Artimare.com is a website that has everything to do with a 600 year old legend about a mermaid who was said to have been captured in Holland in 1403. 

The capture of this mermaid caused quite a stir, especially in the seventeenth century. 

At that time, scientists added to the ‘Naturalis Historiae’, the natural history reference work of the renowned Roman physicist Pliny, an extensive treatise on the fact that a real mermaid had been captured in Holland in 1403.

Most stories in the Dutch national history span a limited time. However, this story goes many times further and covers a period of more than six hundred years and therefore affects very large parts of there cultural heritage. 

I discovered that the story has its origins in Latin written texts from before the invention of the printing press. 

Although I’ve been working on this subject for a very long time now, I regularly discover new remarkable details and I’m still learning things and that will probably never stop. In this way I collected many anecdotes, interesting facts and images about this subject.The story inspired me to make a series of paintings that I have been working on for more than 25 years now.

Moreover, I made a book in which all the material can be found and also images of the paintings.

I started working on the paintings depicted on this site around 1998. 

With the book, the recently completed paintings and the accompanying exhibition, I hope to draw attention to this story again. Because it has a fascinating history and is part of the Dutch cultural heritage.

Hubert Christiaan (Bert) Knispel

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