Monuments are surprisingly shaky. Usually built to last and designed to convey an unambiguous message, the monument’s capacity to provoke responses that range from boredom to hatred creates the conditions of its own precarity. Marisa Bass’s The Monument’s End. Public Art and the Modern Republic approaches the monument as a problem, especially in a republican context. The ideals of a modern Republic, as Bass deftly shows, are more aspirational than actual, an inconsistency revealed by the contradictions that seem to be an inherent feature of republican monuments. The Dutch Republic is a particularly rich case for study and Bass chooses various monuments – some obvious and others unexpected – to explore the imbrications of art, politics, and public life. She juxtaposes these early modern monuments with selected works by contemporary artists and addresses current controversies related to the destruction and removal of historical monuments, mainly in the USA. Throughout, The Monument’s End demonstrates that while monuments may be futile, this does not make them any the less powerful.

The political structure of the Dutch Republic was characterized by its instability, and Bass is right to divide the book into two parts, distinguishing between an early stage of emergent republicanism and a later era of Dutch expansionism. Each period had its conflicts and rivalries, heroes and villains, and differing understandings of the political potential afforded by monuments. The book opens with Hendrick de Keyser’s tomb of William of Orange, a work that has stood the test of time thus far, still drawing visitors to the New Church in Delft where it continues to serve as the mausoleum of the Dutch royal house of Orange-Nassau. Casting the Prince of Orange as the quasi-monarchical ‘father of the fatherland,’ de Keyser’s memorial seems to have anticipated and countered potentially conflicting reactions from the various factions that divided the volatile young republic. To this day, the tomb of Orange appears both royal and republican, secular and religious, imposing and intimate. Viewers, Bass concludes, were able to see their own interests reflected back to them in its polished black marble base.

This enduringly efficacious monument stands in contrast to one that was summarily destroyed but persisted as an image of infamy – the effigy of the Duke of Alba, the Spanish governor appointed by the Habsburg empire to force the rebellious northern provinces back under imperial control. While William I’s marble tomb reflected republicanism, Alba’s bronze statue, made from repurposed cannons, was weaponized against it. For supporters of the Dutch Revolt, the monument to Alba embodied tyranny – it depicted him trampling the Dutch rebels underfoot. William of Orange, by contrast, exemplified the cardinal virtues of democracy, highlighted by the supportive female figures at the tomb’s four corners, especially the statue of Liberty.

From these contrasts between hero and antihero, and freedom and despotism, the book opens into a nuanced discussion of monuments and counter-monuments. Counter-monuments are defined by Bass as works that “reject and respond to the fixity, grandiosity, exclusivity, and authority that have been associated with monumental forms since antiquity” (16). A compelling example is the infamous right thumb of Alba’s statue, a fragment which inexplicably survived when the work was melted down. This material remain incited anti-Spanish antipathy. The power of a small body part to convey larger sentiments is theorized by Bass in relation to saint’s relics. She characterizes Alba’s thumb as a counter-relic – a case where the part does not stand for the whole but was used to deride the oppressiveness of a monument to tyranny.

The Spanish cannonball that killed the Dutch Admiral Jacob van Heemskerk in the storied Battle of Gibraltar is another counter-relic, which brings Bass to the crux of her argument about the problem of a republican monument. Hendrick de Keyser’s memorial to Heemskerk is a modest affair; it honors a citizen hero of common birth by incorporating relics of his breastplate and sword into an assemblage that potentially creates uncertainty about what precisely is being commemorated: “the virtues of the Republic, a formative event in its history, or an individual male hero – in short, a debate about what monuments should be allowed to do.” (61) The individual and the collective vie for dominance in a republican monument. As if in response to the monument’s tendency to aggrandize the exceptional man, the cannonball that killed the admiral was reused by the people of the town of Velsen in a collective rite of mustard grinding. Bass argues that this inventive repurposing makes the cannonball a counter-relic, which, like the appropriation of Alba’s thumb, undermined the veneration of an individual and asserted the radical relocation of power into the hands of the people.

Part one of the book concludes with a discussion of counter-monuments to counter-cultural figures. De Keyser’s statue of Desiderius Erasmus is juxtaposed to a contemporary work – Thomas Hirschhorn’s ephemeral monument to Baruch Spinoza. Each memorial incorporates counter-relics: books that represent the complex writings of controversial scholars who disrupted the dogmas of their time. While Bass does not overtly say so, these self-referential examples highlight the role of the scholar in a republic and the fragile yet tenacious potential of books to shape public life.

The fascinating case studies in part one of The Monument’s End allow Bass to craft a sophisticated theoretical apparatus for interpreting the capacity of republican monuments to express both the unity and the fragmentation of a body politic. Together, the examples raise provocative questions about the failures and shortcomings, not just of monuments, but also of republicanism. By bringing the Dutch Republic’s quest for freedom up against its involvement in the slave trade, Bass astutely interrogates how the emerging republic gained its ascendency. To this end, more discussion of the body politic as a differentiated collective would have further nuanced some of the central claims. The resourceful mustard-grinders of Velten, for instance, occupied a different position in the social structure than did Erasmus or Spinoza or patrician scholars like P. C. Hooft, who wrote satirical poetry about the thumb of Alba. The explicit language of these poems alludes to sexual violence (52), and this section of the book could have included more analysis of the gendered and exclusionary practices of early modern republicanism, which Bass takes up in the book’s concluding chapter. Such an assessment might have cast Hooft less as a man of the people and more as a representative of the ruling elite. While counter-monuments sometimes represent the views of the majority, they are not always or inherently populist.

The second part of the book, “Monuments as Media,” situates monuments in an expanded field. Gathering a range of examples, Bass argues that the monument does not have to be monumental in scale, fixed in place, or made of enduring materials. She accordingly takes up a variety of dynamic monuments in various media, including prints, drawings, friendship albums, medals, poetry, paintings, and theatre plays to show how early modern mass media could circulate monuments in multiples to a broad public, a process of transmission that provided opportunities both to affirm and critique. These examples infer that all works of art, including monuments, are media that convey messages to viewers. Bass’s rich discussion of counter-monuments and counter-relics, which effectively structures the delineation of a monument in the first half of the book, accordingly raises questions about what types of works might run counter to the characterization of monuments as media.

At the centre of part two is the Amsterdam Town Hall, an epic work of architecture built to express the peace and prosperity of the independent Dutch Republic after the 1648 peace treaty with Spain. The building of the Town Hall generated something like a media frenzy of competing views about the purported unity of the United Provinces. Such a plethora of divergent perspectives in a sense represents the ideal of a republican public sphere, in which the use of media to generate consensus and dissensus is a defining feature of public life. Even so, as Bass astutely notes, not everything was discussed openly in public, especially “the violence and discord that was definitional to the Dutch Republic, as well as every modern republic since” (112). A particularly glaring case in point is the exterior relief sculpture on the west pediment of the Town Hall, which represents the peoples of Africa, America, and Asia willingly subjecting themselves as they bestow global goods upon the dominant figure of Amsterdam. This public work of art erases the unsavory and often brutal practices of the Dutch trading empire in order to create an influential image of world order with Amsterdam at its apex. No longer characterized as the beleaguered victim of Spanish imperialism, a new public image of the Dutch Republic as a global powerhouse is revealed in the Town Hall. This noticeable shift in the messaging of Dutch monuments indicates how the communication of an unmistakable meaning is structured by the negating potential of media to suppress information. The antithetical role played by monuments in cover-up, denial, elision, and complicity with the operations that underpinned Dutch domination potentially complicates the argument about how monuments function as media and to what end.

Bass goes on to consider the fate of works that did not corroborate the dominant view, as was the case with Rembrandt’s commissioned painting of The Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis, made for the interior decoration of the Town Hall. This work was rejected, Bass argues, because it failed to pander to the self-image of the Amsterdam regents, an increasingly closed elite group that wielded considerable power. While Rembrandt’s scene of a scruffy band of rebels might have played well earlier in the century, such an image no longer fit the noble aspirations of the civic magistrates. Indeed, the afterlife of their ostentatious Town Hall is somewhat similar to that of the tomb of Orange: converted to a Royal Palace, it is still used by the House of Orange-Nassau for state functions. Both of these republican monuments expressed monarchic aspirations from their inception. While part one of the book explores the much-publicized threat of external tyranny to the Dutch Republic, the second part suggests less-publicized internal threats. Here, the argument would have benefitted from some discussion of oligarchy as a form of citizen rulership that emerged from, but also undermined, republican ideals. It seems that the impossibility of representing incompatible forms of government such as monarchy, oligarchy, and empire under the umbrella of republicanism generated the idiosyncratic problem of the Dutch monument. Taken together, the compelling case studies in part two convincingly allow Bass to recalibrate the definition of a “modern republic,” in which, as she justifiably concludes, “hierarchy rather than equality was the rule of the day” (150), “the many were subject to … the few” (115), and commercial prosperity “was to the benefit of some and on the backs of others” (150).

The Monument’s End fittingly concludes with a chapter on “The Death of the Monument,” in which Bass analyses the 1681 tomb of Admiral Michiel de Ruyter to signal the demise of the Dutch republican monument and to draw together the book’s main arguments. Made over seventy years after de Keyser’s modest memorial to Admiral van Heemskerk, de Ruyter’s tomb in the Amsterdam New Church partakes in the visual language of the adjacent Town Hall. Imperialistic and grandiose, its visual rhetoric of global supremacy only pays lip service to republican virtues. Bass likens this tomb to the statue of Alba, an aggressive deployment of art in military service. No longer fighting for its own freedom from imperial rule, the Dutch Republic at this point in its history was openly vaunting its quest for control of global economic power, instrumentalized by the transatlantic slavery business. Bass compares the whiteness of Admiral de Ruyter’s marble effigy to a portrayal of him with Admiral Maarten Tromp incised in a pearly nautilus shell. Reminding readers of the connections between virtue, virility, and violence, she signals how the Dutch Republic and its citizen heroes were racialized and gendered: “their whiteness and their manhood … reflect the virtue of a republic that will never know defeat” (166).

From the abhorrence of Alba to the veneration of colonial violence, The Monument’s End explores affective terrain that is rarely studied in histories of Dutch art: how hatred can be a driver of artistic production and reception. While monuments may lapse into dormancy, barely eliciting a glance from passersby, animosity remains latent in works that lend themselves to re-weaponization. The true heroes of this book are the townsfolk of Velsen who assessed a cannonball’s form and changed its function from a deadly missile into a public benefit. Addressing contemporary controversies, Bass concludes that to inflict violence on monuments is a less effective response than using humour, creativity, collective resistance, and the element of surprise to transform them into counter-monuments.

Angela Vanhaelen
McGill University