Abraham van Beyeren

"Mar Bravo"

"Whether fact or fantasy, the premise on wich the drowning cell was dreamed up was that survival in the teeth of calamity was the beginning of self-respect: a recovery of identity. To its first generation of patriotic eulogists, Dutchness was often equated with the transformation, under divine guidance, of catastrophe into good fortune, infirmity into strenght, water into dry land, mud into gold. This arrogation of a special destiny, marked by suffering and redemption, was not so particular to de Dutch as they imagined. But the uncanny ways in wich geography reinforced moral analogy gave their collective self-recognition great immediacy. Those who had come through flood and had survived could hardly miss the differentiating significance of beproeving, or ordeal. So the trial of faith by adversity was a formativ element of the national culture. "

Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches - An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age.