This bronze Erasmus puts one foot forward, as if to step off the pedestal, and turns a page in his book, as if he wants to keep going. It looks like something is not quite right: this stone is not the statue’s original pedestal, it’s a 1964 replacement. The old pedestal dates back to 1677. It stands on the campus, and is now one of the oldest pieces of Rotterdam.
I walked around the campus recently with some visitors, and we walked past the park in front of the tennis courts. Amazed, they looked at the steel monster rising out of the grass and asked what it was. “Art”, I said, but that answer wasn’t enough for them. It’s a 2018 artwork by Kathrin Schlegel, a thought bubble like in a comic strip, in which all students and staff can be confronted with their own thoughts. It’s called Der Stein des Weisen (‘the Philosophers’ Stone’). That title refers to the most important part of this artwork: the pedestal that people have to stand on in order to look in the mirror. It’s the original pedestal of the bronze statue of Erasmus that stands in front of the Laurenskerk.
The statue of Erasmus dates back to 1622 and the old pedestal, as mentioned, is from 1677 (or possibly even earlier). After its replacement in 1964, the old pedestal ended up at the Gymnasium Erasmianum school, where it served for decades as somewhere for students to sit or lean their bicycles against. There wasn’t much regard for the cultural value of this unique piece of Rotterdam, until Kathrin Schlegel came up with the idea of incorporating the old pedestal into her artwork for the campus. Suddenly, the eyes of art historians were opened, and any damage to this monument had to be prevented. This explains why the old pedestal is now trapped in a transparent cage, enclosed in hard glass.
Which is nonsense: the stone has withstood centuries of wind and rain, and has even survived generations of students. All of this has become part of the history of the pedestal. It is now locked away, as if it has become ‘art’ and is no longer allowed to be a functional object. The cage doesn’t do justice to the artwork, which, after all, intends for Erasmians to stand on the pedestal of Erasmus. But you can’t do that on a sheet of glass, it has to be on the actual stone. I did it anyway and climbed onto the slippery plate. The visitors and I agreed: it felt strange, it wasn’t right.
So let us free Erasmus’s pedestal from its glass cage so we can truly walk in the footsteps of our namesake; so we can gaze in the mirror and take a look at ourselves. But not for too long, because we shouldn’t keep standing still. We should leave the pedestal, just as Erasmus did.
