These narrative scenes often feature multiple human figures. For instance, Jan Jansz Mostaert depicts a scene from the conquest of America around 1530, while Jan Willem Pieneman records The Battle of Waterloo, the largest painting in the Rijksmuseum, in 1824. Some 17th-century artists use Ancient Roman settings as metaphors for the political situation in the Netherlands at the time, an example being Ferdinand Bol’s Claudius Civilis, which depicts the Batavian uprising against the Romans to reflect on hostilities between the Dutch and the Spanish.
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