Guardroom

In the 1630s the Dutch Republic was still at war with Spain, and soldiers garrisoned in its towns spent long stretches waiting between campaigns. Amsterdam painters turned that idleness into the guardroom scene, and Pieter Codde was one of them. Here an officer in a striped silk doublet points across the room, a musketeer carries his gun on his shoulder, and a polished breastplate lies abandoned on the floor. Scenes like this drew on shared models, among them a drill manual by the engraver Jacques de Gheyn, published in 1607, which showed every move with musket and pike. Prince Marcantonio IV Borghese bought the panel in Rome in 1783, and for a century it passed as Flemish. The German scholar Wilhelm von Bode named Codde in 1883, and a restoration in 1887 uncovered the signature, its date reading 163, with the last digit lost.