Work of art ready for a great escape

Imagine this scenario.

An Amsterdam cyclist is valiantly pedalling his or her way against the wind home from work and one of the most treasured paintings in the world suddenly drops down in front of them.

The chance of that happening may be slight. But it is not impossible thanks to a ‘letterbox’ style escape route for Rembrandt’s ‘Night Watch’, one of the quirkier features incorporated into Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum which has just reopened following a 10-year renovation.

The city’s influential pedal power insisted that planners preserve the unique cycle path right of way which slices through the monumental late Victorian building.

Visitors to Amsterdam will know the familiar landmarks. They include soft drugs dens known as ‘coffee shops’ filled with grungy backpackers and some stoned locals. Hump-backed bridges connect the narrow streets and canal sides of ancient gabled buildings leading one into Amsterdam’s notorious Red Light District, where semi-clothed women plying the oldest profession fill windows framed by lurid neon lights.

Then there are the city’s famous art museums showing off masterpieces from Rembrandt to Vincent van Gogh and Piet Mondrian. The star of them all and Amsterdam’s most popular tourist attraction has always been the Rijksmuseum, the city’s answer to the Louvre, whose ‘Night Watch’ — a huge shadowy drama depicting a militia company — is just as alluring to visitors as the ‘Mona Lisa’.

Our preview tour guide Valentijn Rambonnet explains how his pragmatic countrymen thought of everything during this marathon renovation as we stand in front of the towering ’Night Watch’. Tributes to the painter Rembrandt van Rijn and snippets of biography unfold as banners, some surprisingly Twitter-like in terms of brevity and content, painted beneath the ceiling.

Pointing to a rectangular split in the floor right in front of the monumental painting and a bit larger in dimension, he tells us how “that space can be opened up so the ‘Night Watch’ is dropped — you could say ‘posted’ through it — in case of a fire or another disaster, taking it out of harm’s way and out on to the street”.

So the unwary cyclist could indeed end up eyeballing the priceless treasure yet, but hopefully not be hit on the head with it, he agrees with a chuckle.

Dating from 1885, King William the Third refused to cross the threshold of the new Rijksmuseum because the staunchly Protestant monarch considered it uncomfortably similar to an over-decorated Catholic Cathedral. Architect Pierre Cuypers’ eccentric mixture of Gothic, Renaissance, and Roman architecture was not universally praised at the time, though its interior did have a bling-like appeal.

As the decades passed, the building ended up enduring a number of sacrilegious alterations. They include the laying of linoleum, followed by parquet above the original mosaic floors, white walls replacing the richly embellished walls and original decorations. The dimensions of galleries and other spaces were also savagely altered as time went on.

Its closure in 2003 for a massive facelift, supposed to take five years, dragged on for a further five years and ran tens of millions of euro over budget.

The work was also delayed by flooding, a not unusual occurrence here in Amsterdam. As much of the ground-floor building was already well below sea level, dinghies transported tradesmen back and forth.

The new atrium, a striking space five stories high, is located at a depth where divers had to be deployed for essential welding and other installation work. An asbestos alarm during the gutting of sections of the building and the dispute over access for cyclists through its outer corridor also held up the work.

Costing a grand total of €375m the new Rijksmuseum may go down in history as one of the costliest renovations ever. No longer dark and cavernous, where you got hopelessly lost somewhere among the 200 rooms and 770,000 objects, the maxim ‘less is more’ has been bravely adopted in the new museum.

The public will view a mere 8,000 objects, from paintings to furniture and dolls houses to tapestries in 80 rooms, amid state of the art lighting, display, climate control and security. So finding your way is almost child’s play on a fascinating journey which starts in the Dutch middle ages and ends somewhere in the 20th century.