The Town Hall of Amsterdam

The great classical building that fills this picture was brand new when Jan van der Heyden painted it. Amsterdam's medieval town hall had burned down in 1652, and the city answered by raising an enormous stone palace on the Dam, so grand that people called it the eighth wonder of the world, a boast about a merchant city that now outshone kings. Van der Heyden had watched the old hall burn as a young man, and fire never left him. Alongside his painting he designed a much improved fire hose and ran Amsterdam's firefighting service. What makes this canvas unusually easy to trace is its buyer. Cosimo de' Medici, the future Grand Duke of Tuscany, passed through Amsterdam on his travels in 1667 and bought it, which is how a view of the Dutch republic's proudest building came to hang in Florence, where it still is.