Gouda Cheese

I thought I should make a pilgrimage to the city of Gouda since it is not only the home of Gouda cheese but also a famous series of sixteenth-century stained glass windows.  It is a really beautiful city.  This is a picture of the town square, taken from where I sat to eat my lunch.

And here are rounds of Gouda cheese being weighed on a large scale before going to the market.  There is a cheese museum inside this building, but I didn't have enough time to make the admission worth it.  So I ate a sample of the delicious aged Gouda cheese and left!

Gouda is also well known for its production of pipes and candles.  I saw this particularly eccentric pipe with five bowls in one of the museums.

Sint-Janskerk, dedicated to St. John the Baptist, is the largest church in the Netherlands.  Like nearly all the Dutch Gothic churches, it was converted to a Protestant sanctuary during the Reformation and much of its art destroyed.  Fortunately, the sixteenth-century stained glass windows survived.  I prefer medieval windows, but these Renaissance ones were still interesting, with scenes from the lives of Christ and St. John the Baptist against a backdrop of towering architecture rendered (a little too mathematically) in one-point perspective. 

The sign on the door to the church said "no photography," but the woman at the ticket desk said I could take one or two.  Here is number two!  It is a small window that originally came from the monastery where Erasmus of Rotterdam was ordained a priest.  Erasmus--the famous sixteenth-century humanist--lived for a while in Gouda.  He may have looked at this very window of the Lord's Betrayal in Gethsemane.

Gouda's town hall is pretty spectacular, although kind of an odd combination of a medieval castle and a Dutch canal house with red shutters!

This roaring lion bears the city's coat of arms.

And here is another view of the "Dutch Gothic" facade.

And here is a classic Dutch brick building with stepped roof and red shutters, but minus the Gothic add-ons!

This painted seventeenth-century doorway leads to the museum I visited.  It depicts the New Testament parable of Dives and Lazarus, reminding Gouda's citizens to learn from Dives' poor example and to make sure to care for the poor and hungry that may be seeking shelter in their own doorways.

A beautiful canal in Gouda.

And on an unrelated note, I also wanted to include a couple pictures from a recent visit to Amsterdam.  I went again to the Hermitage Museum--or rather the Amsterdam satellite for Russia's most famous art collection.  This is the view across the canal from the Dutch Hermitage.  Every six months a new exhibition arrives.  When I first got here the exhibition was on Alexander the Great.

Can you believe my luck?  The new exhibition was Splendor and Glory: Art of the Russian Orthodox Church.  It sounds like an exhibition designed for me!  This is a picture of the advertizement poster with an icon of the Mother of God of Kazan painted for the Russian royal family and decorated with tiny Faberge Easter eggs.  The museum had a marvelous collection of icons spanning hundreds of years, a partially constructed iconostasis ("icon screen"), altar vessels, vestments, icon battle banners, and penitential chains worn by Orthodox monks.  And they had excerpts from the Orthodox Divine Liturgy playing so that you could look at the art to the sound of church bells and the beautiful harmony of Russian choral music.