Interior of an Imaginary Catholic Church

In 1668, when Emanuel de Witte signed and dated this canvas, a church like this one could not openly hold services in Amsterdam. The city had turned Protestant 90 years earlier and taken over its medieval churches, and Catholics who wanted to hear Mass went to hidden churches set up inside ordinary houses, tolerated as long as they did not look like churches from the street. One of them, built into the attic of a canal house in the old centre, had been consecrated only five years before. Here de Witte imagined the opposite, a tall Gothic church with narrow pointed arches, still furnished for the old faith. The light falls on a few figures in the foreground and leaves the rest of the building in darkness. The canvas passed through collections in Amsterdam, Leeuwarden and Brussels before the Mauritshuis bought it in 1883.