The Last Judgement
Van Leyden's 1526 panel, saved from the iconoclasm.
Michiel1972 โ CC BY-SA 3.0 ยท C messier โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท C messier โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Hnapel โ CC BY-SA 4.0
Because it combines three things that rarely come together: the oldest Dutch university (1575) and the student life around it, a historic centre of canals and mills left intact by the bombing, and an exceptional density of museums for its size โ the National Museum of Antiquities with a large Egyptian collection including a complete temple moved from Nubia, the natural history museum, and De Lakenhal. Add Rembrandt's birthplace and the first botanical garden in the Netherlands.
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Museum De Lakenhal in Leiden occupies the cloth hall of 1641 โ the building where woollen cloth was inspected and sealed before sale, and the origin of the whole city's wealth. Leiden was the centre of the textile industry in northern Europe in the seventeenth century, and its population tripled in half a century because of it. The cloth hall was the quality control institution: no cloth was sold without its seal. The museum tells that story in the very rooms where the inspection happened, with the tools, seals and looms. But what draws visitors is the art floor. Leiden is Rembrandt's birthplace, and the museum holds his early work alongside Lucas van Leyden โ the most important painter of the Dutch Renaissance โ and Van Goyen and Steen. The best-known painting is Van Leyden's Last Judgement of 1526, saved from destruction in the iconoclasm of 1566 by being hidden.
Van Leyden's 1526 panel, saved from the iconoclasm.
Looms and seals in the building that did the work.
Oude Singel 32, 2312 Leiden