43. Liedboek

In his Van 't light der teken en schilder konst (Amsterdam, 1665) the renowned engraver Crispyn van de Passe de Jonge remembers that he went with ‘the honourable Jonckheer van der Burg to a well-known Drawing academy’ in Utrecht. Van der Borch, unlike Van de Passe, has never made a name for himself as a graphic artist, but the scene on the opposite page, probably made by Van der Borch himself, indicates that he was not without a modicum of talent. The shooting range, landscape and costumes are aptly depicted, but the expression on the face of little Cupid shows that this talent had its limitations indeed. And this also applies to his poetic abilities. The accompanying poem ‘Minne Schichten’ is just a short rhyme on the concept of the ‘arrow of love’. It reads in an early seventeenth-century hand:

The arrows shot by spinsters' hand
bring forth joy in bachelors' land
but the sweetest goal
for any man, if his arrow struck
a spinster's tender soul
And she gave herself in full, oh luck.

The illustration shows how a young woman, dressed according to the latest fashion around 1600, is given archery practice by a more frivolously dressed Venus, assisted by Cupid. The watercolour and the rhyme make an attractive whole. Such combinations were characteristic of the songbooks and emblem books, and in the first decades of the seventeenth century these became all the rage among the offspring of the newly rich middle classes, the jeunesse dorée, with their predilection for singing and kissing.

Van der Borch's songbook is, in a sense, ambiguous. It resembles an armorial because of the large number of painted coats of arms, while two of its pages contain true specimens of album amicorum contributions. One (Douai 1599) might have been taken from an earlier album of Van der Borch and pasted by him in the songbook, the other (18 October 1615) was actually written in the songbook. This volume was subsequently filled with coats of arms of noble families, mostly from Utrecht. It would seem that this was done by a member of a later generation who added a rhyme of his own underneath the ‘Minne Schichten’, signed ‘HVBorch’. Hybrids of songbooks and alba amicorum were by no means unusual in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Literature

• C. Kramm, 'Joncker Henric van der Borch', in: De Navorscher 22 (1872), p. 353-354
• Alba amicorum. Vijf eeuwen vriendschap op papier gezet. Maarssen, 's-Gravenhage 1990, no. 32.