ABSTRACT
Willem Teellinck was a popular and prolific Dutch Reformed minister. In 1620, he published a small book aimed at convincing liefhebbers of their Christian duties, above all to celebrate the avondmaal-the Lord's Supper. Pieter Claesz's life and the many others like it produced during the early decades of the seventeenth century came to rest not in places of worship but in private homes. Dutch painting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has long been defined as a Protestant art. Consequently, to classify all Dutch art as automatically or characteristically Protestant is logically untenable. The displacement of the human body in the pictorial economy of the Word heralded the rise of a new religious material culture. And by positing absence as a viable methodology for understanding presence, these objects in the new church interior provide a very real and thriving alternative to the vaunted realism of the Dutch Golden Age.
