De Waag

This is a city gate with no wall. You are standing where the edge of Amsterdam used to be, and the square around you was a moat.

In 1488 this was the way in from the east. Travellers crossed a bridge over the moat and passed between the towers, and the wall ran off to either side. A stone in one of the towers still records the day the first stone was laid.

A century later Amsterdam had outgrown its walls. The city pushed its defences further out, pulled the old wall down and filled in the moat, which is how the Nieuwmarkt came to exist. The gate was left standing in the middle of a new market square with nothing to guard. It also sits strangely low: the ground was raised around it when the water was filled in.

So the city found it a job. In 1617 the courtyard between the towers was roofed over and it became a weigh house, where goods were weighed on official scales before they could be sold. The rooms upstairs went to the guilds: the smiths, the painters, the masons and the surgeons, each with its own front door.

The surgeons held public dissections here, of executed criminals, in winter when the cold kept the body. In 1632 they commissioned a group portrait from a 25-year-old painter who had recently moved to the city. Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp was painted for the surgeons’ room in this building, and it made his name.