high “Bookhall”, which included a gallery and was topped by a magnificently stuccoed
arched roof incorporating glass panes to let in the daylight, was held in the neo-classical style,
and was accessible through Teyler’s former house, from a door that went off from the Grote
Herenkamer.
Unfortunately, very little is known about the process through which he arrived at the final
design of the building he had been commissioned to construct.130 Reconstructing the stages of
this creative process is further complicated by the fact that those architectural drawings that
have been preserved don’t carry any dates. In fact, the entire building’s most striking feature
is also its most puzzling: the oval shape of its interior. Judging by Viervant’s drawings, he
initially appears to have proposed a rectangular building separated into two large rooms of
equal size. It has been suggested that one room was intended as a library, the other as a
cabinet to store all other items from the Foundation’s collections.131 But there is nothing
besides the soon-to-come but nevertheless later — and presumably unconnected - decision to
reserve the upper half of the Oval Room for books to support this assumption.
By the time the final plans for the building were approved in October 1779, Viervant had
obviously come up with the idea of giving the interior its oval shape, thereby inevitably also
creating four smaller chambers in the building’s comers. It is conceivable that he might have
taken his inspiration from the frontispiece of the catalogue of Levinus Vincent’s collections -I
Vincent had put these collections on display in Haarlem at the beginning of the 18th century,
and made them accessible to all members of the public, provided they paid an entrance fee.132
But although Vincent’s cabinet had been world-famous in its day, attracting visitors such as
the Russian Tsar and Cosimo de Medici, and the similarities between the — presumably
slightly exaggerated - depiction of its premises and the Oval Room are quite striking, there is
no evidence whatsoever that Viervant based his designs on Vincent’s frontispieces, or, for that
matter, that he was even aware of them.
The general assumption is that the reason Viervant came up with the oval shape is that he was
designing a hall intended to store books, i.e. a library. This is a little less speculative than
other explanations because there had indeed been famous precedents of libraries built in a
rounded shape. Of these, the ducal library in Wolfenbiittel, built between 1705 and 1710,
bears the most resemblance to Teylers. And indeed, over the course of the two centuries
preceding the establishment of Teylers Museum, as the humanist ideals of the Renaissance
were ever more widely adopted and books had become more readily available thanks to the
invention of the printing press, libraries had proliferated all over Europe. Over the course of
the 18* century in particular they gradually come to be separated from other associated
institutions, such as monasteries, cabinets of curiosities, or schools, and were increasingly
made publicly accessible too. It has even been suggested that the arrangement of libraries in
130 The little information that is available has been scrutinised in: Peggy Bouman and Paul Broers, Teylers
"Boek- en Konstzael”: de bouwgeschiedenis van het oudste museum van Nederland ( ’s-Gravenhage: SDU,
1988).
131 Ibid., 19.
132 On Vincent’s collections see: Eric Jorink, Het ‘‘Boeck der Natuere Nederlandse geleerden en de wonderen
van Gods schepping 1575-1715 (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2006), 351-355.
central, oval structures that allowed for better access to a larger number of books, rather than
in rectangular, elongated rooms, can be seen as the pinnacle of this development:
“With the central-plan building the idea of the autonomy of the library building is perhaps
confirmed most impressively. This is already implied by the choice of a circular form,
ensuring visibility from all angles, which ensures the structure remains distinct, even if it
forms part of an architectural ensemble. Because of its association with the archetype of the
circular ground-plan, the Roman Pantheon, a rotunda also guarantees a universal quality,
which in the case of the library metaphorically refers to a place that in utopian fashion
contains the knowledge of the entire world. [...] This tendency towards functional and
architectural autonomy is an indication of the increasing use [of libraries] by independent
scholars, who are not associated with the institution responsible for the library, but use the
collection of books for limited research periods.”133
Again however, it cannot be proven that Viervant was in any way aware of such implications
when he chose his design, or that he based it on one of the existing examples. And it also
needs to be said that, despite the proliferation of libraries in the 17th and 18th centuries, very
few actually sported a rounded interior. Wolfenbiittel, Radcliffe’s Camera in Oxford, and the
ducal library in Weimar are some of the very few examplesB there certainly was no precedent
in the Netherlands. What’s more, a number of libraries were built in the more traditional
rectangular shape even though their architects suggested a rounded, central hall. Examples
include the library of Trinity College in Dublin, and the library of Trinity College in
Cambridge, built by Christopher Wren.
So, whatever the reasons, Viervant’s plans constituted a bold move. One can easily imagine
one of the trustees having come up with the idea of an oval interior too, but it would actually
befit what little we know about Viervant himself. For one, he was strikingly young, and
actually inexperienced. Any artistic brashness would not have been inhibited by the need to
protect a reputation. All that is known about his training is that he had been an apprentice to
his considerably more famous and accomplished uncle, Jacob Otten Husly. Husly himself was
involved in the work for the Teyler Foundation, he is known to have decorated the ceiling of
the Oval Room. So it is fathomable that his uncle provided some guidance, but there is also
little reason why he should have let all the credit go to his nephew if he had not really been
the main architect. Viervant’s early success, however, seems to have gone to his head. The
only other major building he ever designed was the Foundation’s new almshouse. Caught up
in the political turmoil of the late 18th century and displaying a brazenness not befitting of his
3 “Im Zentralbau erlangt die Idee der Autonomie des Bibliotheksbaus vielleicht ihre eindrucksvollste
Beglaubigung. Denn dies wird bereits durch die Wahl der allansichtigen Rundform, die sich einem
architektonischen Ensemble zuordnen, aber nicht einfugen lässt, signalisiert. Durch den Bezug zum Urmodell
des Rundbaus, dem römischen Pantheon, verbürgt die Rotunde zudem einen universellen Gehalt, der bei den
Bibliotheken auf die Metaphorik eines Ortes, der in utopischer Weise das Wissen der Welt beherbergt,
übertragen wurde. [...] Die Tendenz zur funktionalen und baulichen Autonomie ist ein Indiz für die zunehmende
Benutzung durch externe Gelehrte, die nicht der für die Bibliothek verantwortlichen Institution angehörten,
sondern die Buchbestände während befristeter Forschungsaufenthalte nutzten.“ Dietrich Erben, “Die
Pluralisierung des Wissens: Bibliotheksbau zwischen Renaissance und Aufklärung,” in Die Weisheit baut sich
ein Haus: Architektur und Geschichte von Bibliotheken, ed. Winfried Nerdinger (München: Prestel, 2011), 185.