Description: Moral Learning by Beautifying The Power of Fine Art in Moral Learning in 17th Century HollandIn the first half of the 17th century, in the Dutch Republic numerous moral educational texts and images were produced. Dutch genre painting was popular, forming a major part of the huge painting production. It was dominated much more by family virtues than by public ones: it was not so much good government but good education, not so much the good citizen but the good father and mother together with their children, which dominated Dutch moralistic genre painting tradition. Indeed, the Dutch Republic was a Republic of moral educators. The written version of these moral messages was put in an explicit style, the painted version being often more implicit, but above all full of intended beauty. In this paper, the question will be studied why this moral learning by beautifying took place on that big scale in a culture in search of frugality. In his The Embarrassment of Riches, Simon Schama argued that Dutch culture in the 17th century did contain major contradictions, summarised by him as the extraordinary richness of the Dutch burghers against the Calvinistic embarrassment of these same riches. The hypothesis of this paper is that the vast production of beautifully and sumptuously manufactured moralistic paintings on childhood and education is evidence for the fact that the existing feelings of embarrassment were overruled by the search of moral learning. This was true for at least that part of middle-class people that was able to buy paintings. The tension was real indeed between on the one hand enjoying beauty, and on the other hand dominant Calvinistic aspects of Dutch culture, being built on iconoclasm in the sixties of the 16th century as a result of the struggle between Protestants and Roman Catholics. Yet, the most popular moral books written by the non-orthodox but pragmatic politician Grand Pensionary Jacob Cats combined the pursuit of moral learning with the pleasure of reading enjoyable texts and emblematics. Even more enjoyment was possible in looking at moralistic genre painting. An implicit deal on the art market between producers and consumers in pursuit of the combination of fine art and moral learning reconciled the apparent contradictions between beauty and frugality, overruling embarrassment. For the rest, the orthodox representatives of the Calvinistic belief were not amused about this beauty. They were opposed against almost all sorts of representation by the visual arts, also of moral issues. This overruling of embarrassment was made possible by at least three different reasons. Firstly, the Calvinist hard liners did never dominate Dutch Civilisation and could not prevent artists in making their pieces of work and consumers in buying them. Secondly, the art market functioned adequately in reconciling the need for moral learning and for enjoyment of fine art, so creating a private surrounding in which morality and beauty went together. Finally, refined messages were considered as very effective indeed, so it was good marketing for moralists to pack their messages in fine paintings or enjoyable texts. This marketing approach was not new. The Roman Catholic Church had made moral messages more effective by presenting them in a refined way for many centuries. This practice was abandoned during the iconoclastic phase of the Dutch revolution, but it made a come back at the beginning of the 17th century, when the orthodox Calvinistic revolution failed in becoming generally accepted. Many Dutch parents wanted to be seduced to chastity and frugality by beauty, and many moralists were eager to seduce them in that way, because they know the power of beautiful images (cf. David Freedberg's The Power of Images).