The Nave and Choir of the Mariakerk in Utrecht, Seen from the West

Pieter Saenredam made his name with precisely measured church interiors, and this view of the Mariakerk in Utrecht is one of the most ambitious. The church, founded in the eleventh century, was demolished in the nineteenth, so Saenredam’s paintings and drawings are now the principal record of its appearance. Working from careful surveys he had made on the spot, he built the composition with the exacting linear perspective that gives his interiors their remarkable clarity and stillness, in which light falls evenly across whitewashed walls and the tall Gothic arcade.