Kaart van het beleg van Menen, 1706 1706 - 1729

Curator: Ah, this is Pieter van (II) Call's "Kaart van het beleg van Menen, 1706," dating from sometime between 1706 and 1729. It's a drawing and print, ink on paper, an engraving held here at the Rijksmuseum. What's your immediate sense of it? Editor: It looks like someone sneezed geometry! All these ordered lines and precise angles… It's mesmerizing in a strangely sterile way. Like a blueprint for a very serious game of SimCity. Curator: Precisely! It’s academic art, but don't let that fool you. It represents a siege, a violent historical event, meticulously rendered as a landscape of strategic importance. Think about what cartography represented at the time, before satellites or photography. Maps held power. Editor: Right, visual manifestations of control! I see these little…are those fortifications? And rivers snaking around. It's a visual language of dominance, really. This city becomes almost an object of study, clinically detached from the human drama playing out within its walls. Do you think they were trying to strip the battle of the horror to look at its strategy? Curator: Perhaps to depersonalize it, yes. War became a problem to be solved through logistics and planning. This bird's-eye view, very fashionable at the time, serves almost like an omniscient god surveying his domain, seeing patterns unseen to those caught in the midst of battle. Also, note how this 'geometric' approach ties into other expressions from the Baroque period that attempted to master and 'organize' nature. Editor: It's amazing how even in something so seemingly objective, like a map, cultural attitudes leak through. A desire for order imposed on a messy reality. That grid insists the world make sense. I guess that’s the comfort one needed! It's funny how such meticulousness becomes symbolic of a desperate attempt to make sense of chaos. Curator: Exactly. It becomes a form of cultural memory—the continuity of these visual symbols tells a story about power, perception, and our attempts to understand conflict itself. Thank you for highlighting the cultural layers to this very intriguing cartographic document. Editor: My pleasure. A battlefield viewed from the drawing table, sanitized and surveyed—a curious and rather unnerving thing to ponder.