![]() 15Įspecially intriguing is how the Doolhof’s exhibits presented the strangeness of the android, which appears both as a lively person and lifeless thing. Accounts of the performances entice with claims that these lively artworks could sing and almost speak and that animal automata regaled crowds with their crowing, lowing, braying, bleating, and quacking. A number of the automata made sounds as the spectacle of lifelike motion began to play. A house of moving pictures, the gallery was a complex pictorial and narrative space, featuring works that apparently came alive. On a raised stage behind these apparatuses was a row of life-sized historical figures in wax. Each work in turn was activated and introduced by a presenter. On display, in addition, were complex astronomical clocks with intricate moving parts. There were also moving-picture shows: miniature stage sets on which a series of animated figures acted out familiar classical, theatrical, or biblical narratives. The androids were life-sized or larger than life-sized costumed figures that looked and moved like human bodies. They consisted of three kinds of mechanically driven works. The shows or performances ( vertooningen), as they were called, were wondrous indeed. The doolhof der kalverliefde designates the early phase of love, when young people are stirred by the strong and conflicting emotions of kalverliefde (calf love). The challenge, as articulated by Cats, is to negotiate this overly passionate stage of life into the safe haven of marriage at the center. In Houwelijck (1625), one of the best-selling Dutch books of the seventeenth century, Jacob Cats describes entry into the maze as a rite of sexual initiation. And yet, worldly delight can never be entirely repudiated, or there would be no earthly life. Those well versed in Calvinist theology would know that the reformer himself often compared the seductive pleasures and errors of the world to a labyrinth and advocated reliance on God. Indeed, this religious view would have been an effective way to answer potential critiques from church leaders about the revival of paganism at these sites. The Oude Doolhof maze no doubt was open to the sorts of Reformed interpretations offered by Comenius and Quarles. The motto exhorts that when human will and ingenuity fail, we must turn to God to find our way. ![]() The emblem’s image shows a pilgrim walking atop the (iconographically unusual) raised path of a maze. In Comenius’ popular work The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart, published in the 1620s, he exhorts that without a guide, the defeated maze warrior is “doomed to wander and grope about it without ever finding his way out.” 11 Quarles’ 1635 English edition of the popular emblem book Pia Desideria by Antwerp Jesuit Herman Hugo adapts the labyrinth to emphasize Reformed understandings. This aspect of the classical labyrinth - the need for guidance - was given moral meanings by scholars such as the Reformed pedagogue Jan Amos Comenius and the poet Francis Quarles. ![]() In the battle to decipher a complicated maze, it is useful to have the help of a guide, like Ariadne’s clew of thread. The inability to trust the senses may cause frustration and failure, but this experience can lead to deeper understanding. ![]()
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