Living as Befits a Knight: New Castles in Seventeenth-Century Holland

From the 1630s onwards, the ideal of building according to principles of ‘true’ architecture as formulated in Antiquity by Vitruvius and more recently by Italian architects like Palladio and Scamozzi, had become decisive in the further development of Dutch architecture.¹ The Mauritshuis in The Hague (1633–1644) was one of the first convincing specimens of this new building style. Thanks to Huygens’ mediation, Jacob van Campen became involved not long afterwards in one of the Prince of Orange’s key construction projects: in 1639, he designed the new front facade of, and oversaw an extensive renovation of, the Oude Hof at