Driehoek met mannen op het terras van een architecturale tuin 1669

Curator: Sèbastien Leclerc I created this engraving, "Driehoek met mannen op het terras van een architecturale tuin," in 1669. The Rijksmuseum holds this print which features a geometrical exercise with men standing on an ornate balcony in the lower half. What stands out to you most immediately? Editor: There’s a striking formality in the scene—it almost feels staged. The presence of the diagram above the terrace lends the gathering below an unsettling sense of constructed artifice. It's like these men are figures enacting a theorem in real time. What symbols are in play for you? Curator: Oh, it’s dripping with them. The terrace, elevated and adorned with sculpture, can signify the heights of achievement and social status. The men in conversation suggest intellectual discourse, perhaps within a humanistic educational tradition focused on rhetoric and rational thinking. Consider, too, how gardens were understood as allegories for the cultivated mind during the Baroque. Editor: So you see the architecture reflecting intellectual mastery. I see a rigid hierarchy visually reinforced. The architectural precision could be an allusion to power and control. Do you think Leclerc is glorifying intellectualism, or is he offering subtle commentary on the use of reason to uphold social structures? I sense a latent tension in its precise geometry versus lively, yet subdued interactions of these male figures. Curator: The two aren't mutually exclusive. We're in the realm of Louis XIV, after all; intellectual and social standing were powerfully entwined with the machinations of the court. So yes, power, class, privilege, knowledge – these were deeply interdependent ideas. He's interested in conveying how classical virtues could be materialized and managed. It suggests civilization over a so-called barbarity of that era's racialized “others”. Editor: This engraving truly is a window into the Baroque mindset: structured, hierarchical, self-assured and profoundly aware of appearances and social constructs. The geometry of human life in those times – a stark lesson. Curator: Absolutely, and in its crisp lines, we get a potent reminder of just how constructed that "natural order" really was.