In January 1552 the Church of St. John the Baptist in Gouda was struck by lightning and caught fire. Some of the fabric, most of the internal furnishings, the roof, and all but a few of the stained-glass windows were destroyed, and it was only after a decade that the fabric of the church was rebuilt. The windows took longer to replace: the choir, the transepts, and part of the nave were reglazed by 1572. The new windows were not restored versions of the old glass—they were rethought and redesigned according to a different conception. The old glass had represented traditional themes—saints’ lives and the works of mercy—but the new glass consisted of biblical narratives with theological and typological allusions. Its iconography displayed considerable originality and must have been planned by someone aware of recent developments in theology.
The glass was being made as the Reformation was gaining ground in the Low Countries, and the iconographic scheme reflects the new emphasis on scripture found among both Protestants and reforming Catholics. In the ambulatory of the choir, a cycle of windows devoted to John the Baptist is interspersed with a cycle devoted to Christ. John's role as the forerunner of Christ is stressed, but so, too, is the fact that Christ is sole teacher of religious truth. In the transepts, typological scenes do not merely illustrate parallels between Old and New Testaments but can be taken to emphasize the importance of Christ compared to his predecessors.
Xander van Eck has published numerous articles on the iconography of the Gouda windows: this book is a summary of three decades of work. One of his key arguments is that the program of the ambulatory cycle can be assigned to Herman Lethmaet, born in Gouda in 1492, a reforming Catholic theologian who was a friend of Erasmus. He was involved in raising funds for the reglazing and appears in one of the windows, as a donor. Van Eck writes that “a passage in Lethmaet's book De Instauranda Religione reads as a detailed commentary to the three central windows in the choir” (177–78), and that he “must have been the author of the ‘roll’ or program for the windows” (177).
Van Eck makes a good case for the former claim, but the latter is less persuasive. Lethmaet died in 1555, when the reglazing had only just begun. He cannot have contributed anything to the transept windows, which were commissioned after his death. Van Eck sees traces of Lethmaet's thinking in these windows too, but Lethmaet cannot have put them there. Besides, his ideas had been published, so they could have been used by anyone who had access to his books. Van Eck also suggests that a professor of theology at Louvain, Franciscus Sonnius, may have been involved, but while he knew Lethmaet, there is not much to link Sonnius with Gouda.
The theological faculty at Louvain was, in Van Eck's view, an important source of ideas both for Catholic reform and the Gouda glass. Given this, there is an obvious candidate for the author of the programs of both ambulatory and transepts: Judocus Bourgeois, pastor of the church from 1555 to 1571. He had studied for a doctorate in theology at Louvain, so he would have had the theological sophistication to design the windows, with the help of the glaziers.
In 1572 Gouda was taken by the Calvinist Sea Beggars. The windows were not destroyed—in part, perhaps, due to their Christological slant. Indeed, more windows were made under Calvinist rule in subsequent decades. Despite the date range in Van Eck's title, he also discusses these further developments, into the seventeenth century. The Gouda Windows should be read by anyone interested in the iconography of these impressive and complex works of art, or in ideological changes at the outset of the Dutch Revolt.
The illustrations in this small-format volume are inevitably insufficient—some of the windows are twenty meters high—but excellent high-resolution images can be found online at www.sintjan.com and at https://beeldbank.cultureelerfgoed.nl/.
