Masculinity pacified: Women as mothers in the guardroom scenes of Anthonie Palamedes (1602-1673)

The guardroom scene was one of the most original and popular genre themes in Dutch Golden Age painting. One of its main practitioners was the Delft painter Anthonie Palamedes (1602-1673). The article shows that his guardroom scenes are unique, in that he paints women as mothers and not just in their conventional role of playful courtesans. In tracing the juxtaposition of ideal men and women in this era and then of Mars and Venus as personifications of War and Peace in contemporary art, the article establishes that Palamedes' guardroom scenes represent the way the masculine outdoors is pacified and tamed by feminine domestic motherhood. In other words, these apparently masculine paintings are actually an embodiment of masculinity pacified. This phenomenon, it is argued, is part of a broader process of growing femininity and civility in seventeenth-century Dutch society.