Jacob van Campen, the most distinguished architect of the Dutch Republic during its seventeenth-century Golden Age, is identified as the designer of Amersfoortweg (the Amersfoort Road) in A Roman Road in the Dutch Republic. This large-scale landscape architecture project was conceived to improve transportation in the province of Utrecht and also to catalyze the transformation of a large wasteland into a landscape of prosperous agricultural estates. The grandiose roadway, over sixty meters wide and lined with trees, ran perfectly straight for most of the route between Utrecht and Amersfoort. Jaap Evert Abrahamse argues that Van Campen and his clients created Amersfoortweg on the model of the ancient Roman roads that they had read about in the Renaissance treatises that were beginning to circulate in the Netherlands.
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December 2011
