost of the siege. It transforms human suffering into a feat of engineering and military might.